I want to say something about Tony Rice, the master guitar player who died suddenly on Christmas morning, at sixty-nine, and who, by his friend, the musician Ricky Skaggs, was recalled as “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last fifty years.” When I was younger, Rice was a kind of hero to me. He was tall and handsome, with a terse and stoic Gary Cooper- or Sam Shepard-like manner, and I pretty much wanted to be just like him.
Rice was a specialist. He confined himself to the acoustic guitar, which he played with flat picks that he made from pieces of tortoiseshell he had bought when it was still a legal purchase. He played in duets and small ensembles, often within the context of bluegrass, the idiom that he grew up in, but he was a questing type, and, in his early twenties, he began studying harmony and playing more adventurously, and the effect was as if he had left a dialect for a language.
He had a towering technique and a severe and idiosyncratic ear. He played deftly and often very fast, sixteenth notes among high-speed tempos, and with impeccable clarity and tone. Because of his example, there are a number of acoustic-guitar players who can play fast and are deft and have interesting ideas, some of them more interesting than Rice’s—after all, they had the advantage of being able to study him closely—but almost no one, and maybe no one, has matched the ringing quality of his tone.
Another of the observations made after Rice’s death is that he did for the acoustic guitar what Jimi Hendrix did for the electric guitar, meaning that he made it express itself in ways that it hadn’t been known beforehand to be capable of. I might add that, when Rice began, the guitar in bluegrass was an unassuming member of the rhythm section. Like Charlie Christian in jazz, Rice brought the guitar to the front of the stage. Other bluegrass guitar players have to deal with him the way I have heard tenor-saxophone players say that they have to deal with Coltrane. You either sound like Tony Rice, or you’re trying to figure out how not to sound like him, but you aren’t able to avoid him.
Being a pioneer, Rice had to work out an improvising vocabulary on his own. The one he assembled, drawn largely from horn and keyboard players, was pragmatic and meticulous, and, once he had settled on it, he held to it. This made him more the deliberate kind of improviser than the ecstatic kind, but its simplicity contributed to its effect. The guitarist Chris Eldridge, who plays in Punch Brothers, told me that Rice, like B. B. King, worked expansively within a concise harmonic frame. The musicologist Alan Lomax called the genre “folk music in overdrive.” Even as quickly as the notes often went by in Rice’s playing, you had the uncanny feeling that they mattered to him; he never seemed to play anything indifferently. Whether you are a classical musician or an improviser, once you have learned to play the notes, you have to learn to deliver them as if they were thoughts that have arisen during the moment. The difference is similar to that between an amateur reading lines in a play and an accomplished actor speaking them. In addition, Rice often heard possibilities that other musicians didn’t tend to hear, and he was capable of lyrical and unexpected statements. “He had a remarkable way of being nuanced and surprising,” Eldridge said.
Rice’s abilities and reputation were such that he elevated the stature of any collection of musicians he was part of. His standing as a soloist meant that listeners sometimes were unaware of the force of his rhythm playing, but musicians weren’t. Eldridge said that Rice “could cause a bluegrass band to boil and churn the way Elvin Jones could elevate a jazz ensemble’s abilities with his ‘tempest of sound.’ ” Everyone played his or her best around Rice, Eldridge continued, “not just because of his mystique—although that was huge and something that he was aware of and could wield,” but because his rhythm playing was “free but also completely grounding. He was the ultimate rising tide.”
For the past decade, Rice had been a spectral presence in bluegrass, having withdrawn from performing. He lost his singing voice, and his hands hurt. He had been a powerful singer, with a split-tenor voice that a musician once described as having the clarity of a trumpet, but somewhere around twenty-five years ago he developed a condition called muscle tension dysphonia which affected his vocal cords. It left his speaking voice sounding strained and gravelly, and it ruined his singing voice. Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass, was a pure tenor, and his singing established what was called the high, lonesome sound. Rice said that he damaged his vocal cords by straining for years to sing above his range. After a certain amount of preparation and by concentrating hard, he could speak in his natural voice but only briefly. He did this dramatically in 2013 at his induction to the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. The occasion was also the last time he played guitar in public.
I first saw Rice sometime in the early seventies, at Lincoln Center, when he was in a bluegrass band called J. D. Crowe & the New South, which was a kind of finishing school for some of the best young bluegrass musicians of the era, including Ricky Skaggs. Skaggs and Rice made a record in 1980 that I listen to often. It is called “Skaggs & Rice,” and it has the two of them playing and singing mostly gospel-type duets in which their voices bind together so closely that it is like they were welded. In 1974, when I got out of college, with a degree in music, I thought I would move to Lexington, Kentucky, where J. D. Crowe & the New South were something like the house band at the Red Slipper Lounge in the Holiday Inn. I figured I would occupy a table by the stage with a cassette recorder and just more or less trace Rice.
My nerve failed me and, instead, I moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, at the end of Cape Cod. Someone told me about a fiddle player named Marie Rhines, who lived in, at the other end of the Cape, closer to Boston. Rhines was a classical musician who heard Irish and bluegrass fiddle music somewhere and had a conversion experience. She made a record called “The Reconciliation” and toured with a guitar player backing her and then asked someone who the best guitar player was and, as a result, tracked down Rice and hired him to play a brief tour with her.
I no longer remember how I figured out that Rice was staying at Rhines’s house to rehearse. I had decided by then, privately, since no one else would care, that I also wanted to be a writer, although I hadn’t written anything that had been published. I found Rhines’s phone number and called, and she answered, and I asked to speak to Rice, and she gave him the phone. I collected myself and said that I wanted to interview him for the magazine Guitar Player. This was true. I did want to interview him for Guitar Player. I figured that if he agreed, I would contact Guitar Player and tell them I had interviewed Tony Rice. He said, “I just did an interview with Guitar Player for their cover next month.” He was gracious and did not ask why I was wasting his time or what species of fraud I was. He gave the phone back to Rhines, and we talked long enough for me to say that I was also a guitar player. She said that we should play sometime, and I ended up driving down to her house a few weeks later and being hired for her next tour, since Rice by then had moved to California and was beginning a band with David Grisman, the virtuoso mandolin player. This was called the David Grisman Quintet. It had two mandolins, a guitar, a fiddle, and a bass player, and it was a sort of jazzy string band playing Grisman’s compositions, which were bluegrass inflected but gypsy tinged, too. It was novel-sounding music, depending heavily on high-wire improvisation, and Rice thrived playing it. Meanwhile, he continued to make bluegrass records, usually with an all-star band that included J. D. Crowe and was called the Bluegrass Album Band, or with his own band, the Tony Rice Unit, which played his own pieces.
The tour that Rhines hired me to play on had been advertised as Marie Rhines and Tony Rice, because he had pulled out too late for the clubs to be notified. I didn’t know this until the first date, when people were arriving, and I heard someone at the door say indignantly, “We paid to hear Tony Rice.” I was not unskilled. I did all right—I did a good Tony Rice impersonation—but I also knew that anyone who bought it didn’t know anything about bluegrass guitar playing. I had hoped one day to meet Rice and to be able to say, “I took your place on that tour you weren’t able to make with Marie Rhines,” but I never did meet him. The light he casts across bluegrass goes all the way to the border.
