I haven’t seen this posted yet, so I went ahead with this.
David Anthony “TONY” RICE was born June 8th, 1951 in Danville, VA. He was one of the premier acoustic flatpick guitar players and one of the most innovative, combining jazz and classical music with traditional bluegrass. Tony was raised in California and early influences included Roland and Clarence White, Herb Pedersen, Ry Cooder and Chris Hillman.
In 1970 he moved to Kentucky and played in the Bluegrass Alliance—whose members included Sam Bush, Dan Creary and Vince Gill—before joining J.D. Crowe’s New South. In the mid-’70s he joined the David Grisman Quintet before forming his first Tony Rice Unit, and his second release, “Manzanita” is considered a bluegrass standard. Later incarnations of the Unit leaned toward jazz-inflected “spacegrass”. Tony also recorded two well-regarded albums with the great Norman Blake.
Rice was also a very fine vocalist as well, with a distinctive baritone, until in 1994 he developed a very serious condition which precluded his even speaking for a time, and Tony had to give up singing. Then a decade later he developed a serious case of tennis elbow which wouldn’t allow him to play guitar at the level he was used to and he vowed not to perform in public again (his last time was at his 2013 induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Honor). He was nominated for and won numerous awards from the IBMA. Tony Rice died on December 25, 2020 at the age of 69.
He was a student of the Civil War and he commissioned Mary Chapin Carpenter to write this. It’s a good example of his guitar and vocal excellence. What’s your favorite Tony Rice song or memory?