Tony Rice, the Grammy-winning and International Bluegrass Musician Association Hall of Famer, died on Friday according to reports. For over four decades Rice was considered one of the leading guitarists in the bluegrass genre, known for his racing, precise flat picking style. He was 69 years old.
Ricky Skaggs, Rice’s longtime associate, called him “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years” in a statement on Saturday. Skaggs and Rice were both part of J.D. Crowe‘s group The New South, a top-selling bluegrass outfit from the 1970s and early 1980s. Rich won his first Grammy with this group, for a recording of “Fireball.”
Raised in Los Angeles (where he associated at an early age with Chris Hillman, co-founder of The Byrds, and Ry Cooder) he moved to Kentucky in the early 1970s to follow the bluegrass sound. In time he released albums under his own name and also formed his group, the Tony Rice Unit, which incorporated elements of jazz, Spanish guitar, and even progressive rock, as heard on the signature tune “Manzanita.”
In the 1980s Rice also began playing in David Grisman‘s quartet, which led to the most famous accidental release in all of recorded bluegrass, The Pizza Tapes.
Over two February nights in 1993, the Grisman, a mandolin player, and Rice were tooling around in the studio, and Grisman invited his chum, Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia to come sit in. (Garcia and Grisman had a relationship for decades, going back to the group Old and In The Way.) They tore through a number of classics (making some unexpected detours, like to Miles Davis’s “So What“) and then, so the legend goes, a pizza delivery guy stole Jerry Garcia’s copy, which then ended up on the bootleg market. In 2000, the first official release was put out.
“Try to restrain yourself, Tony!” you can hear Garcia chuckle at the end of a particularly blazing version of the Appalachian folk tune “Shady Grove.”
In 1993 he also won the Grammy for his album Tony Rice Plays and Sings Bluegrass.
Rice stopped singing live in 1994 due to a muscle tension dysphonia issue. He stopped performing entirely in 2014 when the condition commonly known as “tennis elbow” made it difficult to play guitar. A perfectionist, he said at the time that “I have been blessed with a very devout audience all these years, and I am certainly not going to let anybody down.”