Tony Rice
Acoustic Guitar Magazine
June 2007  

Tony Rice is, inarguably, the most influential and imitated guitarist in the short history of bluegrass. Ever since the early ‘70s, when Rice’s first recordings were released to the delight and astonishment of acoustic guitarists everywhere, his tone, power, and fluidity have set the standard by which all other bluegrass guitarists are judged. But Rice has never been just a virtuosic bluegrass shredder. His smooth, soulful singing voice and driving rhythm-guitar style have as much to do with his pervasive influence as his oft-parroted bluesy lead licks or his “new acoustic” excursions with progressive pickers like David Grisman, Bela Fleck, and Jerry Douglas. Among acoustic flat pickers, there is no more complete musician.

In recent years, due to a variety of health issues, Rice has been forced to reinvent his musical self. Vocal problems required him to stop singing in the mid-’90s, and he has been plagued by both tendonitis and arthritis in his hands. His most frequent gig of late has been as co leader of the Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet, which released its second recording, Quartet (Rounder) in January. In this new role, Rice has ceded vocal duties to Rowan and the primary rhythm function to the rhythm section of bassist Bryn Davies and mandolinist Sharon Gilchrist, allowing him room to explore all the creative possibilities of his role as lead guitarist. While his soloing has deepened and become freer and more spontaneous, some of Rice’s most creative playing occurs in his accompaniment, enriching the harmonic palette of the Quartet’s bluegrass/ folk Material with bursts of extended chords and rhythmic accents more reminiscent of a piano player than a hotshot guitarist, Rice has also been revisiting past material of late in selected gigs, allowing him to return to the Tony Rice of old, driving the band with his inimitable rhythm guitar (a combination of raw power and rhythmic sophistication) and thrilling audiences with his explosive solos. At last summer’s RockyGrass bluegrass festival in Lyons, Colorado, Rice and an all-star band of Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Dan Tyminski, Barry Bales, and Gabe Witcher performed material from Rice’s classic 1979 album Manzanita, with Bush and Tyminski taking the vocal reins and Rice leading the instrumental charge on blistering, expansive renditions of songs like “Blue Railroad Train,”“Ginseng Sullivan,”“Nine Pound Hammer,” and “Old Train.” As this article went to press, he was planning to perform similar material in a special tour with Alison Krauss and Union Station this spring.

When I sat down with Rice, after a Quartet gig at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, I took the opportunity to ask him about a few aspects of his playing that are not often explored—his melodic, Carter Family—style playing; his approach to solo guitar pieces like “Shenandoah”; his distinctive right-hand picking technique; and his evolving approach to accompaniment.

There’s a way you have of playing melody that’s a sort of modern Carter Family style. I’m thinking of things like the way you play “Last Thing on My Mind” or the solo you played on “To Live Is to Fly” (from

Quartet.) RICE Yeah, on “To Live Is to Fly,” I played that capoed up out of C position, which I don’t do very much anymore, but I will if the situation calls for it.

What other tunes have you been playing like that lately?

RICE Well, you know, the first thing I learned was “Wildwood Flower,” early Carter Family things——”The Storms Are on the Ocean,” stuff like that. Here, I’ll play a little bit of that [Example 1]. Of course, when I learned it, it wasn’t like that [laughs].

I notice you’re doing some cross-picking, but it’s not the standard banjo-style cross- picking that people like Clarence White and George Shuffler do.

RICE No, and I never have. I never have done that.

Your cross-picking reminds me of the way a piano player might play a melody and then fill in the spaces with little arpeggios. RICE Yeah, you know, at heart, I am an acoustic piano player.

Did you have any role models when you started?

RICE Well, back then there was no bluegrass [lead] guitar; it didn’t exist. The first stuff I ever heard was Flatt and Scruggs, the Monroe Brothers, Delmore Brothers. Probably the first guitarist I heard play what you would consider a solo in an arpeggio form was Earl Sciuggs fingerpicking something like “Jimmie Brown the Newsboy.” I mean, Clarence White wasn’t even playing lead back when I was doing that stuff.

So when you knew Clarence, he was just playing rhythm?

RICE Yeah, that’s the only thing he knew. I remember when Roland got drafted into the Army, the only lead guy they [the Kentucky Colonels] had was [banjoist] Billy Ray [Lathum] and occasionally LeRoy Mack on Dobro. So Clarence started taking an interest in playing some lead stuff on the guitar— some ideas that he got from his brother [Roland]. And he just evolved into his own musician.

You played together, right?

RICE Yeah, sure, but I couldn’t play like him—I still can’t play like him. Nobody else

can either [laughs]. It’s been an interesting ride, I tell ya, to watch this whole scheme of things, from a time when there was no bluegrass guitar to what it has evolved to now.

I’m curious about your right-hand picking technique. Unlike a lot of fiatpickers these days, you don’t use a strictly alternating style of down-up picking.

RICE Right.

It seems to me that what you’ve done is found the most efficient way of picking any given group of notes.

RICE Yeah, combined with pull-offs. I use a lot of pull-offs, and try to make them sound like they’re actually plucked notes. My playing was more straight-ahead up until about 10 or 15 years ago. Then I started to get arthritis in my right hand, and now I have tendinitis real bad in my left hand—over ten years or so, that’s really changed it even further. I’ve slowed down; I don’t play that many fiddle tunes or real fast breaks anymore.

looking for something to keep from boring myself [laughs].

The solo on “Walls of Time” Ifrom Quartet], where you go into double time, is a good example. It reminds me of Coltrane in a way. Did that just happen in the studio? Or did you plan to do that?

RICE I don’t know when I started doing that. It probably happened on one of those nights in some juke joint somewhere. And you just go, “Well, Peter kicked the tune off slow enough, but I can’t hardly play it that slow. I’m just going to play it double time, just to get through it.” So it evolved from there.

I notice you’re also occasionally using your middle and ring fingers along with the fiatpick—not just in solo pieces, but also in some of your lead lines.

RICE A few things, yeah. You can’t do it so much on a steel-string guitar; you’re not going to have any fingernails left—you’ll rip ‘em all to shreds [Examples 3 and 4]. Stuff like that, you can’t do with just a roll of the flatpick.

But you’ve been expanding your playing in other ways.

RICE Yeah. Sometimes in the middle of a solo, I’ll weave in a couple of chord patterns—use a sequence of chords as an integrated part of a solo [Example 2]. I find myself doing more and more of that. My jazz heroes do it, so

Your playing seems very free these days— like you’re allowing all your ideas to come out and you’re not afraid to take chances. RICE No, I’m not. It’s just one big circus of

Have you been doing that for a while? RICE Oh, 20 or 25 years, I guess. I don’t even know when I started doing it.

Obviously it works when you’re playing solo pieces, but how often do you use your fingers with a band?

RICE It depends on how well you can hear onstage. If it’s a situation where you’re having to play really hard, then I couldn’t dare get away with anything like that. But there

with no third, and then play out of B, or C, or F. It’ll work with all those chords. Once the rhythm section goes to B, I just say “Well, I can play everything I want to play in G.” F will work [Example 81. There are a lot of things that will work with that vamp.

Speaking of Clarence White, you’ve got his old D-28 with you on this tour. Are you still playing a Santa Cruz, too?

RICE You know, I played that last Cruz for five years. That guitar was so good; I miss it so bad. The D-28 was literally in a vault

those five years; it rarely came out. About a year ago, I dragged it out of the vault and played it, and it was almost like the old guitar looked at me and said, “Hey, what about me? How do I fit into this scheme of things?” So I decided to do whatever I could to start playing it again. I had a brace replaced and it’s still recovering. But it’s still got its basic character.

Do you still have the Santa Cruz?

RICE No, I got rid of the Cruz. There’s another being made, a new prototype. It’ll have some minor changes—a shorter scale, but not anything cosmetic that anybody’d notice. How do you improve on those instruments cosmetically? You can’t.

So you used the D-28 on the Quartet recording. How did you record it? What kind of mics did you use?

RICE Two Telefunken U 47s. I’ve been using those since the Unit of Measure album. Before that I’d always used a pair of [Neumann] KM 86s.

That goes back to the Arch Street days in Berkeley, when I first recorded there with Billy Wolf, and he said, “Let’s try this. It’s a weird mic, but they sound good.” And I’ve been recording this guitar with them ever since. There are substitute combinations I can use, like a U 89 and a KM 84, and then I’ll pan them extreme left and right. Or a pair of U 87s or a pair of KIVI 84s. But the best this instrument has ever sounded is with those Telefunkens. We recorded the album up at Bias Recorders, in Springfield, Virginia. Billy Wolf recorded, mixed, and mastered, and it’s an audio delight. Audio for a band like this just doesn’t get any better. With Peter, your backup and rhythm style has really evolved. It’s very different from how you played in the Tony Rice Unit or the Bluegrass Album Band.

RICE Yeah, and it’s been cool to do that. Peter and I started playing together in about 1998, and when I first started gigging with Peter it was just him and me; there was no rhythm section. It was pretty straight-ahead what I had to do: just solo and play alternate chord inversions to what Peter was doing.