Master bluegrass guitarist dies at 69
Tony Rice, the master bluegrass picker who drew fans worldwide for the quick, f luid sounds he conjured from his Martin D- 28 guitar, has died at age 69.
Rice died Friday at his home in Reidsville, N. C., said Casey Campbell, a spokesman for the International Bluegrass Music Assn.
Ricky Skaggs, one of many musicians who revered Rice and performed and recorded with him, called him “the single most inf luential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years.”
“Sometime during Christmas morning while making his coffee, our dear friend and guitar hero Tony Rice passed from this life and made his swift journey to his heavenly home,” Skaggs wrote on Facebook this weekend. “Many if not all of the Bluegrass guitar players of today would say that they cut their teeth on Tony Rice’s music. He loved hearing the next generation players play his licks. I think that’s where he got most of his joy as a player.”
Tall and lean, with an understated live presence that contrasted with the dynamism of his guitar playing, Rice had health problems over the last quarter of a century.
A muscle disorder around his vocal cords left him unable to sing onstage, and tennis elbow limited his playing.
His last live guitar performance was in 2013, when he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
“I am not going to go back out into the public eye until I can be the musician that I was, where I left off or better,” Rice told North Carolina newspaper the Greensboro News & Record in 2015. “I have been blessed with a very devout audience all these years, and I am certainly not going to let anybody down.”
Rice released dozens of albums, including several as a member of the David Grisman Quintet; “Skaggs & Rice” with Skaggs; “Manzanita” as leader of the Tony Rice Unit; and such solo efforts as “Tony Rice” and “Me & My Guitar.”
He played with a range of performers, including Jerry Garcia and Dolly Parton, and received honors including a Grammy in 1993 for best country instrumental performance and citations from the International Bluegrass Music Assn. as guitarist of the year.