I remember the room, though I was there for ten minutes 50 years ago. The army sergeant unlocked the classroom door as late afternoon sun, strained through aluminum blinds, glared at the linoleum floor. Fifty guys, in our teens through twenties, trooped in, heading for desks that packed the space. We’d been bussed in from […]
Tony’s interest in John Wilkes Booth (JWB) – the actor and President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin – was with him when we played together in the 1970s. Books about Booth were lying around his Corte Madera apartment. Ron Rice wrote, “I do know he was a JWB nut. I have seen a couple of photos of
JWB & Native American Read More »
The Clarence White Martin was not played for a couple of years, and there’s a story behind that. I visited Tony and his third wife, Pamela Hodges Rice, in Florida, during the winter of 1991. He picked me up at the Tampa airport late on the evening of November 8. We drove to their home
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On June 13, 1978, Tony and I drove down to Santa Cruz to pick up the first Tony Rice Model guitar from the Santa Cruz Guitar Company (SCGC), founded in 1976 by Richard Hoover, Will Davis, and Bruce Ross. This Dreadnought-sized instrument picked up one distinguishing feature of the 1935 Clarence White Martin, its oversized
The SCGC Tony Rice Model Guitar Read More »
An astounding incident happened on this tour. It slack-jawed me and is burned in my memory. It’s a tale of tortoiseshell picks and payback. The history of France’s liberation by the Allies, begun on June 6, 1944, at the beaches of Normandy, has fascinated me since I read Is Paris Burning as a young man. With
The David Grisman Quintet (a.k.a. the DGQ) played its first gig on January 31, 1976, in the California coastal town of Bolinas. I lived there at the time, and made a point of catching their show. The group, with Darol Anger on fiddle, Todd Phillips, second mandolin, Tony, guitar, David, lead mandolin, and Joe Carroll
First Time Ever – an excerpt Read More »
His name was Tony Rice, and in the world of bluegrass he was a Big Man with a Big Guitar. Stories about him and his priceless 1935 Martin D-28 can be heard throughout the United States and in bluegrass outposts from Japan, England, Ireland, Australia, Italy and France, to South Korea, the Czech Republic, Brazil