Tony Rice walked into 1750 Arch Studios in Berkeley, California, in late July 1976 carrying a 1935 Martin D-28 Herringbone with the serial number 58957. The guitar had belonged to Clarence White, the Kentucky Colonels flatpicker who had been one of Rice's earliest models, struck by a drunk driver in Palmdale, California, on July 14, 1973, and dead the following morning. Rice had purchased the instrument in 1975, after it passed through other hands following White's death. He was twenty-five years old. The album he was about to make, released in 1977 simply as Tony Rice on Rounder Records, would carry all of that weight without announcing it.
The record's context is inseparable from a specific moment in Rice's life: the period between leaving one of the finest bluegrass bands ever assembled and finding out what he was going to become. J.D. Crowe's New South, the 1975 self-titled album, had featured Rice alongside Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, and its influence on the genre was immediate and lasting. Rice could have stayed. Instead, he moved to the Bay Area to play with David Grisman, who assembled the David Grisman Quintet in 1976. The quintet drew from Bill Monroe's bluegrass legacy and Django Reinhardt's 1930s swing, and Rice immersed himself in that new musical world. The self-titled album grew directly out of that period of transition.
What Rice assembled for the sessions was a room divided between two musical lives, and the tension between them is what gives the record its particular quality. From his New South days, he brought J.D. Crowe on banjo, Jerry Douglas on dobro, and his brother Larry Rice on mandolin. From the Grisman orbit, he brought Grisman himself on mandolin, Darol Anger on fiddle, and Todd Phillips on bass. The fiddler Richard Greene appeared on ten of the twelve tracks, threading the two worlds together. Rice produced the sessions himself.
The repertoire holds the same tension as the personnel. Side one opens with "Banks of the Ohio," a traditional ballad delivered with steady vocal clarity and Larry Rice's tenor harmony sitting close beside it, Jerry Douglas and Richard Greene adding accents that feel earned rather than ornamental. Then comes "Rattlesnake," a Grisman composition built on minor sixths and sevenths more at home in jazz than in bluegrass, with Rice, Grisman, and Darol Anger trading solos through it with the ease of people who have been listening to each other very carefully. Later, "Mr. Engineer," a Jimmy Martin and Paul Williams song, pulls the album back toward the tradition with the same seriousness the opener carries. And then David Nichtern's "Plastic Banana" appears, an instrumental that doesn't belong to any genre in particular and seems to know it. The album holds all of this without strain. It never sounds like a record arguing with itself.
The guitar underneath all of it is the reason. Rice's playing on the 1935 Martin, the instrument he called "the Antique," had a quality that went beyond technique. His flatpicking was precise and fluid, rhythmically grounded in the bluegrass tradition while reaching toward a broader harmonic vocabulary that he had been developing since his time with Grisman. The guitar had been Clarence White's, and White had been the guitarist who demonstrated that flatpicking could be the structural center of a piece of music rather than its ornamentation. Rice inherited that idea along with the instrument. The record is, among other things, a conversation with a player who was no longer alive to have it.
The album was Rice's first for Rounder Records, a label he would stay with for most of his career. It came out the same year as the David Grisman Quintet's debut on Kaleidoscope, a record that would open up the argument about what acoustic music was allowed to be for a generation of players. Rice was on that record too, his guitar at the center of it, and the two albums together describe a single moment in his development. He would go on to Manzanita in 1979, and then to the Bluegrass Album Band, where he and J.D. Crowe, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, and Todd Phillips returned to the tradition with the same seriousness the 1977 record had brought to it. But the self-titled album sits before all of that, in the space between what he had been and what he was becoming, and it sounds exactly like that space feels: open, assured, and quietly irreversible.
