Krauss & Rice: A Bluegrass Star and Her Hero

Alison Krauss: "Tony [Rice] is the epitome of the kind of things that I would want to be someday." (By Se?or Mcguire)

The first time Washingtonians got to see Alison Krauss and the extraordinary guitarist Tony Rice play together was Oct. 7, 1988, when the then-17-year-old fiddle player sat in with the Tony Rice Unit at the Birchmere. After a breathless version of "Nine Pound Hammer," Rice asked the audience, "That's some fiddle playing, isn't it?"

At DAR Constitution Hall on Wednesday, Krauss, who has since won more Grammys than any other female artist (20), will essentially be asking the audience, "That's some guitar playing, isn't it?"

That's because the concert, featuring Krauss, her band, Union Station, and Rice, will draw exclusively from a remarkable legacy of recordings going back three decades, in which time Rice redefined acoustic guitar and acoustic music, whether playing traditional straight-ahead bluegrass or more progressive jazz and experimental "spacegrass." With his tone, articulation, blinding speed, improvisational agility and rare blend of power and soul, Rice freed the fingers and imaginations of future generations of string musicians.

Including a young Krauss.

"My love and admiration for Tony goes back to what made me really want to play music," Krauss says, recalling recently that she heard his early records as a teenager, when she was immersed in classical violin. "My whole concept of music itself came alive because of Tony.

"The singing and the playing are so shockingly beautiful," Krauss says from her Nashville home. "But for me, more than anything, it was Tony's production of the songs that he chose to sing, and the kind of person he portrayed, and portrays, himself to be in the choices he makes musically. His records are the textbooks for me. Tony is the epitome of the kind of things that I would want to be someday -- that's my desire as a musician, to reach for that."

Krauss, of course, is known not just as a great fiddler, but as one of the great voices in bluegrass and country. There was a time when Rice, too, was considered one of the finest modern bluegrass singers. But in the mid-90s, his voice began failing because of overuse and strain, and he had to stop singing. Rice's condition is called dysphonia, and, for now, time may be the only healer of a voice that's rough and rumbling when he speaks.

Rice insists he doesn't miss singing all that much, "not as much as you might think. The only time I do is when I hear a piece of music -- a rare Gordon Lightfoot song or something by Norman Blake -- where I think, 'Boy, I wish I had a voice, because if I did, I would put my own stamp on that tune and play and record it.' "

"But those moments are probably more rare than my general listening audience might think because my first love has been the guitar."

And he has been putting his loving stamp on that for a long time.

Rice was born in Danville, Va., but grew up in Southern California. He was fascinated with guitar by age 4, thanks to his father, Herb, a "serious" amateur guitarist and fan of classic bluegrass of the '40s and '50s. Rice's older brother, Larry, a superb mandolinist who died last year, was another role model, particularly after he and Tony found inspiration in brothers Roland and Clarence White of the California-based Kentucky Colonels.

Clarence White was the most innovative flat-picker of his time and almost single-handedly elevated the acoustic guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass from its traditional rhythm role. White's influence remains evident in his legendary 1935 Martin D-28, with its famous enlarged sound hole, acquired by Rice in 1975, two years after White was killed by a drunk driver. Rice has played it almost continuously since, and the guitar is so strongly identified with Rice that Fretboard Journal recently devoted a 22-page cover story to it.