Sunday morning coming down
Putting an exclamation point on the year from hell, I want to note the death of the musician Tony Rice on Christmas day. Tony was a musician’s musician. Alison Krauss testified in some detail to his impact on her last month before he died (I quote her toward the bottom of this post). She is representative of a couple generations of our best musicians.
Rice struggled with health issues that first prevented him from singing and then impaired his playing for too many years, but his death represents an enormous loss to American music. Stacy Chandler’s No Depression obituary “Iconic Bluegrass Guitarist Tony Rice Dies at Age 69” provides biographical background. David Morris collects tributes to Rice from “his peers” (I would say he was peerless, but that’s nitpicking). When Rice was inducted into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2014, the New York Times published a moving account that foreshadowed his death last month.