An Enjoyable Profile

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/tony-rice-guitar-hero.html?_r=0

                                                                 Intro

     One morning last September, the red carpet was laid in Raleigh, N.C., for the 2013 International Bluegrass Music Awards, which had moved there from Nashville to escape country music’s shadow. The city’s bronze statue of Sir Walter Raleigh was newly adorned with a banjo. A few miles from the convention center, I was on my phone, trying to find out if Tony Rice, the legendary flatpick guitarist, would show up for his induction into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. “Tony has canceled a lot of dates over the last decade,”his longtime agent, Keith Case, had told me, “but nobody plays like him, either.” Rice was still asleep at his home in Reidsville, 85 miles away. Pamela, his wife of almost 25 years, was debating whether to give him a B-12 shot to provide strength for the drive.
       Rice’s warm, slightly nasal baritone has been silenced for nearly two decades by muscle-tension dysphonia, a disorder that contracts muscles around the vocal cords, interrupting speech and strangling pitch. Rice attributes the throat spasms partly to the strain of singing for years above his natural range — though he does not deny that the stress of life on the road has played its part as well. The last time he recalls singing in public was the 1994 Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival. “Guys, this is it,” he said midset. “I have to shut it down.” His most recent recorded vocal is an elegant but hoarse 1999 cover of Tom Waits’s “Pony.”

                                                                  Outro

      Rice believes his dysphonia can be defeated. His doctor tells him the voice box is uninjured, though trapped. Freedom comes with relearning muscle postures lost for 20 years. He starts each day by humming whatever tune comes into his head, because “the only way you can hum is in your natural voice.” Once he has summoned his voice, he uses it for his daily prayer. Eventually he hopes to sing again in his instinctive baritone.
     “It’s getting a little easier every day,” he told me, “if I think about it” — he focused and his tone shifted, resonated — “yeah, if I think about it, I can do it.” But it’s tiring work. When it gets to be too much, he takes his pick to the strings of the D-28, the one instrument that has never let him down.