In 1960 a nine-year-old in California was handed Clarence White’s modified 1935 Martin D-28, its sound hole enlarged with a blade, and fifteen years later he tracked down and bought that exact guitar. This episode tells the story of David Anthony Rice, born in Danville, Virginia, in 1951, raised in a nomadic musical family that landed in Los Angeles, and shaped by White’s syncopation and cross-picking as much as Doc Watson’s speed.

We follow the 1970 campfire jam in Reidsville, North Carolina, where Sam Bush recruited him into the Bluegrass Alliance, his years singing lead in J.D. Crowe’s New South and resisting electric instruments, and the landmark 1975 album that became Rounder’s biggest seller. Then comes the leap to David Grisman’s all-instrumental quintet, formal jazz study with John Carlini, the Tony Rice Unit and spacegrass, the Bluegrass Album Band, and the loss of both his baritone voice to muscle tension dysphonia and his playing to tennis elbow. He died in December 2020 in Reidsville, the same town where his career took off.

• Clarence White versus Doc Watson: syncopation and cross-picking versus linear speed
• Why Rice fought amplifiers in the New South and how Ricky Skaggs’ arrival settled the debate
• Learning to read charts and play major sevenths and flatted ninths for Grisman’s dawg music
• Spacegrass albums, the anti-supergroup with Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen, and Dylan and Joni Mitchell covers
• His 2015 statement on refusing to perform below his own standard, and his influence on Molly Tuttle and the Punch Brothers