The musician Alison Krauss called “the epitome of what I want to be some day”
When you fall in love with someone’s work at a young age, when you’re at your most impressionable, it’s highly likely that, barring any catastrophic career choices from the artist, that love will remain intact forever and guide you through whatever moments in life you wish them to. In the case of other musicians having gained early influences from others, the goal becomes for you to be able to emulate exactly what it is that makes them so special to you while putting your own artistic signature on it. As one of the modern greats of bluegrass and traditional country music, you’d imagine that many aspiring songwriters in the genre are looking up to Alison Krauss for their own source of inspiration.
The fiddler and singer, perhaps best known for her two collaborative records alongside Robert Plant and her contributions to film soundtracks such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain, has had an illustrious career that began when she was only a teenager, and has seen her win a total 27 Grammy Awards, putting her behind only Beyoncé, Quincy Jones and composer Georg Solti in her success at the awards ceremony.
However, her inspirations have to have come from somewhere, and her contributions to the spaces she works in are far from the first examples of a country artist pushing the boundaries to new places and one example of an artist she admires for his innovative and instinctive approach to his craft has stuck with her throughout her career.
The artist that Krauss seemingly looks to as a reminder of why she pursued her career of choice is fellow bluegrass musician Tony Rice, a guitarist famous for introducing more texture and sonic variety to the traditional forms of the genre. Best known for his technicolour visions of what bluegrass could be on songs such as ‘Church Street Blues’ and ‘Freeborn Man’, his music was an honest expression of love for the music his father brought up on him.
Speaking about the work of Rice, Krauss would say: “My love and admiration for Tony goes back to what made me really want to play music, which came alive in me because of him.” While she would only have been 14 at the time when she first began performing with Union Station, her early influence from Rice is clear in the first records she would put out.
Krauss would also state that “his singing and playing are so shockingly beautiful, but for me, more than anything, it was Tony’s production of the songs he chose to sing, and the kind of person he portrayed, and portrays, himself to be in the choices he makes musically.” There’s a certain warmth to his music that isn’t always felt in other bluegrass records, perhaps due to the traditionalist roots that they tend to stick to and the choices made not to incorporate other instruments into the arrangements.
Much of what Krauss does to this day leans in the direction of artists like Rice, along with the likes of Ricky Skaggs and JD Crowe, but Rice is still the number one influence and point of reference as far as she is concerned.
“His records are the textbooks for me,” she would say. “Tony is the epitome of what I would want to be someday, and my desire as a musician, to reach for that.”
