“The people who know about Tony Rice revere him as one of the greats. If you’re in the club, you recognize this guy was an absolute titan of American music in the 20th Century,” observes Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge. “He’s got this amazing legacy as a guitar player. He really changed the game in modern American string-band music. He transformed a lot of the basic parameters and changed the expected level of musicianship. Everybody played their best when they played with Tony, and he also raised the stakes for everybody who was watching from afar.”

Beyond Rice’s extraordinary talents as an instrumentalist, Eldridge points to another facet of his musical identity that supplied the spark for Punch Brothers’ new studio record, Hell on Church Street—in which the quintet reimagines Rice’s 1983 solo album, Church Street Blues. “While Tony had this amazing ability to galvanize all the people he played with,” Eldridge continues, “he was also a genius at finding a batch of great songs and putting them together. Church Street Blues is one of his most masterful curatorial collections of songs.”

The origins of the album trace back to a Punch Brothers performance at the RockyGrass festival in Lyons, Colo. on July 28, 2019. Eldridge explains that he and his fellow band members—bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, mandolinist/singer Chris Thile and fiddler Gabe Witcher—were looking for a theme to inform their set.

“We didn’t want to just play a bunch of bluegrass songs,” he recalls. “We wanted it to be cohesive. So we were thinking of various ideas and, finally, we landed on Church Street Blues which is one of the great records. It’s just Tony and his guitar [with Tony’s brother Wyatt adding rhythm guitar on four tracks] and the songs are amazing. So we thought, ‘Let’s be Punch Brothers, using this template that Tony shared with us all. It’ll be a really sweet tribute to Tony as well because we all just love him, and it’s something to share with the community.’ We figured the RockyGrass audience would know that record, and most people caught on very quickly to what was going on, which was great.”

As Punch Brothers began contemplating a new studio album in 2020, amidst all the complications that come with COVID, the RockyGrass performance came to mind once again. The group had originally intended to gather in person to craft new material for the follow-up to 2018’s All Ashore. However, the pandemic interceded, leading to a change in plans.

“We had planned on having writing sessions and doing what we always do, but the world was complicated and also very unknowable,” the guitarist says. “So when it came time to talk about what our next record was going to be, we tossed a lot of ideas around, but we ultimately felt that Church Street Blues would be a cool project because the songs were curated so well. It’s such a killer collection of songs, and we threw the RockyGrass set together in very short order. We felt that with a little bit more time than we had for the RockyGrass set, we could reimagine some of these songs a little bit more.

“In creating this album, we also thought we’d honor Tony. One of the really inspiring things that he did is he always made everything his own. When Tony Rice would cover a song, he would make that song his own. A lot of times, Tony’s version of a song became the definitive version of the song. So we wanted to honor that spirit, which is one of the big lessons for us as a band and as musicians who have committed our lives to doing this. We wanted to make this music our own because we felt that would be the truest tribute to Tony.”

The project carried an additional layer of resonance for Eldridge, who first met Rice early in life and maintained a connection with him over the years.

“Tony became a north star for me. He was friends with my father [Ben] who played in a bluegrass band called The Seldom Scene. They were peers throughout the ‘70s. Tony used to come stay at the house when he was in D.C. I was born in 1982, so the crashing-on-the-couch days were a little bit before my time, but they were old friends. So I grew up knowing Tony a bit but, when I got into the guitar— and, specifically, the acoustic guitar—Tony became my hero.

“Of all the musicians that I had the good fortune of growing up around, there was something very striking about Tony. He just carried himself so seriously. You could tell that he was powerful. It was like being around Zeus or something. Then, as I got a little bit older and started taking the acoustic guitar seriously, I started studying Tony very closely, and I’d go see him. He played the Birchmere in D.C. a few times a year, and I’d always go up and watch him. And, every time I’d see him play, I’d see how he’d do something that I’d been trying to figure out on the guitar by listening to his records. So I’d watch him play and see how he did it.”

A few years later, when Eldridge was a college student at Oberlin—which requires its students to design a winter[1]term course of self-directed learning—he asked Rice for a tutorial. Eldridge spent a week at the elder musician’s home and credits the experience with “transforming the way that I think about music and think about being a musician.”

He says: “We hung out in his basement, listened to records all day long and talked about them. We weren’t sitting there playing guitars together. It wasn’t about him trying to be my guitar teacher. It was about him trying to share with me what he felt was important about being a great musician and that was a deeply profound experience for me.”

Punch Brothers ended up recording Hell on Church Street in November 2020 at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, and Rice passed away the following month on Christmas Day. Eldridge acknowledges, “The entire context of this record is different now because he was very much alive when we made it. I was looking forward to calling him and telling him about it. I wanted to be able to say, ‘We’ve been thinking about you, we love you and we want you to know that for our next record we reimagined Church Street Blues. I’ll put a CD in the mail.’ It wasn’t intended as a memorialization. It was meant to be an active thing that we were excited to share with Tony.”

Church Street Blues

This was written by the great Norman Blake. Tony recorded such a definitive version that I think a lot of people don’t even know it’s a Norman Blake song because Tony’s version has been so dominant. We didn’t want to just cover Tony’s version of “Church Street Blues.” That’s almost the thesis statement for the record—we wanted to take it and make it our own.

We played around with it for a little while, and Thile had the interesting idea of trying to play it in 5/4. It was really interesting, and it wasn’t natural. I had to reimagine how I thought of the song, but I’m really pleased with what it became. We wanted to capture some of the confusion that’s inherent in the song as well as the sublime beauty.

Cattle in the Cane

“Cattle in the Cane” is a classic fiddle tune that Norman Blake also recorded, and then Tony put it on Church Street Blues. For this one, we wanted to play it pretty straight as a bluegrass tune. It’s different enough that Tony was playing these songs by himself—although on “Cattle in the Cane,” he had his brother Wyatt playing rhythm guitar. Still, functionally, it’s just Tony playing melody the whole time. So for this one, we took it pretty straight and played it as a band.

Noam and I learned a part of Tony’s solo note-for-note. It’s such an iconic solo that we almost centered our version around it. We present it as part of the melody of “Cattle in the Cane.” But aside from that, it’s a rip-roaring fiddle tune with a lot of energy. It’s a catchy song.

Streets of London

“Streets of London” is another song where we felt like we wouldn’t have much to add by just playing it the way Tony played it. It’s very straightforward, very simple. Tony delivered that song in a direct, simple form as beautifully as anybody could ever want it to be delivered.

So we played with this one a bit and we gave it a few treatments. Then, ultimately, we settled on a pretty radical reimagination in terms of the harmony and the melody to reflect some of the confusion in the lyrics. We were trying to get at how lost those characters are. It’s a really forlorn, confused, sad portrait. So we tried to recontextualize the music with some of that in mind.

One More Night

This one was fun. Some of these songs are so simple that they wind up being open canvases for reimagination. This one we decided to sing as a duet. I also kind of imagined those crazy cuckoo clocks, where, on the hour, the mouth opens, a little train comes out and the gears start swirling around. Then, you imagine what happens when the mouth closes, the train goes back in and the bird goes back in—there’s this little world swimming around in there on gears. That’s sort of what I picture with this one—a bizarre little world.

The Gold Rush

This is the one we took the most liberties with. It’s an extremely impressionistic take but we still followed the contour of the song. We just felt like there have been so many great versions through the years played by bluegrass bands that we wanted to take the opportunity to try and create something new with it.

It’s a very free conversation that the band is having around the form of the tune, around the melody. We’ve never done anything like it in the band’s history. We’ve never had anything on a record that was so open and, in a way, indistinct with that sort of free improv approach. We really dig that one, although it’s not going to win us any fans at the International Bluegrass Music Association. [Laughs.]

 With Punch Brothers, we’ve always taken bluegrass as this beautiful form that exists. But if you look at the creators of the music, these people who we revere so much, they were all very radical—they all just kind of did it their own way.

I feel like the example that they set is: you’ve got these instruments and you take the ingredients, and you make something that reflects who you are, and what you love and believe in. So that’s always been the MO of Punch Brothers, in that we want to be aligned with—and reverent of—that spirit of creativity and creation the forefathers of the music embodied. And there’s no one in the modern era who embodied that more than Tony Rice. He had this beautiful way of being totally original and holding down the core essence of bluegrass, which is part of the reason that we love him.

Any Old Time

That one wound up being a party. We had another arrangement we’d been playing with that was almost like The Andrews Sisters, treating it like a ‘20s or ‘30s three-part harmony thing. It was cool, but it didn’t really feel like us.

So we came back around to it and said, ‘What happens if we just play it like it’s a party.’ That version on the record we probably ran twice before we cut it. So it was spontaneous and it was fun singing it as a duet all the way through.

Orphan Annie

This is another one of those absolute classic Norman Blake songs that Tony made his own. We wanted to separate it a little bit more, so we kind of took it in a John Hartford sort of direction. The chorus on that song is so beautiful and it always felt like it was ripe for three-part harmony. And if it’s ripe for three-part harmony, then it might be ripe for slowing the whole thing down and kind of milking it a little bit with this sort of laid-back feeling.

I think some of this came from the decision we made that we were going to have the songs in the same order that Tony had them on his record. So part of the consideration of the treatment of the songs was saying, ‘What’s going to sit well with the song that came before it.’ That was something that helped us come up with these reimaginations. And “Orphan Annie” is kind of fun next to the extra energy of “Any Old Time.”

House Carpenter/ Jerusalem Ridge

This was something that we came up with pretty quickly for the RockyGrass set. We had this idea that they could coexist together. The way that “House Carpenter” ends lyrically is kind of tempestuous. These guys set sail and basically they wind up sinking in a ship. There’s a lot of pathos leading up to the end of the song. So it builds up to a tempest, and we wanted the music to reflect that a bit. But, we also realized that “Jerusalem Ridge” is a great potential burner of a song that seemed like it fit well with the idea of the tempest.

The Last Thing on My Mind

This is one of my favorite songs on the record. Some of the songs that were straightforward and, especially those that were from the folk canon, seemed to invite a little bit more of a reimagination. So this one offered an opportunity to explore some different sonic textures. We wanted it to be quiet and extremely intimate because that’s the nature of the song, lyrically.

This one quickly came together as soon as we established the basic aesthetic of the song as being about textures—almost something where the sounds are all kind of tactile. Hopefully, it engulfs you.

Pride of Man

“Pride of Man” has always been one of my favorite songs on Church Street Blues. The way Tony plays it is just so charged with energy and righteous fire. We definitely wanted to honor that.

So this song gave us a chance to have kind of an ass-kicker on the record. Our take also has elements of some original songs that we’ve worked on over the years that have never seen the light of day.

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

This is an amazing Gordon Lightfoot song. It’s like a requiem. There’s something very spooky about this historical event that happened, and Tony delivers it almost through a detached recitation.

So in our version, we wanted to be a little bit detached and ghostly. But, having the entire string band on the record provides an opportunity to move dynamically throughout the song. The goal was to not only have some of that suspension-in-air sense that Tony captured so beautifully, but also to take full advantage of the band dynamically.

Tony was my mentor. He really took me under his wing. And the message he shared with me was: “You have to be yourself. Don’t do what I did, you have to do what you’re going to do.” He always said that the way he became himself was that he wanted to be Clarence White, who was his hero, but he realized that he couldn’t really do it. He was just going to be a B-team version of Clarence White. And out of this emerged the idea that your strengths come out of your weaknesses and both of those things will produce your individuality. That was something that Tony impressed on me, maybe more than anything else.

So that was the spirit that we embraced on this album—the spirit of being inventive, unique and not copying something that somebody’s already done. Tony Rice made Church Street Blues, and nobody can top Tony’s version of Church Street Blues. Nobody can top anybody’s anything but, particularly, that record stands as a monument. It’s an iconic record. So based on what Tony directly taught me—and by extension us—we had to be ourselves. There’s nothing stronger in the world than that.