Just as the pace was exhausting him, Rice heard a recording by David Grisman, a mandolinist from Greenwich Village. Grisman’s progressive sound lured Rice to San Francisco. “The music laid out in front of me was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Rice said. “At first I wasn’t even sure I could learn it. The only thing that saved me was that I always loved the sound of acoustic, small-group, modern jazz.”

Rice co-founded the David Grisman Quintet in 1975, and they toured Japan. But when Grisman suggested the Quintet leave America to tour with the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Rice balked. Grisman lined up a replacement. “Musically, my heart was not in it,” Rice said. He had his own band in mind, as well as “The Bluegrass Album,” a 1980 project that has spawned six volumes.

Ninety minutes into our conversation in Reidsville, Rice’s voice began to fail. To give it a rest, I asked to see the “Antique,” his D-28 herringbone guitar, a prewar model sometimes referred to by aficionados as the Holy Grail. As he lifted it, rattlesnake tails bounced around inside. It’s tradition to add them, whether for the subtle sound or, as some say, to keep mice from nesting there.

“I don’t think I can play it right now,” he said. “I picked it up a few days ago, and my hands hurt so bad that I just put it back in the case. It is still mind-blowing to me that the first time I played it was 52 years ago.” Rice was thinking of California, where he made his live-broadcast radio debut at age 9. The show also featured Clarence White, the D-28’s owner at the time, who let the boy play the distinctive guitar with an enlarged sound hole and an extended finger board.

Built in 1935, the guitar’s “D” is a nod to dreadnought battleships, denoting an oversize body squared off for a bass-heavy tone. White dinged the D-28, parked cigarettes on it and once ran it over with his station wagon. White eventually turned to an electrified sound, playing with the Byrds and Gram Parsons. By that time, though, he had popularized the guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass, and Rice had avidly studied him during dozens of perform­ances on the festival circuit. After White’s death in 1973 at age 29 (he was struck by a drunken driver while loading equipment after a gig), Rice wondered what happened to the guitar. He eventually learned that White had sold it to a friend, Joe Miller, whose father owned liquor stores in Pasadena. Rice looked up “Miller’s Liquors” and found Joe Miller, and in March 1975 flew from Kentucky to LAX with $550 in cash. Though the strings were green, that sound hole was unmistakable. The D-28 had been lying under Miller’s bed.

In Rice’s hands, the guitar took on mythical properties, revered for its vitality of sound. The Santa Cruz Guitar Company’s “Tony Rice” line is influenced by its design. Then the guitar was almost lost again, in 1993. When a tropical storm took Rice’s home in Crystal River, Fla., Rice had to quickly move his dog to high ground, leaving his beloved guitar in peril. He gave a young fisherman $20, asking him to rescue “a big blue case” from the house. The boy brought back the priceless instrument, waterlogged but salvageable.

At the Days Inn, Rice perched on the bed’s edge, leg crossed to cradle his guitar, and played part of “Barbara Allen.” The sound was agile, the pick work economical. He moved on to “Shady Grove” but stopped after only a verse, the pain becoming too much. “That was Garcia’s favorite tune.”