Jack Lynch

Musician
Best known for Bass

Jack Lynch was a musician, record producer and label owner from Dayton, Ohio, who founded Jalyn Records in the 1960s. He played bass on Ralph Stanley’s first two albums after Carter Stanley’s death, Old Time Music and Bluegrass Sound (both 1968), which he recorded in Dayton, and he made records of his own with the Lee Brothers and the Miami Valley Boys.

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He played most of the bluegrass instruments. Friendly with the Stanley Brothers, he booked them into venues around Dayton and filled in on bass for them when they came to town short of musicians. Jalyn’s early singles were his own: Jack Lynch & the Lee Brothers, with Roy Lee Centers, recorded Wade Mainer’s “Little Birdie” and Centers’s “You Left Me This Morning” for Jalyn 45-201 in 1964, followed in 1967 by “Will You Miss Me” with Centers’s instrumental “Roy Lee’s Breakdown,” and in July 1967 by Lynch’s song “In Memory of Carter Stanley.” As Jack Lynch & the Miami Valley Boys he released a single, “Battle of New Orleans” and “Cripple Creek” (1967), and the album Bluegrass Music (Jalyn JLP 121, 1968), with “Wildwood Flower,” “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Shady Grove” and liner notes by Ralph Stanley.

When Ralph Stanley re-formed the Clinch Mountain Boys after Carter’s death in December 1966, Lynch recorded them. Old Time Music (Jalyn JLP 118) was cut in August 1967 at Lynch’s home studio in Dayton, with Larry Sparks singing lead, Curly Ray Cline on fiddle, Melvin Goins on guitar, Curly Lambert on mandolin and Lynch on bass; one side held songs such as “Knoxville Girl,” “East Virginia Blues” and “Poor Ellen Smith,” the other instrumentals, among them his own “Bonnie and Clyde’s Hop,” with Ralph on clawhammer banjo. “Long Journey Home” and “East Virginia Blues” were issued as Jalyn singles, and in 1978 Lynch said the album was his best-selling LP. Bluegrass Sound (Jalyn JLP 120), recorded in Dayton on 14 February 1968 with Sparks, Cline, Frank Wakefield on mandolin and Lynch on bass, opened with “In Memory of Carter Stanley.”

Jalyn recorded many other bluegrass acts, including Don Reno, Bill Harrell and the Tennessee Cut-Ups (Bluegrass Favorites, 1967), Lee Allen with Roy Lee Centers and Curly Ray Cline (Songs of Love and Tragedy, about 1969), Cline’s The Working Man (1970) and, in January 1971, the first album by the teenagers Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs, Tribute to the Stanley Brothers. Lynch was known for selling records from the trunk of his Cadillac at festivals. He moved to Nashville around the end of the 1970s, where he ran further labels, among them Nashville Country and the Nashville Bluegrass Recording Company, and in 2000 Jalyn issued a CD of old-time fiddle and banjo instrumentals by Jack Lynch & Friends.

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