Kenny Ingram

He was a young man when he came into the bands of two of the music’s first-generation leaders. On 16 March 1973 he was the banjo player at a Jimmy Martin session for Decca at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with Owen Bradley producing, that produced “Mary Ann,” “Fly Me to Frisco” and “Just Plain Yellow.” Within a year he had joined Flatt, and on 19 March 1974 he played banjo in the Nashville Grass at the concert at Vanderbilt University’s Neely Auditorium where Bill Monroe joined Flatt on stage, recorded by RCA for Lester Flatt Live! Bluegrass Festival. Over the next four years he played on Flatt’s records: the gospel record Flatt Gospel for Canaan and the Flying Fish album Lester Raymond Flatt, both cut in Nashville in 1975, and the CMH albums recorded at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, beginning with A Living Legend in the spring of 1976 and ending with the sessions of October 1978, where the band was Marty Stuart, Curly Seckler, Charlie Nixon on Dobro, Pete Corum on bass, Tater Tate on fiddle and Ingram. In 1975 he also played on Benny Martin’s Flying Fish sessions, sharing the banjo with John Hartford on the tracks Flatt sang.

When Flatt retired in 1979, Curly Seckler took over the Nashville Grass, and Ingram stayed with him. He played banjo and sang harmony on Seckler’s CMH album recorded at Hilltop Studios in Nashville on 10–12 November 1979, with Johnny Cash and Marty Stuart among the guests, and on later Seckler records of 1981 and 1983, the second of them for Folkways. In between, on 3 and 4 March 1980, he was the banjo player when Jimmy Martin and Ralph Stanley recorded together for Gusto in Nashville, a session that produced “Roll On Buddy, Roll On,” “Footprints in the Snow” and “Stone Walls and Steel Bars.”

He spent seven years in Rhonda Vincent’s band, the Rage, playing on her Rounder records of the mid-2000s: the live Ragin’ Live, recorded at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis in 2004, All American Bluegrass Girl (2006) and Good Thing Going (2008). In 2007 he was one of the banjo players, with Earl Scruggs, Béla Fleck and others, on Tony Trischka’s Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, which the IBMA named Recorded Event of the Year. He left Vincent late in 2008 and joined Larry Stephenson, starting with a New Year’s Day show on Jekyll Island in 2009. With Stephenson he recorded What Really Matters (Compass, 2012) and, for Stephenson’s own Whysper Dream label, the gospel album Pull Your Savior In (2014) and Weep Little Willow (2016). The Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America named him Banjo Player of the Year in 2016. He was no longer with the band by March 2018, when Derek Vaden took over the banjo.

Known in the band world as “Big K,” he also taught at banjo camps in many countries and guested on records by Marty Stuart, Josh Williams and others. He died on 26 July 2020, aged 67.