Tommy Boyd

His earliest documented recordings are on Dobro: on Country Grass (Old Homestead, 1975) by the mandolinist Wendy Miller and the banjo player Mike Lilly, and on Sparks’s You Could Have Called (King Bluegrass, 1976), recorded in 1975 at Lemco Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, with Lilly on banjo, the young Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and fiddle and Art Wynder on bass. In 1976 he played banjo and Dobro on Sparks’s Larry Sparks Sings Hank Williams (County, 1977), with Skaggs and the fiddler Chubby Wise, and banjo and some Dobro on Christmas in the Hills (King Bluegrass, 1976), on which he sang tenor to Sparks’s lead.

Boyd was on banjo and Dobro for Sparks’s first Rebel album, John Deere Tractor, recorded at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington on 16 March 1978 with Kirk Brandenberger on fiddle and Mike Carter on bass and released in 1980, singing harmony on every vocal. The next year he recorded A Face in the Crowd with Sparks, the fiddler Glen Duncan and the bassist David Bowling at Programme Audio’s Studio A in Greenfield, Indiana, singing tenor with Duncan on baritone; Old Homestead issued it in 1985.

With Dry Branch Fire Squad he played banjo on Echoes of the Mountains (Rounder, 2009), recorded at Hilltop in Nashville with Thomason, Brian Aldridge and Dan Russell. When Aldridge and Russell retired at the end of 2015, Boyd stayed on, and in 2016 the band was Adam McIntosh on guitar and mandolin, Boyd on banjo and resophonic guitar, Jeff Byrd on bass and Thomason.