Vernon McIntyre

His father played bass in the band that Earl Taylor, Jim McCall and the banjo player Walt Hensley put together in Baltimore, and the boy went along in the car to the clubs, too young to go inside, listening from outside. The banjo, he later said, was the loudest thing he heard, and it left no doubt about what he wanted to play. With his father on bass, Taylor’s Stoney Mountain Boys recorded for Folkways in 1958 and for United Artists in 1959.

His own first records were made with Taylor’s band. On 30 January 1963, in Nashville, Ken Nelson recorded it for Capitol’s Bluegrass Taylor Made, with Frankie Short on guitar, Walter Hensley on banjo, Benny Martin on fiddle and Boatwhistle McIntyre singing and playing bass; the younger McIntyre added a second banjo on “Cabin Home on the Hill,” “I’ve Lived a Lot in My Time,” “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” and “Pan Handle Country.” Around 1966 he was the banjo player when Taylor and Jim McCall recorded for Rural Rhythm, with his father on bass and Paul Mullins on fiddle, on songs such as “Little Maggie,” “Pretty Polly” and “Worried Man Blues.” He also played banjo in Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys, one of the line of banjo players heard on Martin’s instrumentals.

At the end of the 1960s he was playing banjo with a young Dayton band, the Easterners, alongside Roy Lee Centers on guitar and Fred Spencer on mandolin. In February 1969 that group backed Hylo Brown at Rusty York’s Jewel Recording studio and at the Village Tavern in Cincinnati, and the live recording of their night at the tavern, with Liz Ellison on electric bass and Jack Gibbs on drums, came out on Vetco in 1974 as Roy Lee Centers’s I’ve Lived a Lot in My Time. Through the 1970s he worked as a staff musician at Jewel, playing banjo or rhythm guitar on sessions for Mac Wiseman, Jimmy Skinner, Charlie Moore, Lonnie Mack and Hylo Brown, among others.

By 1971 he and Jim McCall were leading the Appalachian Grass at Aunt Maudie’s on Main Street in Cincinnati, with David Cox on mandolin, and the two made a pair of albums for Vetco, among them Jim McCall, Vernon McIntyre and the Appalachian Grass (LP-3015, mastered in July 1973). He played rhythm guitar on Wendy Miller and Mike Lilly’s Country Grass (Old Homestead, 1975), and in 1977 Miller and Lilly backed him on Vernon McIntyre’s Appalachian Grass (Old Homestead), on which he sang lead and played guitar, with Alan Eiseman on fiddle and Charlie Hoskins on bass, on songs such as “Banjer John” and “Fifty-Seven Chevy.” In the early 1980s Earl Taylor, back on the road after a break, worked for a time with McIntyre’s band.

In 1983 he and his wife, the fiddler Kitty McIntyre, bought the Famous Old Time Music Company, a Cincinnati music store founded in 1972, and in 2002 they opened a second shop in Wapakoneta, Ohio. They closed the business in 2013, auctioning several hundred instruments and a collection of 7,000 to 10,000 vintage LPs, but kept teaching lessons, repairing instruments and playing with the band. At the end of March 2026 the band played a concert for Miami University’s regional campus in Hamilton, Ohio, with Vernon as singer, rhythm guitarist and emcee, Kitty on fiddle, Robert Campbell on banjo, Susan Shook on mandolin and Tammy Powers on bass.