The titles of his three featured albums as a leader – Leroy Walks (Contemporary, 1957), Leroy Walks Again (1963) and Walkin' The Basses (1992) – offer a prominent clue as to Vinnegar's talent. While he was prepared to take bass solos, he preferred to play them in his normal four-to-the-bar, walking style, and it became his signature delivery. He played with Wes Montgomery in his home town of Indianapolis before moving to Chicago in 1952, where he worked as an accompanist to many major soloists. In 1954 he moved to Los Angeles and became a prolific sessionman there, a step which probably secured his leadership dates with Contemporary. This kind of freelancing lasted him through the 60s and 70s, when he worked with the likes of The Jazz Crusaders and Eddie Harris, but he began to suffer from heart and lung problems and eventually he moved to Oregon, in part because the LA smog was giving him trouble.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.