The Stoneman Family

Pop Stoneman was born on 25 May 1893 at Monarat, Virginia. He went to New York in 1924 convinced that he could play and sing better than the musicians already on records, and his first OKeh session took place on 4 September that year. “The Titanic,” which he first attempted at that session and cut again in January 1925, became his breakthrough record. Accompanying himself on autoharp, harmonica and guitar, he recorded traditional songs such as “John Hardy,” sentimental songs such as “The Dying Girl’s Farewell” and event songs such as “Wreck on the C&O.” From 1926 he brought kin and neighbors into his recordings, his wife Hattie among them on fiddle, and recorded as Ernest V. Stoneman and His Dixie Mountaineers.

Sales of his records led the Victor producer Ralph Peer to schedule sessions in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927 to record Stoneman and other artists he recruited; the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers made their first recordings there. Stoneman’s last records of the 1920s were made in 1929 with other bands, and he did not record again until January 1934, when sessions in New York ending on 10 January closed his prewar recording career. By then the family had moved, in 1932, to the Washington, D.C., area.

In June 1948 Pop and a group of his children won a talent search at Constitution Hall sponsored by the promoter Connie B. Gay, which brought twenty-seven weeks of performances, radio time and television appearances. In 1956 Pop won $10,000 on the quiz show The Big Surprise, and the Blue Grass Champs, made up of Scotty, Donna and Jimmy Stoneman with the guitarist Jimmy Case and the banjoist Porter Church, won on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts with “Salty Dog Blues.” They also took the band prize at the National Country Music Championship in Warrenton, Virginia, where Scotty won the fiddle contest. Donna’s mandolin on a 1957 Blue Grass Champs record for Bakersfield is credited as the first by a woman on a bluegrass recording, and Roni’s “Lonesome Road Blues” on Mike Seeger’s Scruggs-style banjo anthology as the first Scruggs-style banjo on record by a woman.

By 1962 the group was the Stoneman Family, with Scotty on fiddle, Roni on banjo, Donna on mandolin, Van on guitar and Jimmy on bass. They recorded two albums for Starday at Starday Sound Studio in Nashville, in June 1962 and November 1963, and made a guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1964 they went west for two years in California, playing the Ash Grove, the Troubadour, the Monterey Folk Festival and Disneyland, and recorded a live album for World Pacific in Hollywood with Jack Clement producing.

Clement stayed with them when they signed with MGM, recording the group in Nashville from November 1965, and at his insistence the four MGM albums leaned toward mainstream country. The family settled in Nashville at the start of 1966, had a weekly half-hour television show for three and a half years, and in 1967 won the CMA award. Pop died on 14 June 1968, and Patsy took his place on autoharp and vocals. The group then moved to RCA, recording at RCA Victor Studio in Nashville from November 1969.

Donna, Roni and Patsy left in the early 1970s. Scotty, who had played with the Kentucky Colonels, died on 4 March 1973, and that year Roni joined the cast of Hee Haw, where she stayed nineteen years as a banjo player and as the comic character Ida Lee Nagger. Patsy later returned, and the Stonemans, with Van on guitar and Jimmy on bass, recorded for CMH Records between 1976 and 1981. The band had effectively ended by 1993.

Pop was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. That year Patsy, Donna and Roni made a record together for Patuxent, and they made another in 2012; Donna and Roni recorded as late as 2020. Patsy died on 23 July 2015, Roni on 22 February 2024 and Donna, the last of the family, on 28 June 2026.