Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper

Wilma Lee Leary was born on 7 February 1921 in Valley Head, West Virginia, and sang as a child with her parents and sisters in the Leary Family, a gospel group. In 1938 the Learys were chosen to represent West Virginia at the National Folk Festival in Washington, and their fiddler was a young man from Harman, West Virginia, Dale Troy “Stoney” Cooper, born on 16 October 1918. He and Wilma Lee married in 1941 and set out with a group of their own, the Clinch Mountain Clan, she singing lead and playing guitar or banjo, he playing fiddle and singing. For several years they moved from station to station, broadcasting in Nebraska, Indianapolis and Chicago, before settling at WWVA in Wheeling in 1947.

That year they made their first records, at radio station WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina, for Jim Stanton’s Rich-R-Tone label, among them “The Little Rosewood Casket,” “Wicked Path of Sin” and “The Tramp on the Street,” with Bill Carver on steel, Dobro and mandolin. Columbia signed them in 1949, and Art Satherley recorded them at Castle Studio in Nashville that April on “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” “What’s the Matter With This World” and “Moonlight on West Virginia.” Their Columbia sessions, which ran to December 1953, produced “The Legend of the Dogwood Tree,” “Walking My Lord Up Calvary Hill,” “Sunny Side of the Mountain” and “The West Virginia Polka,” with Josh “Buck” Graves on Dobro from 1951, Tex Logan on fiddle and harmonica and, from 1953, Tommy Jackson on fiddle. These records, mostly pious or nostalgic songs, were popular with the Coopers’ audience but did not become chart hits. A series of transcribed shows, sent to stations across the country, widened their audience further.

From 1955 they recorded for Hickory, produced by Wesley Rose, often with Chet Atkins on guitar and Tommy Jackson on fiddle. “I’ve Been Cheated Too” reached number 14 in 1956, and in 1957 the Coopers joined the Grand Ole Opry and moved to Nashville. “Come Walk With Me” (number 4), recorded in March 1958 with their daughter Carol Lee singing harmony, was followed in 1959 by “Big Midnight Special” (number 4), their version of Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special,” and Don Gibson’s “There’s a Big Wheel” (number 3), and in 1961 by “Wreck on the Highway” (number 8). The Hickory albums There’s a Big Wheel (1960), Family Favorites (1962), which included “Philadelphia Lawyer,” and Songs of Inspiration (1963) followed. Their Hickory sidemen included the banjo players Johnny Clark and Buck Trent, the fiddler Benny Martin and, back on Dobro in 1961, Josh Graves.

Owen Bradley produced their Decca sides in 1966 and 1967, collected on Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper Sing (1966), among them “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die (Like Flowers in the Fall).” In the 1970s they made The Great Speckled Bird, a tribute to Roy Acuff (Skylite, 1973), an album of their old favorites for Power Pak (1974), a Rounder album recorded in April 1976 with Butch Robins on banjo and Bill Carver back on Dobro and mandolin, including “He Will Set Your Fields on Fire” and “The Hills of Roane County,” and Sing the Carter Family’s Greatest Hits (Starday, 1977), which included “Wildwood Flower” and “Gathering Flowers From the Hillside.” The Smithsonian Institution honored Wilma Lee in 1974 as “the first lady of bluegrass.”

Stoney’s health was failing by the 1970s, and Wilma Lee increasingly fronted the band alone; he died on 22 March 1977. She kept the Clinch Mountain Clan going, recorded for Rounder and Rebel, and stayed on the Opry until a stroke on stage in 2001 ended her career. She died on 13 September 2011 in Sweetwater, Tennessee, aged 90. IBMA gave her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 1994 and inducted her into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023, calling her one of bluegrass music’s most important early women musicians.