Carol Lee Cooper
Carol Lee Cooper is a singer, the daughter of Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, who sang on her parents’ records from the 1950s on. From 1972 to 2012 she led the Carol Lee Singers, the backing vocal group on the Grand Ole Opry.
She was born in 1942, a year after her parents married in Wheeling, West Virginia, where they were singing on WWVA. She first sang on the Opry stage with her parents in 1956. On November 6 of that year, at Hickory Studio in Nashville, she sang backing vocals on a Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper and the Clinch Mountain Clan session produced by Wesley Rose, which included “The Tramp on the Street” and “Loving You.”
Recording as Carol Lee, she made two singles for Starday in 1968, both produced by Tommy Hill: “I Don’t Believe” backed with “I’m Surprised at Me” (Starday 838) and “Number Eighty Two” backed with “With Each Thought of You” (Starday 858). In 1981 she and Gordon Dee released a duet single on Southern Tracks, “They Just Don’t Make Time Like They Used To” backed with “Happy Ending,” produced by James Stroud.
She kept singing on her parents’ sessions, at Woodland Sound Studio in October 1972 and at L.S.I. Recording Studio in December 1973. Later she sang harmony with her mother on Wilma Lee Cooper’s 1979 sessions in Roanoke, Virginia, with Gene Wooten, Stan Brown and Craig Duncan, and at Pete’s Place in Nashville around 1980.
In 1972 she formed the Carol Lee Singers, a name given by Roy Acuff, and led them as the Opry’s background vocalists for the next four decades. She ended her Opry career on March 24, 2012, sitting center stage while Marty Stuart closed the segment with “The Unseen Hand,” and the group’s other members carried on as the Opry Singers. When Wilma Lee Cooper died in 2011, her obituary named Carol Lee as a Grand Ole Opry member.
