Patsy Stoneman
Patsy Stoneman was a singer and autoharp player, a daughter of the recording pioneer Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, who took her father’s place in the family band, the Stonemans, after his death in 1968 and later led and managed it. In the 1960s she led her own band in the Washington, D.C., area, and she spent four decades campaigning for her father’s election to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which came in 2008. The Autoharp Hall of Fame inducted her in 1999.
Pattie Inez Stoneman was born in Galax, Virginia, on 27 May 1925, the day her father recorded “The Dying Girl’s Farewell” for OKeh in New York, in the year his “The Titanic” became a best-seller. She was one of the thirteen of Pop and Hattie Stoneman’s twenty-three children who lived to adulthood. Around 1939 she and her older brother Eddie began playing comeback shows with their father, and she played in the family band when she could, taking up the autoharp her father often played and sometimes the guitar. She is among the Stoneman Family on recordings made at Carmody Hills, Maryland, and in Washington around the turn of 1957 and issued by Folkways.
In 1963, in the Washington area, she started a band of her own, bluegrass or country depending on who was in it. Over the five years she kept it together it included Red Allen, Porter Church, Buzz Busby, Bill Emerson, Ed Ferris, Roy Self, the Yates brothers Bill and Wayne, and her brother Scotty Stoneman on fiddle. She also played with the Stonemans in 1964 and 1965, and was a frequent guest on their syndicated television show after the family moved to Nashville.
When Pop died in June 1968, Patsy took his place on autoharp and vocals and moved to Nashville. She recorded with the Stonemans on A Stoneman Christmas (MGM, 1969) and the RCA albums Dawn of the Stonemans’ Age and In All Honesty (1970) and California Blues (1971), and she sang and played autoharp at a Larry Butler session with Donna, Roni and Jimmy in May 1971. The family also recorded “Country Bear Jamboree” for Disneyland in 1970, and she was one of the voices of that animatronic show. She left the group in the early 1970s with Donna and Roni, but by 1976 she was back, singing and playing guitar, autoharp and Jew’s harp with Van and Jimmy on the CMH album Cuttin’ the Grass, recorded in Charlotte, North Carolina, which included “Watermelon on the Vine” and “Let’s All Go Down to the River.” From September 1977 she was the band’s unofficial manager, and her husband, Jack Murphy, later managed it.
In 1981 she assembled seventeen members of the extended family and produced the CMH double album The First Family of Country Music, recorded at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville. Through the 1980s she sang and played guitar in family reunions with Van, Donna, Roni and Jimmy, at the Roy Acuff Theater in Nashville in 1981, at the Galax Old Fiddlers’ Convention in August 1985 and on the gospel album Family Bible for Rutabaga around 1987, and in late 1989 she produced their patriotic and gospel album For God and Country for Old Homestead. From 1987 she hosted a weekly radio show, At Home with the Stonemans, on WSVT in Smyrna, Tennessee. She also recorded an album of her father’s songs, Patsy Sings Pop … Stoneman That Is!, and was the driving force behind Ivan M. Tribe’s 1993 book The Stonemans, having kept most of the family’s memorabilia.
After Van and Jimmy died, she came further to the front. With Donna and Roni she recorded Patsy, Donna and Roni for Patuxent in July 2008, singing and playing autoharp and jaw harp, and The Stoneman Tradition in 2012, and the three performed as the Stoneman Sisters until shortly before her death. Pop Stoneman was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, and she accepted the honor for him. She died in her sleep at her home in Manchester, Tennessee, on 23 July 2015, aged 90.
