Stoney Cooper
Musician · 1918–1977 · Harman, West Virginia
Best known for
Fiddle
Harmony Vocals
Stoney Cooper was a champion old-time fiddler and, with his wife Wilma Lee, one half of one of country music’s most durable and traditional-minded duos. From the late 1930s through the 1970s, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper carried unvarnished Appalachian mountain music and gospel from the Wheeling Jamboree to the Grand Ole Opry, keeping a hard-edged, string-band sound alive as Nashville smoothed the genre around them.
Assisted by AI.
Spot something off? Help us fix it.
- Born Dale Troy Cooper on October 16, 1918, in Harman, in the Randolph County highlands of West Virginia, he was the son of Kenny and Stella (Raines) Cooper and grew up steeped in the fiddle music of the surrounding mountains.
- Before joining the Leary Family, he had honed his fiddling and singing on radio, playing over WMMN in Fairmont, West Virginia, with Rusty Hiser and the Green Valley Boys.
- In the fall of 1938 he was hired as a replacement fiddler by the Leary Family, a West Virginia gospel group that had recorded for the Library of Congress that year and appeared at the National Folk Festival in Washington; there he met the group’s singer, Wilma Lee Leary, whom he married in 1941.
- The couple worked as a duo backed by their band, the Clinch Mountain Clan, with Wilma Lee’s powerful lead voice and guitar out front and Stoney supplying fiddle and high harmony.
- From 1947 to 1957 they were mainstays of the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia, reaching a wide audience through the show’s Saturday-night radio broadcasts.
- The pair first recorded for the small Rich-R-Tone label, moved to Columbia Records in the late 1940s, and found their greatest chart success after signing with Roy Acuff’s Hickory Records in 1955.
- In 1957 the Coopers moved to Nashville and joined the Grand Ole Opry, where they remained fixtures for the rest of Stoney’s life.
- Their Hickory hits included “Come Walk with Me” (1958), “Big Midnight Special” and “There’s a Big Wheel” (both 1959), and a charting revival of “Wreck on the Highway” (1961), the ballad Roy Acuff had made famous—all four reaching the country Top Ten.
- Their daughter, Carol Lee Cooper, became a respected Nashville harmony singer who for decades led the Opry’s backing vocal group, the Carol Lee Singers.
- The Coopers’ hard-driving, banjo-and-fiddle mountain sound placed them close to bluegrass, and their traditional approach later made Wilma Lee a favorite on the festival circuit; the Smithsonian Institution named her the “First Lady of Bluegrass” in 1974.
- After suffering a heart attack on February 4, 1977, Stoney Cooper died on March 22, 1977, in a Nashville hospital at age 58; Wilma Lee kept the Clinch Mountain Clan performing for nearly another quarter-century.
