Stoney Cooper
Stoney Cooper (1918–1977) was a fiddler and singer from Randolph County, West Virginia, who performed with his wife, Wilma Lee Cooper, from their marriage in 1941 until his death, leading their band, the Clinch Mountain Clan, with her. The pair were stars of the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling from 1947 and of the Grand Ole Opry from 1957, and their Hickory records “Come Walk With Me,” “Big Midnight Special” and “There’s a Big Wheel” were top-five country hits.
He was born Dale Troy Cooper on 16 October 1918 in Harman, West Virginia. In the fall of 1938 Jake Leary hired him as the fiddler of the Leary Family, a gospel group from Valley Head that represented West Virginia at the National Folk Festival in Washington that year. He and Leary’s daughter Wilma Leigh were soon singing duets as the Singing Pals, and they married in June 1941. Around the birth of their daughter, Carol Lee, in March 1942, Wilma simplified her name to Wilma Lee and Dale took the stage name Stoney, chosen in an on-air contest. For the next five years the couple worked their way around radio stations, among them KMMJ in Grand Island, Nebraska, WIBC in Indianapolis, WJJD in Chicago, WMMN in Fairmont, West Virginia, KLCN in Blytheville, Arkansas, and WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina; for a time the band was billed as Stoney Cooper’s Blues Chasers.
At WWNC in 1947 they made their first records, for Jim Stanton’s Rich-R-Tone label, as Stoney Cooper and the Clinch Mountain Boys, among them “The Little Rosewood Casket,” “Wicked Path of Sin” and “The Tramp on the Street,” with Bill Carver on steel, Dobro and mandolin. Later that year they settled at WWVA in Wheeling, where, apart from about ten months at the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond in 1953 and 1954, they stayed for a decade. Art Satherley signed them to Columbia, and from April 1949 they recorded with Stoney on fiddle and harmony vocals; because the Stanley Brothers already called their band the Clinch Mountain Boys, the Coopers became the Clinch Mountain Clan, with Wilma Lee’s name now first on the label. The Columbia records, which ran to December 1953, included “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” “The Legend of the Dogwood Tree,” “Walking My Lord Up Calvary Hill” and “The West Virginia Polka,” with Tex Logan as a second fiddler from 1950 and Josh Graves on Dobro from 1951. In 1950 Harvard University’s music library described the Coopers as “the most authentic mountain singing group in the United States.”
From 1955 they recorded for Hickory, produced by Wesley Rose, and in 1956 they added Scruggs-style banjo to their records for the first time. “I’ve Been Cheated Too” was a hit in 1956, and early in 1957 the Coopers joined the Grand Ole Opry and moved to Nashville. “Come Walk With Me” (No. 4), recorded in March 1958 with Carol Lee singing harmony, was followed in 1959 by “Big Midnight Special” (No. 4) and “There’s a Big Wheel” (No. 3), and in 1961 by “Wreck on the Highway” (No. 8). Stoney’s fiddle is out front on “The Canadian Reel,” cut in May 1958 with Jimmie Elrod on banjo and included on their first album, There’s a Big Wheel (Hickory, 1960). Owen Bradley produced their Decca sessions of 1966 and 1967, and the couple appeared in films including Country Music on Broadway (1964) and W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings (1975).
In April 1976 they recorded for Rounder in Nashville with Butch Robins on banjo and Bill Carver on Dobro and mandolin; those sessions produced “He Will Set Your Fields on Fire” and “The Hills of Roane County,” and on two songs from them later issued by Rounder, “Curly Headed Baby” and “Nobody’s Darling but Mine,” Stoney sings the lead. By the 1970s his health was failing, and Wilma Lee increasingly fronted the band alone. He died in Nashville on 22 March 1977. In 2008 he and Wilma Lee were inducted together into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, which remembers him as a champion fiddler.
