Wilma Lee Cooper

She was born Wilma Leigh Leary on 7 February 1921 and began singing as a child in the Leary Family, a group led by her parents, Jake and Lola Leary, that took its songs from shape-note hymnals. In time she and her younger sisters, Geraline and Cathaline, formed a trio within the group and added traditional ballads. A series of regional competitions sent the family to represent West Virginia at the National Folk Festival in Washington in 1938; on the way home they auditioned at WSVA in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and were added to the station’s roster. They returned to the festival in 1939 and recorded for the Library of Congress, the whole family singing “On the Jericho Road” and “The Crawdad Song,” and the three sisters “Old Black Mountain Trail.” After high school she earned a degree in banking at Davis and Elkins College.

In the fall of 1938 her father hired a young fiddler from Harman, Dale Cooper. The two began singing duets as the Singing Pals and married in June 1941, and around the birth of their daughter, Carol Lee, in March 1942 she shortened her name to Wilma Lee and he became Stoney. Over the next five years they worked radio stations in Nebraska, Indianapolis, Chicago, Fairmont, Blytheville, Arkansas, and Asheville, North Carolina, she playing guitar or banjo and he the fiddle. At WWNC in Asheville in 1947 they named their band the Clinch Mountain Boys and made their first records for Jim Stanton’s Rich-R-Tone label, sixteen sides of which eight were issued at the time; among them was “The Tramp on the Street,” a song she kept in her repertoire, and she always felt those early records were their best.

Later in 1947 they returned to WWVA in Wheeling, now a 50,000-watt station whose signal carried them to work across New England and into Canada, and apart from about ten months at the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond in 1953 and 1954 they stayed for ten years, buying a house and, drawing on her business training, opening a record shop. Art Satherley signed them to Columbia, where they recorded thirty-seven songs from 1949 to 1953, now as the Clinch Mountain Clan, since the Stanley Brothers were already the Clinch Mountain Boys, and with Wilma Lee’s name first on the label. None of them was a chart hit, but “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” “The Legend of the Dogwood Tree,” “Walking My Lord Up Calvary Hill,” “The West Virginia Polka” and “Sunny Side of the Mountain” became career songs, and the sessions brought in Tex Logan on fiddle and Josh Graves on Dobro. In 1950 Harvard University’s music library called the Coopers “the most authentic mountain singing group in the United States,” and a series of transcribed shows sponsored by Carter’s Little Liver Pills went out to twenty stations.

From 1955 they recorded for Hickory, the new label of Roy Acuff and Wesley Rose, seventy-four songs and instrumentals over most of a decade. Wilma Lee also cut duets there with Al Terry, among them “We Make a Lovely Couple (You and I)” in 1955 and “It’s Just as Well” in 1956. She wrote or co-wrote several of the Coopers’ successes, among them “Cheated Too,” “I Tell My Heart” and “Heartbreak Street,” and the hit “(I’ve Been) Cheated Too” led to the Grand Ole Opry, which they joined early in 1957, moving to Nashville. “Come Walk With Me” (No. 4) followed in 1958, “Big Midnight Special” (No. 4), her country arrangement of Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special,” and Don Gibson’s “There’s a Big Wheel” (No. 3) in 1959, and “Wreck on the Highway” (No. 8) in 1961. Their Hickory albums included There’s a Big Wheel (1960), Family Favorites (1962), with “Philadelphia Lawyer,” and Songs of Inspiration (1963); Graves was back on Dobro for a session in December 1961. They then recorded for Decca, produced by Owen Bradley, in 1966 and 1967, and appeared in films including Country Music on Broadway (1964) and W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings (1975).

In the 1970s they made a Roy Acuff tribute album for Skylite (1973), recorded for Rounder in 1976 and made Sing the Carter Family’s Greatest Hits for Starday (1977). Wilma Lee was asked to record her repertoire for the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1974 she appeared in the Smithsonian’s Women in Country Music series, which proclaimed her the “First Lady of Bluegrass.” By then Stoney’s health was failing and she often fronted the band alone. After he died, on 22 March 1977, she returned to performing with what she called “mountain music with a beat,” became a favorite at bluegrass festivals and stayed on the Opry. With Gene Wooten on Dobro, Stan Brown on banjo and Craig Duncan on fiddle she recorded A Daisy a Day in Roanoke in 1979 for Leather, later reissued by Rebel; Rounder’s Wilma Lee Cooper (1982), with Tater Tate on fiddle on its newer tracks, mixed old ballads such as “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” with “You Tried to Ruin My Name”; and The White Rose (Rebel, 1983), recorded in Hendersonville in April 1981, brought back “Come Walk With Me.”

A stroke she suffered on the Opry stage in 2001 ended her touring career, though she later made a final Opry appearance in a group sing-along. She died on 13 September 2011 in Sweetwater, Tennessee, aged 90. The IBMA, which had given her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 1994, inducted her into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023, calling her one of bluegrass music’s most important early women musicians.

• 1974: named “First Lady of Bluegrass” by the Smithsonian Institution
• 1994: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 2008: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, with Stoney Cooper
• 2023: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame