Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper

The original sounds from the southern Appalachian mountains were echoed in the music of Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper. In 1950, the Coopers and their music group, the Clinch Hill Clan, were called “one of the most genuine mountain performing group in america” with the music collection of Harvard School. Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper had been delivered to sing traditional nation music. Raised on the plantation in Clinch State, WV, Stoney discovered to play hill music and Elizabethan ballads in the fiddle as a kid. At age 12, he trained himself to try out guitar and became a member of a traditional nation music group, the Green Valley Guys. Wilma Lee was raised singing with a family group music group, the Leary Family members, that was among the top-ranked Southern gospel groupings. Her debut open public performance emerged at age five. In 1938, she sang using the Leary Family members at a nationwide folk celebration sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt. Stoney and Wilma Lee initial performed jointly in the past due ’30s, when Stoney was employed with the Leary Family members to try out fiddle for ten dollars weekly. Wedded in 1941, the Coopers performed like a duo, the Musical Companions, while still touring using the Learys. After departing the group, they performed within the Virginia and Western Virginia circuit until Wilma Lee offered birth with their 1st kid, Carol Lee, and Stoney required a job for any drink distributor to product their musical income. In the first ’40s, the few was heard frequently on r / c in Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, and NEW YORK. Shifting to Chicago, Stoney worked well for a protection flower in Gary, IN. The Coopers’ musical profession began to remove shortly after time for Western Virginia in 1947 and getting cast members from the Wheeling Jamboree. They continued to be with the display for ten years, broadcasting every Sunday night on the CBS radio network. In 1957, they remaining the display, relocated to Nashville, and became users from the Grand Ole Opry. They released the to begin three TOP country strikes, “Arrive Walk beside me,” 2 yrs later on. “There are a Big Steering wheel” and “Big Midnight Particular” implemented the same calendar year. In the ’60s and early ’70s, the Coopers made an appearance on numerous tv shows in america and Canada and in the films Nation Music on Broadway and W.W. as well as the Dixie Dance Kings. They continued to be active using the Grand Ole Opry before middle-’70s, when illness forced Stoney’s pension. The Coopers’ last documenting collectively was Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper Sing the Carter Family’s Greatest Strikes. Following Stoney’s pension, Wilma Lee, who keeps a bachelor’s level in bank from Davis and Elkins University in Elkins, WV, continuing to execute and record on her behalf own. A couple of days before Stoney’s loss of life in 1977, she devoted a performance from the Carter Family’s “Small Darling Pal of Mine” to him during an appearance within the Grand Ole Opry. The Smithsonian Institute honored her as “the 1st female of bluegrass” at their annual folk celebration in 1974. Wilma Lee’s very own performing days finished when she acquired a heart stroke while playing over the Grand Ole Opry stage in 2001, although she retrieved sufficiently to seem on the Opry afterwards being a nonperformer and provide greetings and thank-yous to supporters. A lot of Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper’s music, including “Sunny Aspect of the Hill,” “The Western world Virginia Polka,” “Thirty Bits of Sterling silver,” “Wreck on the road,” and “Star from the Dogwood Tree,” possess gone to become staples of nation and bluegrass repertoires.