Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper

The traditional sounds of the southern Appalachian mountains were echoed in the music of Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper. In 1950, the Coopers and their band, the Clinch Mountain Clan, were named "the most authentic mountain singing group in the United States" by the music library of Harvard University. Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper were born to sing traditional country music. Raised on a farm in Clinch County, West Virginia, Stoney learned to play mountain music and Elizabethan ballads on the fiddle as a child. At the age of twelve, he taught himself to play guitar and joined a traditional country band, the Green Valley Boys. Wilma Lee grew up singing with a family band, the Leary Family, that was one of the top-ranked Southern gospel groups. Her debut public performance came at the age of five. In 1938, she sang with the Leary Family at a national folk festival sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt. Stoney and Wilma Lee first performed together in the late 1930s, when Stoney was hired by the Leary Family to play fiddle for ten dollars a week. Married in 1941, the Coopers performed as a duo, the Musical Partners, while still touring with the Learys. After leaving the group, they performed on the Virginia and West Virginia circuit until Wilma Lee gave birth to their first child, Carol Lee, and Stoney took a job for a beverage distributor to supplement their musical income. In the early 1940s, the couple was heard often on radio stations in Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas and North Carolina. Moving to Chicago, Stoney worked for a defense plant in Gary, Indiana. The Coopers' musical career began to take off shortly after returning to West Virginia in 1947 and becoming cast members of the WWVA Jamboree. They remained with the show for a decade, broadcasting every Saturday...