Wilma Lee Cooper
Wilma Lee Cooper (born Wilma Lee Leary; February 7, 1921 – September 13, 2011) was a singer, guitarist, and clawhammer banjo player from Valley Head, West Virginia. As a girl she sang in the Leary Family, a gospel group with her parents and sisters, which recorded for the Library of Congress in 1938 and performed at that year's National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. In 1941 she married fiddler and singer Dale T. "Stoney" Cooper, and the two performed as Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper and the Clinch Mountain Clan. They were regulars on the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia, for about ten years, starting in 1947, and joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1957. Their country hits included "Come Walk with Me" (1958), recorded with their daughter, Carol Lee Cooper, as well as "Big Midnight Special" and "There's a Big Wheel," both from 1959. Bill Monroe named her as an early woman in bluegrass, and in 1974 the Smithsonian Institution called her the "First Lady of Bluegrass." After Stoney died in 1977, she continued at the Opry as a solo performer and recorded occasionally for bluegrass labels. IBMA gave her its Distinguished Achievement Award in 1994. She had a stroke while performing on the Opry in February 2001, which ended her career. She died at her home in Sweetwater, Tennessee, in 2011, at age 90. She was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023.
In the newsletter
- No. 3 April-June 1995
- No. 6 Winter 1996
- No. 18 Winter 1999
- No. 19 Spring 1999
- No. 25 Winter 2001
- No. 28 January 2002
- No. 31 December 2002
- No. 32 April 2003