Some call her style “bluegrass,” some “mountain music,” others “pure hillbilly,” but whatever the name, there’s just one way Wilma Lee Cooper has gone at it—full throttle.
“I sing just like I did back when I was growing up in those West Virginia Mountains,” she’s said, “where if you were good, you were also loud! And I’ve never changed; I couldn’t sing any other way.”
First achieving prominence in the 1940s performing with her late husband, champion fiddler Stoney (Dale T.) Cooper, big-voiced Wilma Lee sang and played guitar with a bursting-at-the-seams energy. Like her contemporary Rose Maddox, Wilma Lee forged a vocal style that hinted at a sound that listeners would come to know as rocking country, while maintaining her strong link to older ballad styles.
From the first, she’s had special feel and success with story songs—from “The Legend of the Dogwood Tree,” “Little Rosewood Casket,” and “Sunny Side of the Mountain” for Rich-R-Tone and Columbia Records in the ’40s, to “Wreck on the Highway” and “Philadelphia Lawyer” for Hickory in the early 1960s.
She sings those ballads with a clarity and simplicity that lets the audience follow every story twist. Singing that way is a lesson she learned in childhood, as Wilma Leigh Leary, already working as a member of West Virginia’s regionally famed performing Leary Family. Her celebrated delivery of gospel and devotional songs emerged at the same time.
It’s probably Wilma Lee and Stoney’s rousing, old-style jubilee hits of the ‘50s and ‘60s—“There’s a Big Wheel,” “This Old House,” and “Big Midnight Special”—that audiences have responded to most of all.
She continued performing with her group the Clinch Mountain Clan after Stoney’s death in March 1977, and was appearing on the Opry regularly until a stroke suffered on-stage in 2001 forced her to cease performing. Doctors who told her she wouldn’t walk again underestimated Wilma Lee’s spirit. In February 2005, during an Opry set hosted by Emmylou Harris, Wilma Lee Cooper walked onto the stage of the Ryman Auditorium to a standing ovation and greeted the crowd.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington honored Wilma Lee as the “First Lady of Bluegrass” in 1974. She takes her place alongside the great singers of traditional country music, where Opry fans have revered Wilma Lee all along, and still recognize her today.