Wilma Lee Cooper
Wilma Lee Leary (February 7, 1921 – September 13, 2011), known professionally as Wilma Lee Cooper, was an American country music entertainer. She was a guitarist, banjo player and vocalist, and was given the title of “First Lady of Bluegrass” by the Smithsonian Institution in 1974. In 1994 She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the IBMA. She was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023. Biography Leary, according to the 1930 U.S. Census, was born Willma Leigh Leary in Valley Head, West Virginia whose mother was a schoolteacher and father who was a coal miner. Wilma’s mother played pump organ. She had two siblings, Jerry and Peggy. She began singing at the age of five. She sang in her youth with her family's gospel music group, The Leary Family, which included her parents and sisters. They recorded for the Library Of Congress in 1938. That year, they were also recognized at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C, having been chosen through a competition to represent the state of West Virginia. In 1941, Leary married fiddler and vocalist Dale T. "Stoney" Cooper, who was a musical accompanist for the Leary Family, and the