EGN NEWS DESK
Roni Stoneman, a virtuoso banjo participant, mainstay of the nation music tv present “Hee Haw” and one of many final surviving members of the Stoneman Family, a famend Appalachian string band, died on Thursday at her house in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 85.
Her demise was confirmed by Julie Harris, a household pal. No additional particulars had been obtainable; a trigger was not given.
Ms. Stoneman made her mark in 1957 together with her driving instrumental model of “Lonesome Road Blues,” which made her the primary lady to play fashionable bluegrass banjo on a phonograph file. Also often known as “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” and sometimes together with lyrics, the track was included on a compilation album of three-finger, five-string banjo numbers within the model popularized by Earl Scruggs.
Ms. Stoneman’s biggest declare to fame, although, got here 16 years later, when she joined the solid of “Hee Haw,” entertaining thousands and thousands whereas proving herself to be a country comic on a par with Minnie Pearl and June Carter Cash.
Her most amusing, and enduring, character on the present was the gaptoothed “Ironing Board Lady,” Ida Lee Nagger, a beleaguered housewife whose feckless husband by no means lifted a finger to assist her. A case of artwork imitating life, she stated, the skit drew on a time in Ms. Stoneman’s life when, as a younger housewife and mom of 4 kids, she fell on arduous instances and had to absorb washing to feed her household.
“My younger life was not a pleasing one,” she was quoted as saying in “The Stonemans: An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives” (1993), by Ivan M. Tribe.
A decade earlier, Ms. Stoneman grew to become the common banjo participant for the Stonemans, a household band led by her father, Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, a first-generation nation star who, with Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, made recordings in Bristol, Tenn.-Va., in 1927 — periods acknowledged because the beginning of recent nation music.
Mr. Stoneman performed a number of devices and sang with the group, which additionally featured a number of Stoneman siblings, together with Scott on fiddle, Van on guitar, Jim on bass, Patsy on autoharp and Donna on mandolin. In 1956, shortly earlier than Ms. Stoneman’s arrival, when she was about 19, they had been winners on CBS-TV’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.
After Ms. Stoneman joined the act, the Stonemans started working with the producer Jack Clement in Nashville, releasing data for MGM and RCA whereas increasing their repertoire from old-time mountain music to a extra eclectic mixture of bluegrass, up to date nation, people and rock ’n’ roll. Three of their MGM singles reached the nation Top 40 within the late Nineteen Sixties.
Among Ms. Stoneman’s best-known contributions to the household’s catalog had been her lustily-sung model of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1958), the banjo instrumental “It’s Rain” (1962) and an replace of the previous Anglo-Celtic ballad “The Baby-O” (1968), carried out as a duo together with her sister Donna.
As spirited as these recordings had been, they didn’t rival the group’s exuberant, vaudeville-inspired dwell performances — appearances billed on a poster from 1964 as “The Rompin’, Stompin’, Pickin’, Singin’ Stoneman Family!”
Veronica Loretta Stoneman was born on May 5, 1938, in Washington, D.C., the youngest daughter of Ernest and Hattie (Frost) Stoneman, who had 23 kids, solely 15 of whom reached maturity.
Pop Stoneman labored as a carpenter to complement what he earned as a performer, notably through the Depression. Her mom, who performed old-time fiddle and banjo, was an achieved musician herself, contributing to a number of household recordings, together with some on “Old Time Tunes of the South,” which was launched by Folkways Records in 1957.
When Roni was about 9 years previous, her father constructed her her first banjo, an instrument about as massive as a banjo ukulele, about half the scale of a standard one. Graduating to a full-size mannequin when she was 15, she started competing in banjo contests, together with one during which she met and completed second to Eugene Cox. The two had been married shortly earlier than Ms. Stoneman’s 18th birthday.
Ms. Stoneman gave beginning to 4 of her 5 kids between 1957 and 1962. During that point, she struggled to make ends meet whereas additionally enjoying with the household band, which was billed variously because the Blue Grass Champs and Pop Stoneman and His Little Pebbles till 1962.
The group surged in reputation within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, internet hosting a syndicated TV present and being named the Country Music Association’s inaugural vocal group of the 12 months in 1967.
After her father’s demise in 1968, Ms. Stoneman left the band to pursue a solo profession. She grew to become a solid member — and featured banjo participant — on “Hee Haw” 5 years later, remaining with the present till 1991, when a change in its format resulted in her departure.
In 2007, Ms. Stoneman printed “Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story,” an account, as informed to Ellen Wright, of how she overcame poverty and abusive husbands to develop into nation music’s “First Lady of the Banjo.”
Ms. Stoneman is survived by her sister Donna, the final remaining member of the musical household; two sons, Eugene Jr. and Robert, who can be a musician; three daughters, Barbara, Rebecca and Hattie; and several other grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her 5 marriages all led to divorce.
Roni and Donna Stoneman continued to carry out into the 2020s. Both had been inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame as a part of the Stoneman Family in 2021.
“When you develop up in it, and also you hear it all of your life, the music is simply one thing you do,” Ms. Stoneman stated in a 2020 interview with the Bluegrass Newsletter. “I don’t know what drives you, inside your soul, nevertheless it’s there. And it actually drives you. It would drive me loopy to not play music.”
