Roni Stoneman, bluegrass’s ‘first lady of the banjo,’ dies at 85 - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/27/roni-stoneman-dead-banjo/

Roni Stoneman, bluegrass’s ‘first lady of the banjo,’ dies at 85
She performed with her siblings at Washington bars and honky-tonks, rose to stardom in Nashville and became a mainstay of the TV variety show ‘Hee Haw’


By Harrison Smith
February 27, 2024 at 6:49 p.m. EST
Roni Stoneman, circa 1965. (Walden S. Fabry Collection/Courtesy of the
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)


Roni Stoneman, the “first lady of the banjo,” who picked her way into bluegrass and country music history as a member of the Stoneman Family band
and found wider fame as an irascible performer on “Hee Haw,” the down-home variety show, died Feb. 22 at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 85.

The cause was complications from a stroke, her daughter Rebecca Fisher
said.

Ms. Stoneman’s friend Misty Rowe, a fellow “Hee Haw” performer, said Ms. Stoneman had been planning to perform with her in an upcoming stage reunion before falling ill in recent weeks. “She was a spitfire of a comic,” Fisher said by phone, “and she was glorious as a banjo player.”
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A Washington native who grew up in a shack just across the Maryland state
line, Ms. Stoneman was brassy, acerbic and musically brilliant, honing her craft in the 1950s and ’60s while performing with her siblings in long-gone hillbilly bars and clubs — chief among them the Famous Bar and Grill in downtown D.C. — that helped make the capital a rowdy center of the nation’s bluegrass scene.

With encouragement from her father, Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, a Virginia singer and multi-instrumentalist who was one of country music’s first big stars, Ms. Stoneman became the rare woman to pick up the banjo, a bluegrass staple that was traditionally considered an instrument for good ol’ boys
from Appalachia and the South.

Her 1957 studio debut, a rollicking instrumental version of “Lonesome Road Blues,” was said to mark the first time a female banjo player was recorded using the intricate three-finger technique of Earl Scruggs. A few years
later, Ms. Stoneman thrilled audiences at a banjo competition at Sunset
Park, southeastern Pennsylvania’s answer to the Grand Ole Opry, beating out the men and coming in first. She was denied the top prize, a Scruggs-style
Vega banjo, “because of her gender,” according to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

“It was a time when women didn’t have much of a chance for a lot of things,” she told Washingtonian magazine in 2018. “You just had to keep on a-trucking and not let it get to you.”
Ms. Stoneman rose to prominence while performing with her storied family
band, the Stonemans, who performed at venues from the Opry in Nashville to
the Fillmore West in San Francisco, developing a reputation for live shows
that were rowdy, sweaty, raw and kinetic.

Performing the bluegrass standard “Goin’ Up Cripple Creek,” they could begin slowly, treating the song like a ballad, before abruptly
accelerating, carried along by Ms. Stoneman’s nimble banjo playing. A video of the group shows her center stage, comically stoic and statuesque, as her older sister Donna, playing the mandolin, dances a jig and teasingly pokes
Ms. Stoneman in the face, trying to get her to crack a smile.

Onstage, Ms. Stoneman could be playful and wry, shouting down catcallers
(“If I kiss you, will you go away?”) and boasting to the crowd after an especially fast-paced bit of picking (“I told you I was good”).

Her showmanship made her a natural fit for “Hee Haw,” a Southern-fried version of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” that used music and comedy to satirize country life. The variety show premiered on CBS in 1969, was
picked up for syndication two years later and soon added Ms. Stoneman, who became a series mainstay for nearly two decades, singing and playing the
banjo alongside musicians that included co-hosts Roy Clark and Buck Owens
as well as fellow banjo player Grandpa Jones.

Episodes featured her in character as Ida Lee Nagger, the gaptoothed
“ironing board lady” perpetually at odds with her husband, Lavern, played by Gordie Tapp. At times, she cracked jokes to the audience, often at her
own expense: “Did you hear the one about the girl that had Texas teeth? She had lots of wideeee open spaces.”

While the character played off negative stereotypes, Ms. Stoneman said she
had only happy memories of the show. “It gave me something to cling to besides a nightclub or a honky-tonk or a yellow line passing in front of my eyes,” she told The Washington Post in 2001, adding that it brought larger crowds to her concerts, which continued in recent years.

“People would say ‘Let me see your tooth, let me see if you’re as ugly as I
think you are,’ ” she added. “It never bothered me because I had a job and
I was secure. I was a character and that’s what I knew. That was my job,
and I was thankful that the people even noticed that I had a space in my
front teeth or that my eye was crooked.”

The second youngest of 23 children, Veronica Loretta Stoneman was born in Washington on May 5, 1938, and grew up in the Carmody Hills section of
Prince George’s County. She liked to say she was part of a family that suffered from a multigenerational condition: “poorism.”

The Stonemans — including Ms. Stoneman, second from left — on “The Johnny Cash Show” in the early 1970s. (ABC/Disney/Getty Images)

A decade before her birth, the family seemed to be on stable financial
footing. Her father had been a part of landmark 1927 recording sessions in Bristol, Tenn., going into the studio along with pioneering country artists including Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. But the Depression wiped
out his music earnings, leading him and his wife, Hattie, a fiddle player,
to move the family to Washington, where he sought work as a carpenter.

The family purportedly slept as many as a half-dozen to a bed; in 1979, The Post reported that Ms. Stoneman “once said she was never alone in her life until she found an abandoned car in the woods and crawled into the back seat.”
When she was about 9, she began playing on a homemade banjo crafted by her father. She learned the Scruggs style from her brother Scotty, a fiddle
player, and was soon performing with her family at DAR Constitution Hall,
where they won a talent competition that led to regular radio appearances.
By 1956, the band was performing on national television as the Blue Grass Champs, competing on the CBS show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.”

Calling themselves the Stoneman Family or simply the Stonemans, the band recorded for Starday Records and MGM; hosted a syndicated television
series, “Those Stonemans”; released a pair of Top 40 country hits, “Tupelo
County Jail” and “The Five Little Johnson Girls”; and won the inaugural Country Music Association award for vocal group of the year in 1967. The
next year, Ms. Stoneman’s father died at 75.

Ms. Stoneman left the group a few years later. For a time, she performed in
a short-lived all-female band, the Daisy Maes. Audiences weren’t ready, she said, for “girls who could play better than the guys.”

Her father was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, and
Ms. Stoneman was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame as a member
of the Stoneman Family in 2021.

Ms. Stoneman was married and divorced five times, to Eugene Cox, George Hemrick, Richard Adams, William Zimmerman and Larry Corya. She came to view
her marriages, some of them tumultuous, as a way of marking time. “Daddy
used to write songs whenever something bad would happen, like a lot of
mountain people did,” she told The Post. “They’d always write sad songs about sad events. I go by husbands.”

Her sixth husband, Thomas Connor, died in 2022.
Survivors include four children from her first marriage, Eugene Cox Jr., Rebecca Fisher, Barbara Cox and Robert Cox; a daughter from her second marriage, Georgia Hemrick; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
She is also survived by her sister Donna, the last remaining member of the Stoneman Family, with whom she still occasionally performed.

“Daddy didn’t have money to leave us anything for inheritance,” Ms. Stoneman once said. “But he sure did leave us an inheritance of music.”

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