Wilma Lee Cooper

Wilma Lee Cooper died last week. She was 90 years old and will be most often remembered as a Grand Ole Opry star.

Cooper was born in Valley Head, West Virginia and came out of a tradition of mountain singing which is frequently confused with bluegrass. She came from a religious and musical family and from a background in which religion was immediate, up close and personal. Her family appeared in a 1938 music festival organized by Eleanor Roosevelt. She also appeared for many years on the radio station WWVA in Wheeling, where the tri-state coal fields intersect. It's worth pausing and considering what life might be like if we had a government which sponsored people's and folk music and local radio stations which filled the airwaves with that music.

Cooper's career and musical development spanned a period of time which is worth thinking about. The Grand Ole Opry recruited musicians like Cooper--people "from the roots" and out of the working class--and then stylized their music and created something new. This became a part of postwar American mass culture and came to define "country music" as a new category quite separate from people's music, folk music and the blues. This did not happen without cultural struggle and without contradiction, of course. People hung on to their traditional musics despite cultural and political pressures and not every aspiring star fit into the Grand Ole Opry mold. And even the Grand Ole Opry had to concede some space to these musicians. In the 1970s and 1980s some of the more popular and wealthier musicians who had been rejected by the Opry began to be known as "outlaws" and they became successful again precisely because the Grand Ole Opry and the recording industry monopoly had rejected them earlier. The "outlaws" were eventually absorbed by that industry.

There are strong parallels here with what happened to punk rock and ethic musics, of course.

Cooper's music was complex because it reflected the complexities of life in Appalachia, America's "inner colony." Wilma Lee Cooper proudly claimed to be "traditional" and "country." We should study what those terms mean and better understand how culture is being constantly transformed in the US.

Some of Wilma Lee Cooper's best work can be found here.