Wilma Lee Cooper suffered a stroke on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in February 2001, was told she would never walk again, and then walked back onto the Grand Ole Opry stage to thank her audience. This episode traces the life of the singer the Smithsonian Institution named the First Lady of Bluegrass in 1974, from her 1921 birth in Valley Head, West Virginia, to a coal miner and a schoolteacher, through the Leary Family gospel group, the 1938 National Folk Festival, and recordings for the Library of Congress.

We follow her marriage to fiddler Stoney Cooper in 1941, the formation of the Clinch Mountain Clan, their Roy Acuff-influenced early sound, and the dobro-driven arrangements engineered to cut through AM radio static. From ten years on the 50,000-watt WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling and syndicated transcription discs to joining the Opry in 1957 and scoring top-ten Billboard hits like Big Midnight Special and There’s a Big Wheel in 1959, we explain why an unvarnished mountain sound thrived during the rock and roll explosion, and how she carried on as a solo Opry star after Stoney’s death in 1977.

• How singing over a pump organ shaped her piercing, unmistakable vocal style
• Why Library of Congress folklorists sought out the Leary Family in the 1930s
• Borrowing from Roy Acuff as a functional dialect rather than a creative crutch
• The Appalachian diaspora, jukebox dimes, and chart success while Nashville chased the Nashville Sound
• Her 2001 stroke, her return to the Opry, and her 2023 induction into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame