Roni Stoneman, Country Music’s ‘First Lady of the Banjo,’ Dies at 85

Roni Stoneman, a virtuoso banjo player, mainstay of the country music television show “Hee Haw” and one of the last surviving members of the Stoneman Family, a renowned Appalachian string band, died on Thursday at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by Julie Harris, a family friend. No further details were available; a cause was not given.

Ms. Stoneman made her mark in 1957 with her driving instrumental version of “Lonesome Road Blues,” which made her the first woman to play modern bluegrass banjo on a phonograph record. Also known as “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” and often including lyrics, the song was included on a compilation album of three-finger, five-string banjo numbers in the style popularized by Earl Scruggs.

Ms. Stoneman’s greatest claim to fame, though, came 16 years later, when she joined the cast of “Hee Haw,” entertaining millions while proving herself to be a rustic comedian on a par with Minnie Pearl and June Carter Cash.

Her most amusing, and enduring, character on the show was the gaptoothed “Ironing Board Lady,” Ida Lee Nagger, a beleaguered housewife whose feckless husband never lifted a finger to help her. A case of art imitating life, she said, the skit drew on a time in Ms. Stoneman’s life when, as a young housewife and mother of four children, she fell on hard times and had to take in washing to feed her family.

“My young life was not a pleasant 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 became the regular banjo player for the Stonemans, a family band led by her father, Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, a first-generation country star who, with Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, made recordings in Bristol, Tenn.-Va., in 1927 — sessions acknowledged as the birth of modern country music.

Mr. Stoneman played multiple instruments and sang with the group, which also featured several Stoneman siblings, including Scott on fiddle, Van on guitar, Jim on bass, Patsy on autoharp and Donna on mandolin. In 1956, shortly before Ms. Stoneman’s arrival, when she was about 19, they were winners on CBS-TV’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.

After Ms. Stoneman joined the act, the Stonemans began working with the producer Jack Clement in Nashville, releasing records for MGM and RCA while expanding their repertoire from old-time mountain music to a more eclectic mix of bluegrass, contemporary country, folk and rock ’n’ roll. Three of their MGM singles reached the country Top 40 in the late 1960s.

Among Ms. Stoneman’s best-known contributions to the family’s catalog were her lustily-sung version of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1958), the banjo instrumental “It’s Rain” (1962) and an update of the old Anglo-Celtic ballad “The Baby-O” (1968), performed as a duo with her sister Donna.

As spirited as those recordings were, they didn’t rival the group’s exuberant, vaudeville-inspired live 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 children, only 15 of whom reached adulthood.

Pop Stoneman worked as a carpenter to supplement what he earned as a performer, particularly during the Depression. Her mother, who played old-time fiddle and banjo, was an accomplished musician herself, contributing to several family recordings, including some on “Old Time Tunes of the South,” which was released by Folkways Records in 1957.

When Roni was about 9 years old, her father built her her first banjo, an instrument about as large as a banjo ukulele, about half the size of a traditional one. Graduating to a full-size model when she was 15, she began competing in banjo contests, including one in which she met and finished second to Eugene Cox. The two were married shortly before Ms. Stoneman’s 18th birthday.

Ms. Stoneman gave birth to four of her five children between 1957 and 1962. During that time, she struggled to make ends meet while also playing with the family band, which was billed variously as the Blue Grass Champs and Pop Stoneman and His Little Pebbles until 1962.

The group surged in popularity in the mid-1960s, hosting a syndicated TV show and being named the Country Music Association’s inaugural vocal group of the year in 1967.

After her father’s death in 1968, Ms. Stoneman left the band to pursue a solo career. She became a cast member — and featured banjo player — on “Hee Haw” five years later, remaining with the show until 1991, when a change in its format resulted in her departure.

In 2007, Ms. Stoneman published “Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story,” an account, as told to Ellen Wright, of how she overcame poverty and abusive husbands to become country music’s “First Lady of the Banjo.”

Ms. Stoneman is survived by her sister Donna, the last remaining member of the musical family; two sons, Eugene Jr. and Robert, who is also a musician; three daughters, Barbara, Rebecca and Hattie; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her five marriages all ended in divorce.

Roni and Donna Stoneman continued to perform into the 2020s. Both were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame as part of the Stoneman Family in 2021.

“When you grow up in it, and you hear it all your life, the music is just something you do,” Ms. Stoneman said in a 2020 interview with the Bluegrass Newsletter. “I don’t know what drives you, inside your soul, but it’s there. And it really drives you. It would drive me crazy not to play music.”