Ernest Stoneman
Ernest Van "Pop" Stoneman was an American musician, ranked among the prominent recording artists of country music's first commercial decade.
Biography
Born in a log cabin in Monarat, Carroll County, Virginia, United States, near what would later become Galax, Virginia, Stoneman was left motherless at age three and was raised by his father and three musically inclined cousins, who taught him the instrumental and vocal traditions of Blue Ridge Mountains culture. He became a singer and songwriter, and proficient musician on the guitar, autoharp, harmonica, clawhammer banjo, and jaw harp.When he married Hattie Frost in November 1918, he entered another musically involved family. Hattie and he had 23 children, 13 of whom survived to adulthood:
- Eddie Lewis
- Irma Grace
- John Catron
- Pattie Inez "Patsy"
- Joseph William
- Jack Monroe
- Gene Austin
- Dean Clark
- Calvin Scott
- Donna LaVerne
- Oscar James
- Veronica Loretta
- Van Haden
In July and August 1927, Stoneman helped Peer conduct the Bristol sessions that led to the discovery of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He continued to be active in recording through 1929. Between 1925 and 1929, Stoneman recorded more than 200 songs.
Falling on hard times during the Depression, the Stonemans and their nine surviving children moved to the Washington, DC, area in 1932, after losing their home and most of their possessions. There, they had four more children and struggled through dire poverty, with Stoneman taking whatever work he could find and trying to revive his musical career.
In 1941, Stoneman bought a lot in Carmody Hills, Maryland, where he built a shack for the family, and eventually obtained a more-or-less regular job at the Naval Gun Factory. In 1947, the Stoneman Family won a talent contest at Constitution Hall that gave them six months' exposure on local television. In 1956, Pop won $10,000 on the NBC-TV quiz show The Big Surprise and sang on the show. That same year, the Blue Grass Champs, a group composed largely of his children, were winners on the CBS-TV program Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, and Mike Seeger recorded Pop and Hattie for Folkways.
Stoneman retired from labor and the Champs went full-time to become the Stonemans. They recorded albums for Starday in 1962 and 1963, and in 1964, went to Texas and California, cutting an album for World Pacific, playing at Disneyland, on some network shows and at several folk festivals. This included an appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1964. Ernest appeared at the Second Annual UCLA Folk Music Festival in 1964.
In 1965, the Stonemans went to Nashville, where they worked with Jack Clement, signing a contract with MGM Records and starting a syndicated TV show. They received CMA's "Vocal Group of the Year" in 1967. They appeared in the 1967 film Hell on Wheels and in The Road to Nashville.
Death
Pop Stoneman died in 1968 at age 75. He is interred in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville.Honors
On February 12, 2008, Pop Stoneman was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2009, his wife Hattie Frost Stoneman and he were enshrined in the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.The first major retrospective of his musical career, Ernest Stoneman: The Unsung Father of Country Music 1925–1934 was issued in 2008 by the Grammy award-winning reissue team of Christopher C. King and Henry Sapoznik, and was nominated for a 2009 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.