Veronica Loretta “Roni” Stoneman, an award-winning bluegrass singer and comedienne known for her role on a country music show has died. She was 85 years old.
Best known for her role in “Hee Haw,” Roni Stoneman was the youngest daughter of Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman. He was the patriarch of the Stoneman Family, one of the most famous family groups in early country music.
The band was popular in the late 1950s and 1960s with their country, bluegrass and folk music.
As a member of the Stoneman Family band, Roni Stoneman won the Country Music Association Award for Vocal Group of the Year in 1969. She was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2021 with the rest of her family.
“For Roni Stoneman, country music was a birthright and her life’s work,” CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Kyle Young said on X Thursday afternoon. “She was an integral part of a bedrock country music family, and for 18 years on ‘Hee Haw,’ she stole scenes as a skillful banjo player and as a comical, gap-toothed country character.”
Roni joined her family’s band, playing the banjo, in 1957, according to Remind Magazine. The Stoneham family became a touring act and got its own television show called “Those Stonemans” in the late 1960s.
After Pop died in 1970, Roni went solo. She found fame under the title “The First Lady of the Banjo” and joined the cast of “Hee Haw” in the 1970s, according to the news outlet.
“Roni was a jewel,” one person commented on Young’s X post. “I was so happy to meet her and see her and Mona Jo Griffin play banjos together at my Aunt Gail’s house in NC a few years ago She was so nice and loved making us all laugh. May she rest in peace and play that banjo high in the sky.”
Roni and her sister, mandolinist Donna Stoneman, performed occasionally in recent years, Remind Magazine added. Donna is now the only surviving member of the Stoneman Family band.
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