Donna Laverne Stoneman

Donna Laverne Stoneman, age 92, the last living member of country music’s famed Stoneman family, joined her family in heaven on Sunday, June 28, 2026. Billed as “the First Lady of the mandolin” and famous for playing technically demanding solos at racing rockabilly tempos. Donna was born on February 7, 1934, to the late Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman and Hattie Frost Stoneman, who had 23 children of which 15 lived to adulthood. She was also preceded in death by brothers, Eddie, John, Billy, Dean, Gene, Jack, Scott, Jimmy, and Van Stoneman, and sisters, Grace Dugan, Patsy Murphy, Roni Stoneman, Vivian Stoneman, and Juanita Stoneman.

Her father, Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman, now a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, made important early records in the 1920s and was a key figure in the fabled 1927 Bristol Sessions that provided an important blueprint for country music. But as time went on, and Pop’s children revised what their parents laid down, the music went off in fascinating new directions.

By 1968, when historian Bill Malone called the Stoneman’s “one of the most sensational bluegrass bands of the modern period,” Donna Stoneman and her banjo-playing sister Roni were the heart of the sensation.

Donna had originally wanted to be a dancer but, as one of thirteen children, she noticed the kids who played instruments got more parental attention, so she picked up the mandolin as an eight-year-old. By age sixteen, she was a full-time working musician.

The family moved from Galax, Virginia, to the Washington, DC area in 1932. From the late 1950s into the mid-'60s, five of the kids had taken over the act once led by Pop, and Roni and Donna were, in the words of the “Washingtonian” magazine, “bluegrass sisters [who] ruled DC’s honky-tonk bars.”

According to writer Eddie Dean, “For a pair of sisters to work the lead instruments in a genre dominated by good ol’ boys was radically new—a riot grrrl revolution, hillbilly-style.” Donna upended ideas of femininity—picking wicked solos through a scarf draped over her mandolin, wearing garden gloves, and buzz-sawing through “Boil Them Cabbage Down.” And always she danced, even when playing a solo behind her head.

She recorded frequently with the family and was featured on Rose Maddox’s 1962 bluegrass album. Bill Monroe played mandolin on five of its tracks, Donna had seven.

Conversations with Connie Smith and Skeeter Davis, in the midst of marital and career troubles, steered Donna toward religion. By the early 1980s, Donna was a mandolin-playing ordained minister, preaching in prisons. “We liked our music souped up,” said Donna. “It came out of our soul—that’s the best way I can tell you.”

Visitation with the family will be held on Friday, July 3, 2026, at Woodfin Funeral Chapel in Smyrna, TN, from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM. A Celebration of Life will be held at 1:00 PM following the visitation with Pastor Joshua Gilliland officiating. A graveside service will be at 3:00 PM at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, TN.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:16.

An online guestbook for the Stoneman family is available at www.woodfinchapel.com.

Woodfin Funeral Chapel, Smyrna is honored to serve the Stoneman family.

Woodfin Funeral Chapel, Smyrna. (615) 459-3254.