Appalachian Figures
Lois LaVerne Williamson came into the world on July 9, 1923, in rural Pike County, Kentucky, the daughter of coal miner Joseph Williamson and his wife Hester. Like many mountain families along the Tug Fork in those years, the Williamsons lived close to the seams that fed the postwar coal boom and just as close to the insecurity that came with it.
From the start, music was the family’s other livelihood. Lois sang and played guitar alongside her brothers Cecil and Joe, better known to radio audiences as Skeets and Duke. The brothers picked up fiddle and banjo, and the three children formed a small family band that worked schoolhouses, coal camp gatherings, and local dances. Lois listened hungrily to powerful female voices on shows like WLS’s National Barn Dance and patterned her own singing on performers such as Patsy Montana, Lulu Belle Wiseman, Lily May Ledford, and Texas Ruby Owens.
By the late 1930s the Williamsons were edging from informal coal camp stages to the microphone. Skeets landed a job with Ervin Staggs and His Radio Ramblers on WCHS in Charleston, West Virginia. Lois followed, first singing under the on air name “Mountain Fern,” then as “Dixie Lee,” trying on stage identities that would eventually give way to the one that stuck.
Knoxville Radio and The Cumberland Mountain Folks
Radio drew Lois and her brothers through a circuit of mountain towns. They worked stations at Williamson, West Virginia, then Beckley, where they joined Johnnie Bailes’s Happy Valley Boys. Money was scarce and bands shifted constantly, but every stop gave Lois more experience fronting a group in front of live microphones and studio glass.
In 1940 she wrote to bandleader Lynn Davis in Bluefield, West Virginia, asking whether his group needed a female singer. Davis’s band, the Forty Niners, had already built a following on WHIS. He hired her after an audition, and within a short time Lois and Lynn were partners on and off the air. They married in 1941, and the group rebranded itself as The Cumberland Mountain Folks as they moved onto bigger stations, including the powerful WNOX in Knoxville and other outlets that reached deep into the central Appalachians.
Along the way Lois adopted the name that fit her better than Mountain Fern or Dixie Lee. Audiences and announcers alike came to know her as Molly O’Day. With Lynn on guitar and banjo, Skeets and Duke in the band, and a tight string lineup behind her voice, Molly fronted a show that blended old ballads, sacred numbers, and the new honky tonk songs that were beginning to reshape country music.
Columbia Records: Tramp on the Street and Other Hard Songs
Radio brought Columbia Records calling. Between late 1946 and 1951 Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks cut roughly three dozen sides for the label, recording in sessions that paired hillbilly string band instruments with topics as raw as any news headline.
The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists a remarkable December 16, 1946 date where the band recorded “The Tramp on the Street,” “When God Comes to Gather His Jewels,” “The Drunken Driver,” “The Tear Stained Letter,” “Beneath That Lonely Mound of Clay,” and “Six More Miles” in one burst of work. In subsequent Columbia sessions they added “Matthew Twenty Four,” “I Heard My Mother Weeping,” “Too Late, Too Late,” “Don’t Forget the Family Prayer,” and other titles that braided judgment day warnings with very modern fears about wrecked cars, whiskey, and families falling apart.
Several of those records made Molly one of the earliest and most important interpreters of a young songwriter from Alabama named Hank Williams. Compilations such as Hank Williams Songbook preserve her versions of “When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels,” “On the Evening Train,” and “I Don’t Care if Tomorrow Never Comes,” while Hank’s own biographers note that placing songs with Molly helped convince publisher Fred Rose that Williams deserved a recording contract of his own.
For listeners today, those 78s are core primary sources. The original Columbia discs, with their catalog numbers and take designations, still surface in collections and on reissue projects. Digital access through DAHR and modern compilations lets us hear not simply repertoire lists but the crack of Molly’s voice as she scolds a drunken driver, pleads with a child not to sell Daddy any more whiskey, or turns Matthew chapter twenty four into a hillbilly apocalypse.
Critics at the time did not always know what to do with such intensity from a young woman in a field dominated by male stars. Decades later the Los Angeles Times would quote New York Times critic Robert Shelton describing her as one of the greatest women singers in country music, and Dolly Parton credited Molly’s mountain delivery with shaping her own style. Modern writers lean on words like “rough hewn,” “untrained,” and “gut wrenching,” but the Columbia masters show something more deliberate. She slides between straight tone and vibrato, leans into blue notes, and phrases lines so that moral outrage and pity sit in the same breath.
Songbooks, Photos, and Bus Cards
Not all of Molly’s legacy spins at 78 or 33 revolutions per minute. During the height of her radio and touring career The Cumberland Mountain Folks carried stacks of printed songbooks and souvenir photographs on the bus. Fans who could not afford a phonograph could still take home lyrics, posed studio portraits, and occasionally a picture of the band bus itself.
One surviving example is the songbook Ballads of Hills & Home, issued under the names Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks. Copies circulate in the collector trade and online auctions and preserve dozens of titles alongside photographs and short introductions that help document the group’s repertoire between radio and record studio. Ivan Tribe and John Morris’s 1970s bio discography of Molly, Lynn, and the band lists at least half a dozen such songbooks between the mid 1940s and mid 1970s, making them a small paper trail of how the couple presented their work to fans in churches, schoolhouses, and auditoriums.
Even when the physical copies are scattered, references to them help historians reconstruct what the Cumberland Mountain Folks sang on stage and how often sacred material sat alongside secular country songs long before Molly formally left the commercial music world.
Leaving the Business for the Lord
Compared to peers who rode the Opry and major labels for decades, Molly’s commercial career was startlingly brief. By 1952 she was still in her twenties, had a Columbia catalog that younger singers envied, and yet chose to step away from secular stages.
Accounts differ on the exact turning point, but most agree that her conversion experience and discomfort with fame led her and Lynn deeper into evangelical work. Mountaineer Jamboree, Ivan Tribe’s history of country music in West Virginia, and later interviews with Lynn describe the couple as increasingly uneasy with the honky tonk environment and more drawn to church services and revival meetings.
They did not give up music. Instead they took it into pulpits, tent revivals, and eventually Christian radio. In the early 1960s Molly cut religious material for small labels including REM and Starday. A 1966 Starday LP, The Living Legend of Country Music, paired her five string banjo with a program of gospel songs and reintroduced her to audiences who remembered the Columbia hits from twenty years earlier.
By the late 1960s she and Lynn were recording The Heart and Soul of Molly O’Day for the Mastertone label, a gospel LP whose back cover notes remind listeners that “Tramp on the Street” had made her famous but that religion now guided her life and her singing. In the 1970s Old Homestead Records gathered earlier material into A Sacred Collection, then issued The Soul of Molly O’Day volumes that kept her voice in circulation among bluegrass and gospel devotees.
These LPs, often pressed in small numbers and sold through mail order or at church dates, are themselves primary sources for her second act. The themes are consistent with the Columbia sides, but now every line is anchored unwaveringly in Christian hope and warning.
Hymns from the Hills
If the Columbia discs capture Molly as a young recording star, the radio program Hymns from the Hills shows her as a mature evangelist whose voice still carried across Appalachian airwaves.
Beginning in the mid 1970s, Lynn Davis hosted a daily gospel show on WEMM FM in Huntington, West Virginia, built around country gospel records and devotional talk. Scholars of Appalachian women in music note that Molly’s banjo playing and singing lived on in that program long after she had stopped touring regularly. Listeners remembered Lynn’s on air references to his wife and his habit of slipping her recordings into the playlist, a kind of ongoing radio memorial even while she was still alive and then after her death.
In interviews later printed in Goldenseal and collected in the volume Mountains of Music, Lynn described their ministry oriented travels, their years around Huntington, and their conviction that their musical gifts now belonged first to the church rather than to the charts. For historians, that interview functions as an oral history of both Molly’s second career and a regional Christian radio culture that remains underdocumented in more conventional music histories.
Death and Obituaries
By the 1980s Molly’s health was failing. She was diagnosed with cancer and eventually died on December 5, 1987, at Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, at the age of sixty four. She was buried in Woodmere Memorial Park in Huntington under the name Lois LaVerne “Molly O’Day” Williamson Davis, her stone quietly tying together the legal name from Pike County and the stage name that had carried across the region.
An Associated Press obituary carried in the Los Angeles Times called her a country singer and banjo picker whose “mournful mountain blues” helped shape the sound of modern country music. The New York Times stressed her “rough hewn” voice and the emotional force of her Columbia recordings. Local and regional tributes in West Virginia and Kentucky papers framed her more simply as a coal miner’s daughter who had carried the songs of the hills to a national audience and then brought them back into the churches and radio stations of the central Appalachian borderland.
Rough Hewn Voice, Wide Influence
For a singer who retired from mainstream country at twenty nine, Molly cast a long shadow. Writers at AllMusic describe her as a pioneering vocalist whose performances helped redefine the role of women in country music. Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann’s survey of women in country music places her alongside Cousin Emmy and Lily May Ledford as part of the first wave of women who used radio and touring bands to escape the narrow options available in eastern Kentucky.
Her influence also runs through other musicians. Biographical notes on North Carolina banjoist Wade Mainer recall that in the early 1960s it was Molly who convinced him he could bring the banjo into explicitly gospel recordings, helping to launch a new series of sacred albums. Hank Williams’s own career is entangled with hers since her Columbia versions of his songs served as some of his earliest exposure on a major label and showed how a woman’s voice could carry his words into coal camps and mill towns.
Within Appalachian studies, essays like “Molly O’Day and the Gospel in Old Time Country Music” in The Old Time Herald and the Marshall University Banjo Women project read her as a bridge figure. She stood at the point where old time banjo traditions, early commercial hillbilly records, women’s expanding public roles, and evangelical radio culture all met.
Country Music Highway and Hall of Fame Honors
For all that, formal recognition took time. Molly O’Day entered the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 2007, joining artists such as Little Jimmy Dickens and Blind Alfred Reed. Later features note that she was the first woman inducted into the hall, a fitting honor for someone who had once been practically the only woman fronting a major radio band in the region.
In 2011 she joined another roll of honor when the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame inducted her alongside fellow Pike County native Patty Loveless, symbolically linking a 1940s radio star with a modern country hit maker from the same hills. Both halls of fame present her as a coal miner’s daughter from Pike County whose recordings influenced everyone from Kitty Wells to Dolly Parton.
The honors also found their way onto the road. In 2012 the Kentucky General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution 23, instructing the state Transportation Cabinet to include Molly O’Day on the Country Music Highway segment of U.S. 23 in Pike County and to erect signs recognizing her achievements. Brochures and websites promoting the highway now list her among the artists who turned the corridor from a coal road into a cultural route for tourists tracing the development of country music.
Taken together, her grave in Huntington, her name on highway markers in Pike County, and her photograph in hall of fame exhibits form a tri state memorial triangle across the Kentucky West Virginia border.
Listening to Molly Today
For historians and listeners alike, the best entry point into Molly’s world remains the records themselves. The Discography of American Historical Recordings talent entries for Molly and for Lynn Davis gather Columbia matrix numbers, dates, and personnel into a session by session roadmap. Those entries confirm not just titles but the density of her work between 1946 and 1951 and make it possible to follow the progression from early secular material to increasingly sacred themes even within the Columbia years.
Bear Family’s two disc set of Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks pulls together most of those Columbia masters, complete with extensive liner notes by Ivan Tribe that weave biography, recording history, and song analysis into one of the most important secondary sources on her career. Old Homestead’s A Sacred Collection and The Soul of Molly O’Day volumes, along with Mastertone’s The Heart and Soul of Molly O’Day and the earlier Rem and Starday albums, preserve her later gospel style and show how she reworked older favorites into explicitly devotional numbers.
For those interested in what fans saw and held in their hands, surviving songbooks like Ballads of Hills & Home and the related pamphlets documented in the Tribe and Morris bio discography remain invaluable. They capture lyrics, photographs, and brief autobiographical notes that rarely made it into newspaper profiles or label copy.
Finally, the Goldenseal oral history “Living the Right Life Now,” Lynn Davis’s other interviews, and the Banjo Women project’s attention to Molly’s banjo playing all underline a simple fact. Long after she stopped cutting commercial discs, Molly O’Day’s voice and five string could still be heard in Huntington, in Pike County, and wherever “Hymns from the Hills” reached a kitchen radio.
Why Molly O’Day’s Story Matters
Molly O’Day’s life traces a path that is deeply Appalachian. She grew up in a coal miner’s household in Pike County, chased opportunity through West Virginia radio stations, married a fellow musician, and tasted national attention through Columbia Records. Then, at an age when many performers are just getting started, she chose a different kind of stage and spent the rest of her life singing for congregations and radio congregations that measured success in souls rather than chart positions.
Her Columbia sides preserve one of the most powerful women’s voices in mid century country music and show how Appalachian singers could turn newspaper tragedies into moral ballads that still sting. Her gospel albums and the Hymns from the Hills broadcasts document an equally important chapter, where old time banjo and country harmonies became instruments of evangelical outreach in the coalfields and river towns of Kentucky and West Virginia.
For Appalachian history, Molly O’Day reminds us that the border between secular and sacred music, between industry stages and little cinder block churches, has always been porous. She also reminds us that a woman from a Pike County coal family could help shape both the sound of modern country music and the spiritual soundscape of the central Appalachians, even if she preferred to do it from behind a radio microphone rather than under an Opry spotlight.
Sources & Further Reading
Discography of American Historical Recordings, talent entries for “O’Day, Molly” and “Davis, Lynn,” listing Columbia sessions from 1946 through 1951, including “The Tramp on the Street,” “When God Comes to Gather His Jewels,” “Matthew Twenty Four,” and related titles.American Historical Recordings+1
Original Columbia 78 rpm issues such as “The Tramp on the Street” and “Don’t Sell Daddy Any More Whiskey” (Columbia 20451) and “The Drunken Driver” and “Six More Miles” (Columbia 20376), as documented in commercial discographies and reissue track lists.American Historical Recordings+2Discogs+2
Old Homestead Records LPs A Sacred Collection (OHCS 101) and The Soul of Molly O’Day, Volumes I and II (OHCS 312 and 313) and Mastertone’s The Heart and Soul of Molly O’Day (80313), which gather both earlier Columbia masters and later gospel recordings.The Good, Bad & Ugly Gospel Record Barn+3Discogs+3Discogs+3
Abby Gail Goodnite and Ivan M. Tribe, “‘Living the Right Life Now’: Lynn Davis & Molly O’Day,” Goldenseal 24, no. 1 (1998), reprinted in John Lilly, ed., Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from Goldenseal (University of Illinois Press, 1999).West Virginia Encyclopedia+2Stony Brook University Library+2
Susan A. Eacker, “Banjo Women in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky,” Marshall University Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia report, including discussion of Molly O’Day’s banjo style and Lynn Davis’s Hymns from the Hills radio program.marshall.edu+1
“Country Star Molly O’Day Dies,” Associated Press obituary in the Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1987, and the New York Times obituary “Molly O’Day, Singer of Country Music in Roughhewn Style,” December 8, 1987.Los Angeles Times+1
Abby Gail Goodnite, “Molly O’Day and Lynn Davis,” West Virginia Encyclopedia (e WV), updated 2024, with biographical summary and references to Goldenseal interviews and regional scholarship.West Virginia Encyclopedia+1
“Molly O’Day,” Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum biography and related Pike County Historical Society profile, emphasizing her Pike County upbringing, radio career, Columbia recordings, and inductions into both the Kentucky and West Virginia halls of fame.Pike County Historical Society+3Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum+3Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum+3
“Molly O’Day,” Women in Old Time Music online biography and AllMusic artist entry, both summarizing her life, recordings, retirement from secular music, and later religious work.Women in Old Time+2AllMusic+2
“Heritage & Legacy: Molly O’Day,” Born & Bred Music (2024), and Ivan Tribe, Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (University Press of Kentucky, 1984), for broader context on her place in country music history and on West Virginia’s mid century radio scene.Born & Bred Music+2CORE+2
Kentucky General Assembly, House Joint Resolution 23 (2012), directing the Transportation Cabinet to honor Molly O’Day on the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway in Pike County, along with interpretive materials from the Country Music Highway project.Kentucky Legislature Apps+2Country Music Highway+2