Molly O'Day

Molly O'Day (July 9, 1923 – December 5, 1987) was an American country music vocalist. O'Day was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2007. Early life Lois LaVerne Williamson was born on a farm in Pike County, Kentucky, United States, to Joseph and Hester Williamson. Her father supported the family as a coalminer. Neither of her parents played music but Lois got together with her two brothers, Cecil and Joe, to practice singing and playing. Lois and her two brothers, who called themselves Skeets and Duke, began performing at local dances. In 1939, Skeets was hired to perform in a radio band: Ervin Staggs and His Radio Ramblers at WCHS, Charleston, West Virginia. One of the more famous members of the group was Johnnie Bailes. That same year Molly also joined the Radio Ramblers as a vocalist under the pseudonym Mountain Fern. She worked with a banjoist called Murphy McClees and changed her name to Dixie Lee Williamson. Within a couple of months, she and her two brothers quit and moved to Williamson, West Virginia, to perform at a local radio station. In 1940, Lois and her two brothers moved to Beckley, West Virginia, to join the Happy Valley Boys, led by Johnnie Bailes. The band did not make much money and it disintegrated in the fall of 1940. Professional career In 1940, Lois applied for the position as a vocalist in the band Lynn Davis and His Forty-Niners, who had performed on WHIS in Bluefield, West Virginia for the past four years. A few months later, on April 5, 1941, Lynn Davis and Lois Williamson were married. The Forty-Niners appeared on several locations in the southeast and during one gig in Birmingham, Alabama, Hank Williams performed with the group. In 1941, Lois changed her name to Molly O'Day, as there was already a singer named Dixie Lee. In 1945, Davis decided to change the band's name to the Cumberland Mountain Folks.