Not merely a gifted singer, Mr. Wiseman was also a successful music producer and entrepreneur. He was the founding secretary of the board of the Country Music Foundation in 1958. Before that he spent four years as the creative director of the West Coast office of Dot Records. He also managed the WWVA Jamboree, a weekly barn dance and radio broadcast in Wheeling, W.Va., from 1966 to 1970.

Despite feeling hemmed in by the bluegrass label, Mr. Wiseman was elected to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1993 and was for decades regarded as one of the idiom’s elder statesmen.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times, reviewing an appearance by Mr. Wiseman at Carnegie Hall in 1962, wrote that he “used the penetrating, driving idiom of the bluegrass vocal leader in a most winning fashion.” Sharing the bill that evening were Mother Maybelle Carter, Johnny Cash and other popular country and bluegrass entertainers.

Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born on May 23, 1925, in Crimora, Va., in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. His parents, Howard Bell Wiseman, a miller, and Myra Ruth (Humphreys) Wiseman, oversaw a musical household; Mac first performed in public as an adolescent.

Afflicted with polio at a young age, he went on to win a scholarship from the National Foundation for Polio to study piano, music theory and radio broadcasting at a conservatory in Dayton, Va., in the northwest part of the state.

In 1946, after a brief stint as a singer and disc jockey in nearby Harrisonburg, Va., the young Mr. Wiseman moved to Knoxville, Tenn., to work as a harmony vocalist and upright bass player for the country singer Molly O’Day. He appeared both on her popular radio show and on the recordings she made for Columbia that year.