Bonnie Porter Barnett

Bonnie Lucille Porter Barnett, a tender-hearted mother, loving wife, grandmother and great-grandmother who was best known for her guitar playing and her cheerful personality, slipped the surly bonds of earth on April 8, 2024.

She was barely two months shy of her 99th birthday.

The solar eclipse’s path of totality passed over the land of her nativity on the day she departed — a fitting tribute to a life lived in spreading sunshine to those around her.

She spent her final years at the Park Springs retirement community adjacent to Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta. At Park Springs, she led an old-time musical group called the Stone Mountaineers, which brought much joy to her and to her family and the community.

She wrote and recorded many songs of faith, family and friends over the years. She was honored recently at the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University for her pioneering role as a guitar teacher in the Clemson community.

She was the wife of the late Dr. Bobby D. Barnett, in a marriage of nearly 72 years.

She lived most of her life in Clemson, where her husband took a job at the university in 1956.

At Clemson, they were members of the Clemson Church of Christ and later, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. She was a member of MC3 Church in Lilburn, Georgia, at the end of her life.

After retirement, they divided their time between Clemson and St. Petersburg, Florida, for several years before moving to the Atlanta area at the turn of the century.

The two of them traveled the world, living in Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and for a time in Egypt, where she taught music to orphans while her husband taught poultry farmers how to improve their operations.

With her family, she established Barnett Music Center in downtown Clemson in 1969 and taught hundreds of students to play the guitar over the next 15 years.

Born on June 28, 1925 on Sunset Mountain in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas, she was one of six daughters of Lambert A. Porter and Mida Jane Dockery Porter. She outlived all of them.

Having no brothers, she and her sisters stayed busy picking strawberries, hoeing tomatoes and doing whatever else needed to be done on the farm to keep the family going during the Great Depression.

She met her future husband at University High, a high school on the campus of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

She worked as a nurse’s aide and a telephone operator before marrying and going into the hatchery business with her husband in Springdale, Arkansas.

Later, she lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where her husband earned his Ph.D. in poultry science at the University of Wisconsin.

She is survived by her sons, Paul (Janice) of Fort Myers, Florida, and Ron (Kathy) of Easley; and her daughter, Susan (Mike), of Norcross, Georgia; seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at Park Springs in Stone Mountain at 4 p.m. Friday, April 12, 2024 with interment at a later date at Woodland Cemetery on the campus of Clemson University.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the ParkSprings Employee Appreciation Fund in memory of Bonnie Barnett.

Roswell Funeral Home in Roswell, Georgia is handing the services.