Monthly Archives: November 2012

What happened to John Fleming? 1

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Big Sandy Valley, Fourteen, Harts

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Over one hundred years ago, John Fleming, a desperado twice sentenced to serve time in the West Virginia State Penitentiary, escaped from the Lincoln County jail and disappeared forever in the mountains of the Big Sandy Valley.

John P. Fleming was born in February 1868 to Preston and Arty (Mullins) Fleming at Upper Elkhorn Creek in Pike County, Kentucky. Nothing is known of his early life except that he had a daughter named Roxie by Lucy Mullins in 1887. In the late 1880s, John and his family migrated to West Virginia and settled in the Abbott Branch area of Logan County, just above Harts Creek. In 1891, his brother William married Luraney Frye, a daughter of Christian and Elizabeth (Hunter) Frye, in Logan County. In 1897, his sister Sarah married Squire Dial in Logan County. The next year, brother Robert, or Bob, married Lillie Dempsey, also in Logan County.

On December 25, 1892, Fleming murdered his uncle, John H. Mullins, at Big Creek, Logan County. Essentially, the story went like this: Mr. Mullins’ sons, Henry and Emory, were in a quarrel and Fleming intervened. The elder Mullins came to settle the matter and Fleming fled across a creek. Mullins pursued, knife in hand. At the creek, Fleming shot his uncle. He was immediately taken before Squire Garrett, who discharged him. When a new warrant was sworn out for him, he fled the county. In March of 1893, his wife attempted to meet him but became ill and died at Dunlow, Wayne County. Fleming was at her bedside when authorities arrested him. A Logan County jury found him guilty of second degree murder and Judge Thomas H. Harvey sentenced him to eighteen years in the West Virginia state penitentiary in Moundsville. In the 1900 census, he is listed there under the name of “J.P. Flemons,” inmate. Curiously, he claimed to have been married for one year.

During Fleming’s incarceration, his siblings continued to marry into local families. In 1900, brother Willard married Caroline Caldwell, a daughter of Floyd Caldwell, in Logan County. In 1902, sister Lucy married James F. Caldwell, a son of Hugh Caldwell, in Logan County. Around 1903, brother George married Minnie Tomblin.

After his release from prison, John married Sarah Elizabeth “Lizzie” Frye, a daughter of John Henan and Ida Cosby (Headley) Frye. The Fryes lived on Sulphur Springs Fork of Fourteen Mile Creek, several miles below Harts Creek. Lizzie, born around 1887, was roughly eighteen years younger than John. They may have become acquainted through John’s brother, William, who had married Lizzie’s aunt, Luraney Frye, in 1891.

“Aunt Lizzie was married to John Fleming,” said Willard Frye, an elderly resident of Frye Ridge, in a 2003 interview. “John was a mean man who packed two .45 pistols. He was a member of Charley Brumfield’s gang. He was mean to Aunt Lizzie.”

Fleming’s involvement in the Brumfield gang soon led to more prison time. In the summer of 1907, the “feudist,” as newspapers would later call him, became entangled in the peculiar “Adkins conspiracy case.”

A little earlier, in December of 1906, Margaret Adkins, Fisher B. Adkins, Floyd Enos Adkins, Albert G. Adkins and Fed Adkins — all associates in an Adkins general store business in Harts — took out a four-month loan for $600 from the Huntington National Bank. By April 1907, they had not paid any money toward the loan and asked for a four-month extension. In late June or July, Margaret Adkins, sister to Fed, filed a bankruptcy petition. On July 3, the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of West Virginia adjudged her bankrupt. J.P. Douglass (later a Speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates) was appointed as receiver in the case and arrived in Hart to survey the business. A.L. Smith stood guard at the store.

On July 5, after the government had taken control of the merchandise in the store, a vigilante group called the Night Riders robbed the store and hid the various goods in neighbors’ homes and barns.

Following the robbery, detectives descended on Harts in an effort to unravel the details of the crime. The most famous of these detectives was Dan Cunningham, a one-time participant in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. More recently, Mr. Cunningham had been employed by Governor William M.O. Dawson in Raleigh and Wyoming Counties. During his Harts Creek investigation, he boarded with locals and eavesdropped on conversations between suspects. Those involved in the store heist, meanwhile, used various means to suppress information. But as the pressure of the investigation bore down on locals, neighbors began to snitch on each other.

By December of 1907, the State had evidence against eleven men in what the Charleston Gazette called “the celebrated Adkins Bankruptcy Case” which “if proven by witnesses for the government, will equal any novel ever written by Victor Hugo.” Those accused — described by the Huntington Herald-Dispatch as “eleven brawny mountaineers” — were Fed Adkins, Charles Brumfield, Albert “Jake” Davis, Manville Adkins, John Fleming, Willard Fleming, Robert “Bob” Fleming, John Adkins, Albert G. Adkins, Floyd Enos Adkins and William “Bill” Brumfield. The state charged the gang with “conspiracy to defraud the government and to impede the administration of justice after the government had taken possession of Adkins store.”

U.S. District Attorney Elliott Northcott prosecuted the case, while Lace Marcum argued for the defendants. In opening remarks on December 5, according to the Herald-Dispatch, District Attorney Northcott fiercely denounced “the eleven men who have been a terror to the country surrounding the village of Hart, in Lincoln county, for the past six months. He stated in words burning with bitterness that the government expected to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that crimes that would narrow the very souls of every juror had been committed in the vicinity of Hart, and had the story been told him three weeks ago he would have thought it a piece of fiction pure and simple… He also alluded to the fact that the government would prove by witnesses who would tell of the horror that had been created in the neighborhood: houses burned, men shot down from ambush, houses with unprotected women had been shot up and the inmates terrorized until they were afraid to venture outdoors. It was a thrilling recital of the worst crimes that have taken place in this state in a decade.” According to the Herald-Dispatch, the eleven defendants “showed but little interest except to look at each other and smile when the crimes were talked of.”

In Marcum’s opening remarks on December 5, he stated that he would prove the goods found at the homes of the defendants were there several weeks before the Adkins store went bankrupt.

On December 6, Northcott questioned Rosa “Sis” Mullins, a sister to Emory and a resident of Abbotts Branch, who swore that she saw John Fleming’s brothers — Bob and Willard — go by her house the night of the robbery on their way to the Adkins store.

“Nearly every witness who testified yesterday,” the Charleston Gazette reported on December 7, “showed just how desperate these defendants are, and the testimony of Capt. Dan Cunningham unraveled a tale of horror that was realistic in every sense of the word.”

On December 7, Lace Marcum began his defense of John Fleming and the ten other Harts men. Bob Fleming, John’s brother, was the second witness called to the stand. He swore that he knew nothing of the robbery until the day after it happened and that he never saw any of the stolen goods. Willard Fleming, John’s other brother, said he stayed with Charley Brumfield the night of the robbery and saw no one armed. John, referenced in one newspaper account as being a “paroled prisoner,” testified along the same lines, as did all the defendants who were called to the stand. “The entire list of defendants swore to very near the same thing,” reported the Gazette.

For the most part, Marcum’s defense of the eleven Harts men had little chance of success considering the evidence against them. In his closing remarks, he was forced to put them at the court’s mercy by claiming that they had acted the way they did because they didn’t know any better. In the end, ten of the accused were sentenced to twelve- or eighteen-month terms in the West Virginia state penitentiary.

In Search of Ed Haley 12

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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I told Lawrence that I wanted to know about Ed Haley’s early life but he said he really wasn’t old enough to know much about his father’s younger days.

“My dad was 45 years old, I guess, when I was born,” he said. “He was born in 1883 and I was born in 1928. That was about 45 years. I know my mother was 40 years old and to the best of my knowledge my dad was five years older. She was born in ’88 and he was born in ’83.”

Lawrence said his father was born on the Trace Fork of Harts Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. He was the only child of Milt Haley and Emma Jean Mullins. Milt was partly responsible for causing Ed’s blindness, according to one story that Lawrence had heard on Harts Creek, which he reluctantly told.

“We was up there approximately seven years ago and we stopped over on Harts Creek and visited with my dad’s first cousin, Joe Mullins,” Lawrence said. “He told me that when my dad was very young — he couldn’t a been over two or three — he had the measles or some childhood disease. And when his father came in from working in the timbers that evening he didn’t like the whiny way my dad was acting. It was the dead of winter. They was ice on the creeks. So to make him more of a man and cut out his babyish crying, he took him out and held him by the feet and dropped him in a rain barrel through the ice.  Now according to my cousin Joe that’s partly what caused my dad to go blind.”

What? That wasn’t in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes.

“Now, I don’t know for sure about that,” Lawrence said. “That’s hearsay. I don’t want to bad-mouth anybody — my granddad or anybody — this many years after everybody’s in the ground and forgot about.”

Lawrence said Ed’s mother Emma Jean Haley was killed not too long after the rain barrel incident. “During the end of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, other families became involved. Pop’s mother Emma Jean was down at the mouth of Harts Creek visiting some feudists — seems like they were Brownings — when two or three people came to the door looking for somebody. I don’t know his name, whether he was a McCoy or Hatfield or some other person that had allegiance to one of them. And when my grandmother opened the door, they thought that he was going to answer the door so they just shot her and killed her. Now, that’s hearsay. I heard that story and that’s all I can tell you about that.”

I asked if the house was still standing and Lawrence said, “I don’t think so. It was a big two-story house. The best I can remember, it had a double porch on the front. It was standing there when I was just a little small child.”

Pat said she’d seen a picture of Ed’s mother during a visit to Joe Mullins’ place on Harts Creek several years ago. “Joe and his wife Stella had this beautiful enlarged picture and it was framed,” she said. “It was laying in some back room up there in Joe’s house. I don’t think it was on the wall, because it was very, very dusty when she brought it in to show me. And she said, ‘This is Larry’s grandmother,’ and she made a statement to the effect of, ‘We’ve no use for it.’ This lady has since passed away, but Joe should have the picture because it’s just been a few years ago.”

Already, I could see plenty of inspiration for a musician: tragic blindness — a cruel father — a murdered mother — an orphan alone in the world.

I asked Lawrence what happened to his grandfather Milt Haley and he said, “Apparently he stayed around there. Joe told me he’s buried somewhere down on Harts Creek in a cemetery. He apparently didn’t raise his child. Uncle Peter Mullins and Aunt Liza Mullins raised my dad after his mother was killed. My dad’s mother must have been an older sister to Uncle Peter.”

Uncle Peter, Lawrence said, was nicknamed “Club-Foot Peter” because one of his feet was “turned in.” He was the father of Joe Mullins, the source for many of Lawrence’s stories. “I guess Joe is about as old as my brother, Clyde. He might be around 70 now. He was a lot younger than my dad.”

Lawrence wasn’t sure when his father left Uncle Peter’s household.

“I guess he left when he got old enough to get out and start playing music,” he said. “I would say he was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. People’d come after him to go play music.”

Lucian Mitchell recalls rafting timber in Guyandotte Valley

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Timber

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     In the early decades of the twentieth century, Fred B. Lambert, a local historian and educator in southwestern West Virginia, interviewed Lucian Mitchell of Henlawson, Logan County, regarding his memories of the rafting industry in the Guyandotte Valley.

     “I was born July 20, 1885,” Mitchell began. “I ran many rafts. I worked for the Hewett Lumber Company about 1922 for 5 years and then for Jeff Gill, who bought and sold lumber. I often went on rafts and put up at Guyandotte with the Stephenson Hotel.”

     In those days, thousands of Guyan Valley logs were tied into rafts and piloted down the river by pilots to the now defunct town of Guyandotte.

     “It took two days to get out from Logan,” Mitchell said. “The man on the bow of the raft didn’t have to know much. The man at the stern knew where to go, where the shoals were and how to work up to the point on a hard bend and knew the Jordan sands at the mouth of Bear Creek.

     “Sometimes a raft would cork the river by bowing and swinging around in such a position as to get both ends foul. If another raft came down it was rulable to hit this raft in the middle and cut it in two pieces. Most raftsmen could swim so not many got drowned.”

     Among the many turn-of-the-century pilots, Elijah Mobley of Big Creek was memorable.

     “Elijah Mobley of Big Creek below Chapmansville was an eccentric river man — a pilot,” Mitchell said. “He went barefooted and bareheaded in summer and even went that way into Huntington — with his pants rolled up. He was killed by a C&O detective. He had been to Catlettsburg in the West Virginia prohibition days — three or four hoboes were with him — and he tried to bluff the detective by putting his hand in or near his pocket.”

     At some point, the loggers traveling downriver stopped their rafts and boarded overnight with local residents.

     “We took our lunches along and tied up at night,” Mitchell said. “I have stayed at Hubball with James Bench, with W.J. Hatfield at Ranger, with Norma Spurlock at Nine Mile and Burton Hensley at Dusenberry Dam. I stayed with a doctor who lived on the riverbank above Martha who kept about 600 to 700 game chickens. He lived some distance above the Turn Hole.”

     As these trips were often made in the winter months, raftsmen had to survive the freezing cold of river travel.

     “I have had fires on rafts in winter by closing small cracks between logs, but never knew of any cooking to be done,” Mitchell said.

     Upon arriving in Guyandotte, timbermen were paid for their logs and usually used their money to buy liquor and raise all kinds of hell.

     “I’ve seen some fancy fights in Huntington among the raftsmen,” Mitchell said. “Policemen usually didn’t interfere. Dolph Spratt of Mingo County or Paris Brumfield hit ‘Doc’ Suiter. He toned down after this.”

     At the end of his interview, Mitchell recalled the time the Cole and Crane log boom broke at the mouth of the Guyandotte River.

     “The Cole and Crane boom at Guyandotte broke once and came down and struck the piers of the suspension bridge and took it into the Ohio River,” he said.

In Search of Ed Haley 11

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Eight days later, I was with Lawrence Haley in Ashland looking at Ed Haley’s fiddle and holding old family photographs while he talked as if he’d just seen his father the day before. Pat was gone for the day, so it was just Lawrence and I, talking carefully in the kitchen with funeral home silence in the background. Lawrence — or Larry, as his wife called him — was a short, stocky man with thinning hair and a very straightforward manner. I could tell that he was a no-nonsense kind of guy and that it would serve me best to walk on pins and needles for a while. I also had the impression that in talking with me he hoped to correct some of the errors in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes. He was very careful with his words. Occasionally one of the Haley grandchildren would come in and sit nearby as quiet as a mouse before leaving to play in the yard.

In the initial small talk, I looked over Ed Haley’s fiddle, which appeared to be of an inexpensive Czech variety. It was stained brown and was without strings and a bridge. According to Lawrence, his father acquired it during the early 1940s. He confirmed that it was the one used to make the home recordings featured on Parkersburg Landing but was not the one pictured on Parkersburg Landing. He said Ed used “regular old steel strings — no cat-gut at all” and remembered that he always kept his fiddle on an old “pump-type” organ at home. He had the bridge somewhere around the house in a drawer, which he promised to find.

“If you ever find that bridge, we ought to rig that thing up and put some strings on it,” I said.

Lawrence reached me Ed’s bow, which he said was the same one he used the last ten years of his life. “He just used the same bow,” he said. “Whenever he got another fiddle, he’d change the bow.” I looked it over and noticed that it was as heavy as a log.

I started questioning Lawrence slowly with important but seemingly mundane questions about Ed’s music. I wondered if Ed knew what key he was playing in and Lawrence said, “Sure. Well, when my brother Ralph first started playing, Pop’d tell him which key to change to in a piece of music. He’d just lean over to Ralph and tell him.”

I asked Lawrence if he remembered the names of Ed’s favorite fiddle players and he said, “I couldn’t tell you, John. He’s mentioned a few fiddle players but I couldn’t tell you their name now.” Lawrence said he didn’t even remember many of Ed’s local fiddling buddies because he was a kid “wanting to get out and do something else.”

“I don’t even remember Doc White as far as that goes,” he said. “But I remember Laury Hicks up in Calhoun County, which is the next county right against Clay County there.”

I had read about Haley’s friendship with fiddler Laury Hicks on Parkersburg Landing. Hicks was a veterinarian in Calhoun County, West Virginia.

“One of Ed’s lifelong friends was an Ivydale physician named Laury Hicks,” it read. “Shortly before he died, Hicks requested that he be able to hear Ed Haley one more time. Ed arrived too late and it is said that he played over Laury’s grave for hours into the night.”

I asked about Asa Neal, the great Portsmouth fiddler. “Yeah, Asa Neal,” Lawrence said. “I’ve heard my dad talk about him. But I never seen the guy to my knowledge.”

He seemed to know the most about a local physician and casual fiddler named Doc Holbrook, whose name J.P. Fraley had mentioned to me. “They was long-time friends,” Lawrence said. “Doc Holbrook was a physician that practiced medicine in the county seat of Greenup County, which is also named Greenup. He was a fiddle buff and apparently a pretty good one because my dad wouldn’t a fooled with him if he hadn’t showed a lot of promise in playing the violin.”

This was a little confusing. Ed apparently had several doctor friends: Doctor Laury Hicks, Doc White and Doc Holbrook.

“They tell a tale about how Pop would come down to Greenup County and he’d go to where Doctor Holbrook had his practice. He had it in part of his home — had a riverfront home there. When Dad would go over to visit Doctor Holbrook, regardless of how many patients Doctor Holbrook had in his office, he’d shut his office up — he might have a half a dozen patients sitting out there — and him and Pop’d go in and play the fiddle half the day. That’s hear-say, but that’s what they tell me.”

I really liked that image.

Lawrence said his father made a recording for Doc one time, which he assumed was in the hands of Holbrook family descendants.

“Doctor Holbrook wanted this particular piece of music called ‘Over the Waves’ and he bundled my dad and mother up one day and, since there was no recording studios around this area, he took them to Columbus, Ohio where they had a good soundproof recording studio and had them make this piece of music. Now, whether they was other pieces of music made at the same time, I really don’t know. There probably was.”

In addition to giving Doc records, Ed also gave him a fiddle. “Pop had a real good copy of a Stradivarius, and it had a real good mellow tone and a real good solid deep resonance to it,” Lawrence said. “I think it was the one that he give to Doc Holbrook.” Lawrence said it was also still in the Holbrook family. “Doc had a son who had an office down at the Second National Bank Building and he inherited that fiddle,” he said. “J.P. Fraley was supposed to’ve taken that fiddle to the Smithsonian or at some kind of a centennial or something. But that was Pop’s fiddle.”

I asked Lawrence if his father had perfect pitch.

“Yes,” he said. “He never used a pitch pipe or anything. He tuned the fiddle by ear. One of his fiddles, I think had that little tuner on that high key. I never seen one on every string, though. It took him maybe four or five thumps on his strings to get them in tune. You know, them keys would get awful dry and squeaky in their pegs — in their holes — and they’d strip a lot of times and if it was a real dry season or something and it wasn’t holding in tune, he’d blow moist breath on them pegs to get them to hold in place.”

Lawrence had no idea where Ed got any of his tunes, except for one song.

“My dad and mother used to say they played a certain piece of music they heard from this old fella by the name of Greasy George. I won’t say his last name. Greasy George had apparently stolen a pig from somebody and had put it in a small pen close to the house. And two or three days later, he was sitting on the porch playing the fiddle and he saw the sheriff coming up the drive and he began to play a piece of music my dad plays. I don’t know the name of it, except that it went something like this: ‘Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed, further in the bed, further in the bed. Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed. Katy, can’t you understand me now?’ And his purpose in singing those words was trying to get his wife to hide that pig under a blanket, I think. Or that’s what my dad and mother inferred to me — that he wanted his wife to hide that pig somewhere. Mom was telling me about it.”

I asked Lawrence how Ed met his mother.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Pop was either in Catlettsburg or somewhere around here close. My grandfather on my mother’s side, he moved from Morehead up here to Ashland. People followed work wherever they could get it. My granddad was an old timber man, I guess. They mighta been some work around here for him. In fact, I’m pretty sure at the time my dad met my mother, my grandfather was working at an old stave mill over here — where they make barrel staves. I guess Pop was playing and somebody heard him and told my mother that she ought to come hear him play. Somebody thought that my mother — which was supposed to be a trained musician — they wanted her to hear this old fiddle player. And they got them together that-a-way, I guess. Just a chance-type meeting. They got together and raised a family.”

Lawrence tried to describe the extent of Pop’s travels, a crucial detail in ascertaining the extent of his influence as he was primarily a non-recording, non-radio fiddler. “His travels, as far as being too enormously wide, was restricted to about a three state area, I guess. But apparently his influence got around eventually. Like you say, he might be the granddaddy of Texas style contest music. Far be it from me to dispute it. I really think if he’d been around during the sixties when old-time fiddling was coming back and everybody was wanting to hear this fiddle music, I think he could’ve been worth something. I think he could’ve made a little bit of money at that time. And he might not’ve wanted to do that, see. He didn’t want to do it back in the twenties when they was making recordings around.”

I said, “Well, he’d been on the street. He knew what was going on out there. That’s where life is lived.”

Lawrence said, “Well, that’s why he always steered away from these commercial record companies. The way I feel about my dad, if somebody wants to learn about his music or play it, maybe it might not be completely forgotten. I don’t want to make a dime out of it. If there’s any money anywhere to be made out of it that might come to Pop, turn it over to the Foundation for the Blind. I don’t want to make anything off of my dad. He brought me into this world and raised me up and I’ve had a pretty good life.”

I asked Lawrence what Ed did when he was sitting around home and he said, “He liked to chew tobacco. He’d take this old twist — Stader’s twist, they called it — and he’d take his pocketknife and cut that up and put it down in his pocket. It was picked right off a farm. In fact, that picture of him on the front of that album, I think he had a chew of tobacco in his mouth then. He always carried a vegetable can with him to spit in. Mom never did like it but it was just almost a part of him when he was around the house, except when he’d get out on the porch — then he’d spit out in the yard.”

Lawrence said his dad liked to play music on the porch.

“We lived down on 17th Street and he’d get out on the front porch with that banjo or fiddle and he’d sit on the front porch and play. He’d cross his legs and sit up on the banister where he could spit easy or he’d just sit down with a banjo and play it.”

Lawrence had no clue what happened to Ed’s banjo. “It was one of those things that left when I was in the service, I guess. And Mom’s mandolin disappeared. The accordion my mother had, she let Aunt Minnie have it because Aunt Minnie played the organ some and she wanted to try that accordion. They took it up there and she left it up there for Aunt Minnie and then the house burnt down. It was not a very expensive accordion.”

Aunt Minnie, Lawrence said, was Laury Hicks’ widow in Calhoun County, West Virginia. Lawrence mentioned that I should get in touch with their daughter, Ugee (Hicks) Postalwait, in Akron, Ohio. “I guess she must be close to 81 or 82,” he said. “She was a young woman when I was just a kid. She would dance around Pop when he played and while he was noting the fiddle she’d be up there hitting them strings that he was noting. It had a real nice little ring to it. She heard him like these people hear you right now. She heard him live, danced around it and played on it and everything else. She said all that scratch on the records didn’t sound like Ed Haley. It’s not the same.” I said I would call Ugee when I got back to Nashville.

Lawrence told me a little about his childhood trips to Harts Creek — the place of Ed’s birth. “Most of the time we’d ride the train up there and get off at Harts and then maybe walk and it seemed to me like it took us half the day to get up Harts Creek. You’d ford that creek half a dozen times and the road was in the creek half time time.”

I asked him if Ed carried his fiddle all the way up there and he said, “Most of the time he carried the fiddle. I’ve seen him carry nothing but a fiddle — not even a case a lot of times. He’d carry it out in the open.” He said Ed never played it or thumped on it while walking — “he’d tuck it under his arm and go.” What if it rained? “That’s another thing,” he said. “I can’t remember any instance like that, but I imagine he’s had instances like that. But I know he has went around with a fiddle with no case — just a fiddle and a bow. Same way with Mom. She didn’t have a case for her mandolin.”

At that point, Lawrence showed me several family photographs, including a wonderful picture of his family just before his birth in 1928.

“I was born just a year before the Depression hit,” he said. “They was two of us just babies when the Depression started. Ralph, Clyde, Noah and Jack were stepped from five to fifteen. A lot of times it was skimpy eating and at other times it was pretty good. We never starved or anything. We’d go down to an old dairy just below us called Sanitary Dairy and get a big lard bucket full of buttermilk for a dime, and I could take a piece of cornbread and a glass of buttermilk and make a meal out of it. I’ve done that a lot. I’ve taken ten cents when Mom could scrape up a dime and us kids would all walk downtown to one of them ten-cent movies and stay all day and be starving to death when we came home and there wouldn’t be nothing but cold cornbread and pinto beans or something like that. That’s the way our life went, during the Depression anyway.”

There was another remarkable photo of Ed and his family just after the Depression started. “Everybody can tell you about hard times in the Depression,” Lawrence said. “I know in my second summer Mom said she fed me fresh corn and I took the trots and liked to wasted away from diarrhea. That was about 1930. We made it anyway.”

As Lawrence showed me a few family pictures, his wife Pat showed up with a few of her “bingo buddies.” Pat was a very polite English lady with dark hair and a small frame who wore large glasses. We said our “hellos” and I played a few tunes.

Once the guests left, I spoke more about Ed Haley with Pat and Lawrence in the kitchen. With Pat’s presence, Lawrence’s demeanor was a little different. I could tell that he wanted to present his dad to me in just such a way and he almost openly resented any input from Pat. There was a slight tension in the air. At one point, Lawrence said to Pat, “Go ahead Pat. You tell it. You know more about it than I do.” Pat took it all in stride. She just wanted to be helpful. In any case, Lawrence gave me the impression — and this was very important — that if I did or said anything to his disfavor I would be more than welcome to hit the road. Ironically, and contrary to what I had heard, he seemed more over-protective of his father’s story than his music. Needless to say, it took me a while to get up enough nerve to pull out my tape recorder and record his memories.

In Search of Ed Haley 10

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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I spent the next two months thinking about the best way to approach Lawrence Haley. It was imperative that I made the right impression — should I call or write? Should I ease into the situation or just tell him how great I thought his father was? It was a fantastic moment — a period of time just before “contact” when I was mostly daydreaming and not nearly so swept away. In that instant, I was content to just talk with Ed Haley’s son and find out as much as I could about one of the world’s greatest fiddlers.

I finally decided to write Lawrence a letter, a perfectly natural thing to do since he was a retired postman. I had a million questions but limited myself to this:

Dear Mr. Haley,

 I am deeply inspired by your father and his music. I’ve almost completely worn out the Parkersburg Landing album and have become very interested in him. I believe him to be the best as well as the most important fiddler of our time. Through his influence on Clark Kessinger and Georgia Slim who in turn influenced Benny Thomasson he could be considered the grandfather of the present Texas contest fiddling style.

 I would have given anything to have heard him and seen him. I’ve read everything I can find and have talked to J.P. and Annadene Fraley at length for any little tidbit about him. I would love to meet you and hear you talk of him.

Yours very truly,

John Hartford

Because of my promise to Gus Meade, I was careful not to divulge the fact that I had heard any of Ed’s tunes not featured on Parkersburg Landing and had resolved that if I should be so lucky that Lawrence would at some future time play some of them I would act surprised.

A few days later, after getting the “go-ahead” from Annadeene Fraley by telephone, I gave Lawrence a call. He was extremely nice and seemed happy that I was interested in his father. He said he used to watch me on TV years ago.

“You’re the guy with the derby that danced and played the fiddle at the same time,” he said in a somewhat raspy voice.

I hesitantly asked about his father’s records. He said he had most of his dad’s original home recordings, as well as reel-to-reel copies made by the Library of Congress.

“I got four little seven-inch tapes here with some music on them,” he said, before reading the titles. I carefully wrote each title down, taking special note of the ones I had never heard of. Lawrence said his father sometimes named tunes after places where he played, like with “Catlettsburg”, a small river town near Ashland, or with “Parkersburg Landing”, a West Virginia city just below Marietta, Ohio.

“I don’t know where Pop gets all these names from,” Lawrence said, as if Ed were still alive to name them. “I think when my dad went somewhere and played, and if people liked what they heard, that’s the way he named them. Like that ‘Parkersburg Landing’, he was probably up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, playing and people liked it so that’s what he called it. I’m not sure how they got named but that’s what I’d say.”

There were other tunes like “Dunbar”, named for a small town near Charleston, West Virginia, and “Cherry River Rag”, named after a river in eastern West Virginia.

After reading Ed’s titles, Lawrence said, “Pop played quite a few more pieces than that, of course. It’s really hard to say how many of his records are out there that I don’t know about. Several years ago, this guy brought me one of his records with a tune on it called ‘Ox in the Mud’. He said he had wanted it on a record so bad he took Pop to one of these recording studios and had it made. Well, I traded him one of those Parkersburg Landing albums for it and I guess he was satisfied with that because he got quite a bit more music.”

Wow – the prospect of finding more Ed Haley records was exciting. I could just imagine digging through a box in some antique store along the Ohio River and finding Haley records mixed in with old Big Band orchestra albums and selling at a quarter each.

Putting such thoughts aside, I turned my mind back to Lawrence, who was actually holding Ed Haley records at that moment in Ashland, Kentucky. I asked him about the type of records and their general condition.

“The records are mostly Wilcox-Gay plastic records,” he said. “When I took them to the Library of Congress in Washington, some of them was in pretty bad shape. The hole where the spindle was, some of them was wore oblong and they had to put weights and everything else on them and they come up with a flutter in them. I allowed Rounder Records to make a copy of them because they said they was gonna put out a couple of albums.”

I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve heard a lot of fiddling that was made on old records at that time and your dad was so far ahead of any of them it’s not funny. In the one sense, he’s an old-time musician. In the other, he’s modern. That knocked me out. He may be the heaviest musician I ever heard. His syncopation and his timing and his intonation… Because them old-timey notes, you know, you can’t hit them right on the head. You’ve got to shade them. And to shade them, you’ve got to really know if they’re in tune or not and not just anybody can do that. And boy, he is a master of it.”

I was obviously a little carried away and caught up in the moment.

Lawrence sort of laughed and said, “I know he was a good, fine fiddler. My dad held the fiddle out onto his left side right at the top of his bicep where his arm and chest met – the armpit, just about. It was more of a classical violinist’s stance than the old mountain fiddler holding it down towards his knee or close to his knee and right in front of him. I’ve seen him lean his chin over on the base of the violin at times. You know, like people trying to hold that fiddle up there on their shoulder and under their chin, they can’t get their fingers right if they don’t let go of the fiddle on the neck of it. Well, Pop didn’t have to dip the bow a lot of times. What he did, he’d rock the fiddle to that string to meet the bow, see? And that was tricky, too.”

I said, “I’ll tell you what, he’s got one of the best bow arms I’ve ever heard. He gets those notes out so clear.”

Lawrence interjected, “He used all the bow, too. A lot of people, they’ve got to saw the bow back and forth. My dad used every inch of the bow from one end to the other. He didn’t grab the bow up on the strings like a lot of fiddlers. You know, half way up the bow. He got right back on the bow where you tighten the string and his finger was on that tightening fret. His little finger was wrapped around that, more or less.”

I said, “It sounds like he long-bowed a lot, where he’d pull that bow down and get four or five notes on a bow stroke.”

“Yes he did,” Lawrence said without hesitation. “Pop would use every bit of that bow to get it.”

Discussing Ed’s bowing prompted me to think about Ed’s fiddle. I had looked at it many times in the Parkersburg Landing picture and wondered if it survived fifty years after his death.

“I’ve got the old fiddle,” Lawrence said, “but it’s really not playable. We lived at a place one time where we had an excess of moisture and it got to this old fiddle and it started coming apart. My son Steve took it and had some instrument re-builder to put it back together but they never could get it back together right so it’s lost all of its intonation. I’ve got it but it’s not really worth playing because it hasn’t got the resonance to it.”

I told Lawrence I was hoping to be back in Ashland in a few days and would love to visit him and see his father’s records.

“Well, if you come up and you can get a hold of some kind of portable tape player I don’t care to let you copy Pop’s records,” he said. “They will probably just set here till some kind of magnetism comes along and takes all the information off of them. But they’re here and I hope nothing happens to them.”

Well, this was an unexpected offer from someone who was reportedly so over-protective of his father’s music.

I asked Lawrence how old Ed was when he passed away and he said, “Let’s see. I was about 23 or 24. Right now, I’m an old man. I’ve had quite a bit of heart problems. I spent the biggest part of November in the hospital on a ventilator. I was having congestive heart failure. I guess you hear how my voice sounds. They rammed something down my vocal box between my vocal chords and I’ve never got my voice back right. Well, I’m more or less living one day at a time. I’m 63 now.”

I said, “Well, you’re exactly ten years older than I am.”

“Well, you’re getting up there, too, aren’t you? Not the young man we remember on TV,” Lawrence said.

Hoping to get more at the source of Ed’s music, I asked Lawrence if his dad talked about where he learned to play.

“Not to me, no,” he said. “I’ve heard some stories but just like all other legendary people whenever a story is told twice it’s been embellished quite a bit. One fella said to keep from starving to death my dad sat out and eat wild onions with a piece of cold cornbread that he’d take out of the kitchen of my great-aunt Liza’s house, who raised him. But that wasn’t true. I’ve heard Pop tell me personally that he’d take a salt-shaker and a big onion and something like that and a piece of cornbread and go out in the garden and get him a tomato and eat that. I’ve never heard him talk about eating wild onions.”

I had given little thought to Ed’s childhood and birthplace.

“Where he was raised it was kind of rough country up in West Virginia,” Lawrence said. “He come out of Logan County, West Virginia, out in a country called Harts Creek. We used to go up there quite often until I was about nine or ten years old because my dad would go back there. He’d go around courthouse days and play music out in the courthouse lawn for change and things and that’s the way he made his living. He’d go to fairs and any other activities that might draw a crowd where he could play music. That’s how him and my mother made their money and raised us kids.”

How many kids were there in the family?

“They was seven of us all together,” Lawrence said. “I was the youngest boy and then I had a sister younger than me. But I had one brother to die when he was in infancy so really there was only five boys and one girl they raised. They got us up one way or the other without jerking us too hard.”

I asked Lawrence if he remembered his father playing for dances.

“I remember one afternoon we walked from Morehead, Kentucky down to Farmers,” he said. “That’s four or five miles. At that time they didn’t have too good a roads through there so we walked the railroad tracks. I was just a kid. We went to these people’s house and they rolled back the rugs and things and Pop sat there and played all night until the sun come up. I don’t know when Pop made the arrangements. Just him and my mother.”

For the next minute or so, I really bragged on Ed’s music. I had listened to it for years and had a lot of emotion about it. Finally, Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve heard him make a sour note on a few of these records but I think he learned his violin real good.”

Lawrence said his father played the fiddle from the time he was a small child.

“The way I understood it, he become blind when he was a couple of years old and they couldn’t figure out what to do with my dad,” he said. “He was blind and living out on the farm and somebody made him a violin out of a cigar box and he started out from there and just self-taught hisself, I reckon. As he went along, he got a hold of old instruments, I guess, and showed some promise and somebody looked after him and saw that he got the right things any way.”

I was very interested in Haley’s early travels, particularly before he married and settled in Ashland.

“I guess by the time Pop was eighteen, nineteen years old — that’s back at the turn of the century — he was traveling all over West Virginia and eastern Tennessee and western Old Virginia and parts of Ohio and eastern Kentucky,” Lawrence said. “He went to White Sulphur Springs and Webster Springs — these places that were pretty well known as spas and health resorts. He went to the state capital around Charleston. I’ve heard Pop talk about when he’d be in Charleston. He said he’d guarantee if he was at the Capitol building or somewhere playing music, Clark Kessinger would be there a listening trying to learn his style. I think that’s the way that Clark Kessinger got his style of Ed Haley, just watching him around Charleston, West Virginia.”

I told Lawrence that Kessinger was a great fiddle player but that he wasn’t even close to his dad.

That seemed to delight Lawrence, who was quiet for a moment before saying, “I’m glad to hear somebody say that. That’s one reason I agreed to let Rounder Records make an album or two. I thought there might be somebody out there that would appreciate that type of music and want to preserve it some way or the other. Once bluegrass and country rock and all that took off the old mountain-type music that came over from England and Ireland and Scotland and some of the Dutch and Scandinavian countries has just about been lost.”

Easing into more musical dialogue, I told Lawrence about my theory that Haley was a grandfather of the modern Texas contest fiddling style.

“Well, I don’t know about all of that John,” he said, “but when he’d start a piece over — he’d play each piece about four or five times — he had a different variation. It would still be the same piece of music but it always seemed to vary some from the first run through to the second run through. Well, I’ve seen him vary the speed even. When he is getting toward the end — maybe the last run — he’ll speed up the tempo and things like that or make some different finger work. And that was some of the difficulties my brother had about making records with him. My brother played the mandolin or guitar and my mother played the mandolin some.”

Lawrence said his father’s blindness, as well as his distaste for the up-and-coming commercial music industry, hindered his willingness to record music.

“When radio first took off they tried to get my dad to make records, but he always felt he couldn’t do it because they had to cue him in as to when to start,” he said. “My brother had quite a bit of problems like that when he made those home-made records with my dad. And on top of that, my dad felt that recordings were just some way for somebody to take him. After so many records had been sold over a thousand, he might get two cents on the record or something like that. He felt like he’d rather get out on the street and play it for free among friends. I’ve come to the conclusion, Why not?”

I asked Lawrence if Ed played around the house and he said, “Yeah, he’d practice sometimes. I’ve seen him get out the fiddle and just play for himself. He’d listen to a piece of music… One that I can think of real good, but I don’t think he ever really come out and made any version of it for hisself was Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. I think he figured the afterlife was about like Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’: what you did all your life was gonna be your hell if you didn’t do it right, if you didn’t enjoy it.”

While crediting some of Ed’s contemporaries, Lawrence seemed to regard his father as a highly gifted prodigy surrounded by mediocrity. He implied that his father humbly felt the same way, although it was an occasional source of aggravation, especially in his later years. “A lot of guys would get around Pop and aggravate him,” Lawrence said, “but I think he enjoyed music.”

I told Lawrence I would give almost anything to have seen his father play.

“Well, it’s a shame there’s no kind of video of Pop because he had an easy style of violin playing. It didn’t look strenuous to him.”

Ever conscious of genetics, I asked Lawrence if any of his family played music. He said his son Steve Haley — who lived just north of me in Hendersonville — was a former band instructor.

“He graduated from Morehead as a music major and taught high school band in Knoxville. His two daughters are taking violin lessons and are in whatever little junior symphony they have there in Hendersonville. They play semi-classical stuff.”

I asked Lawrence if Ed played any instruments aside from the fiddle and he said, “My dad was an old hammer-thumb banjo-picker like Pappy Jones. He played ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘Sourwood Mountain’ — really just about anything he played on the fiddle. And he put just about as many notes in on the banjo as he did on the fiddle. I’m not a bragger about my dad but he was a good banjo player, too.”

This was a new twist: I hadn’t even considered that Haley might have been a multi-instrumentalist.

“I never seen Pop play a piano,” Lawrence said, “but he could set down and play a piece of music on our old pump organ. And he taught my older brother Ralph how to play the guitar. Sometimes my dad would be playing the fiddle and my brother would be trying to pick up a piece of music with him and he’d tell Ralph what chords to hit, how to change chords and all that. He could make a run between notes and my dad could, too. Yeah, Pop could play any instrument, or I guess a little bit on anything that was handy to him anyway.”

I wondered if there were any recordings of Haley playing the banjo.

“No, not a thing on the banjo. My brother Ralph, when he come out of the service — in 1946, I guess it was — he got a hold of one of these Army surplus machines that had a cutting needle on it that cut the grooves and that’s what he made all these records on. Some of them are paper with a plastic coat on them. Others are a solid plastic. But most of them are all scratched and some of the paper ones are wore completely through the plastic into the paper. I’ve tried to keep them here at home. Some parts of the records are good.”

Just before hanging up, Lawrence said, “It was kind of a surprise to us to have got your letter. Annadeene called here and told us that you’ve been trying to get a hold of us. Our daughter, when you was here, she’d just had her operation, I guess. I think they’re gonna give her some radiation treatment and we will be making some trips back up there to Ohio but we’ll try to be here if you come.”

At that point, Lawrence turned the telephone over to his wife Pat who said in a pleasant British accent, “I do invite you and whoever you’re bringing with you to stay with us overnight or whatever. I have a front bedroom with two double beds and it’s just Larry and I that live here and we appreciate you showing an interest.”