Monthly Archives: December 2012

In Search of Ed Haley 24

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Spottswood

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At some point, Connie showed up with a small entourage of women toting some of Joe Mullins’ old pictures. My eyes immediately went to a large, framed photograph of two serious mustachioed men. Turley said one was Weddie Mullins — his grandfather on “both sides” of the family tree — while the other was Ed Haley’s Uncle Peter Mullins. Both men were brothers. Turley said his grandfather Weddie — Ed’s uncle — was murdered at the little town of Dingess just after the turn of the century.

Lawrence said, “Mom and Pop used to play at Dingess — just a little community over in MingoCounty.”

That got us back on the subject of Ed, although most of the commentary was choppy and mixed between looking at photographs. One of the girls said, “We’ve heard talk of Ed all our lives.” Another made the unusual remark, “He could see lightning. Some way he could feel it or something and tell it was hitting.” Someone said Ella could tell the difference between the Haley children by their smell.

Turley, who had been fairly quiet throughout our visit, said to Lawrence, “Bernie Adams used to play a lot of music with your dad.”

Violet said, “Bernie’s the one took him in the chicken house for the toilet. They stayed all night up at our house. Robert Martin and Bernie and Ed and them played music all night. I can remember it. I was just a little girl. Mother said Ed played many a time where she was raised up over in the head of Francis Creek.”

Lawrence said, “You know, these different places like Hoover and places like that don’t ring a bell to me. I can remember going down here to the end of Trace, and maybe down to Smoke House, and up to George Adams’ who lived on up this way, and up to that store — Maynard’s Store — and buying candy, but that’s about the limit of my travel, except coming up from the mouth of Harts.”

Basically, the next half-hour or so was a giant “get to know everybody session” — mostly between Lawrence and the locals. I sort of hung back a little, taking it all in, while Lawrence spoke of and listened to stories about his father. There was a glow about his face that had been absent in Ashland.

At one juncture, he told Connie how her grandparents, Peter and Liza Mullins, raised his father.

“Oh, really?” she said. “I didn’t know that. Now I remember Granny. They wanted me to stay all night with her and I was always afraid she’d die in her sleep or something. That’s terrible.”

She asked Lawrence if he remembered Uncle Jeff — “he was Granny’s brother and he was kinda slow.”

Violet said, “He liked to go to all these dinner meetings they’d have out in the country. He’d walk for miles and miles.”

Connie asked Lawrence if Ed ever played at Logan — the seat of government for Logan County — and he said, “Yeah, he used to play around Logan quite a bit and Peach Creek. He’d play up there during court days especially. Back in them days, the town would load up. I’ve been there with him during those times. The old courthouse, I think it faced toward the river. One side of it was on Stratton Street.”

Connie asked where Ed was buried and Lawrence said, “He’s buried in the Ashland Cemetery in Ashland. Mom’s buried in the same cemetery but not with him. By the time my mother died — she died three years after Pop — they’d filled that section up.”

I’d never really thought about that. Ed and his wife were not buried together, the kind of seemingly minor detail tossed out randomly that took on somewhat of a greater meaning at a later date. I made a note to myself right then that I would visit Ed’s grave in Ashland before heading back to Nashville.

Violet wondered about Lawrence’s older brother, Clyde.

“Clyde’s out in Stockton, California,” he said. “He’s what I call the black sheep of the family. Never married. He just followed the sun for work. When it was summertime, he’d go north; when it was wintertime, he’d go south.”

Just then, an old man called Bum showed up at Turley’s. Bum remembered Ed and his family well. He asked Lawrence about the Haleys. It was hard to focus on their conversation — everyone in the room seemed to be talking at once — but I heard Bum mention something about how Lawrence’s brother Ralph used to hang from tree limbs by his “sticky toes” and would “do anything.”

“That’s exactly how he got killed,” Lawrence said. “He was hanging by his toes and he was gonna let go with his toes and flip over and land on his feet but he didn’t make it. He was just active like that. See, Ralph danced around these carnivals and fairs and places.”

A few minutes later, things quieted down a little. I moved over near Bum to ask him about Haley. His answers seemed to come through his nose more than his mouth and were usually followed by a little chuckle. He was great. Bum said he was 67 years old and first saw “Uncle Ed” in the thirties.

“He lived down in Ashland and he’d come up pretty often,” Bum said. “People come from everywhere to listen at him play whenever they’d have them big dances and stuff. He’d play half the night. Yeah, I’ve been right there.”

I asked Bum about Ed’s tunes and he said, “Ah, he played so many… There was one religious tune he’d put the bow under the fiddle, and the hair, he’d turn it right over and slip his fiddle between it, and play that. I forgot what it was.”

Bum told me all about the old dances.

“They used to have a big working,” he said. “About every family on this creek and Harts Creek down here, they’d all gather up and hoe one man’s field out and then move to the next one. And they’d all go to each other’s farms that way and help each other, and when they got done one man would have a big dance. They’d have a dance on Saturday night. They’d have them at just about every home, mostly at Uncle Peter’s up here, in the house. Like one room in there, they’d gather everything up and take it outside and they’d have a dance in there, and when they got through they’d put the furniture all back in. Anybody that wanted to come was invited. They’d have food right in the house. There were usually three or four around to call the reel: ‘Dosy doe and here she comes and there she goes.'”

“It’d just be Uncle Ed and John Hager playing?” I asked.

“Well, Ed mostly,” Bum said. “Uncle Johnny, he played some with him. Uncle Ed, he played by himself most all of these dances. Mrs. Haley played with him a lot. She played the mandolin, guitar or accordion.”

“Did Johnny Hager play the banjo about like Grandpa Jones?” Turley asked Bum.

“Yeah, over-handed they call it,” Bum said. “Molly O’Day, she played that way. My grandpaw would whittle out two little sticks and he’d sit and beat on them strings and Ed a playing the fiddle.”

“Ed played with Ed Belcher,” Turley said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard Pop talk about Ed Belcher,” Lawrence said.

Now who was Ed Belcher?

“He played the guitar,” Bum said. “He could play the piano, too. They’d get together at times and play together. They’d go up Buck Fork.”

Bum said he last saw Ed Haley “over here on that mountain yonder” at Clifford Belcher’s beer joint.

“He’d go down there and play and people’d give him beer and stuff. That’s about all he wanted. I run into him over there one night. I said, ‘Uncle Ed, where you been?’ He said, ‘I ain’t been no where but right here. I come up here to sit around and play music a while.’ I bought him a beer and he sat there and played music. Well, a Conley boy run in and went to playing and thought he was better than Ed and everything. Ed finally told that boy, said, ‘Why don’t you quit playing that music? You can’t play. You’re cutting my music up too much.’ That boy come back at him, you know, and aimed to fight him. He said, ‘Shut up, old man. You don’t know what you’re a talking about.’ I was standing there and I told him, I said, ‘Now listen. If you jump on that man, you’ll have me to fight and him both.’ And Ed took his fiddle and hit that feller right down over the head with it and busted that fiddle all to pieces.”

Lawrence laughed.

Turley said Ed Haley was high-tempered, as well as strong, and hinted at his mean streak.

“Dad said Peter had a dog that Ed couldn’t get along with at all. Ed told Uncle Johnny, ‘You get me close to him and I’ll hit him in the mouth. I’ll knock him out.’ And he said Ed hit that dog and killed him with his fist. Hit him in the ear and killed him. That’s what my daddy told.”

Bum was very familiar with Ed Haley’s family on Trace. He said Uncle Peter Mullins was “pretty bad to get out and get drunk and get into it with people.” He knew all about Ed’s uncle Weddie Mullins’ murder at an election in Dingess. “There used to be a train come in there and they’d bring flour and stuff over there and people’d go over there to Dingess and get it,” he said. “They’d take wagons and go through these hills, like up Henderson and all them places and they got into it over there.” Bum wasn’t sure who shot Weddie but knew that his killer survived the fracas. Once the news reached Harts Creek, John Adams got a pistol from Jackson Mullins and rode to Dingess where he found Weddie’s killer laid up in a bed clinging to life. Someone told him the guy probably wouldn’t make it so (like something out of a Hollywood Western) he pulled out a .38 pistol and said, “I know he won’t,” and shot him in cold blood.

I wasn’t exactly sure who any of these people were — Jackson Mullins, John Adams — but I had the impression that they were some relation to Ed Haley. At that juncture, I just let the tape recorder roll and tried to take notes and absorb everything, figuring that what seemed like unimportant details would perhaps later develop into major items of interest.

In Search of Ed Haley 23

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley, Spottswood

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Connie suggested we go see her neighbor Turley Adams, who lived just down the creek near the mouth of a branch. She pointed toward a man working in his yard a few hundred yards away at his one-story white home. That’s Turley? We took off right away. As we approached the place, Lawrence mentioned that Turley lived at the same approximate location of Milt Haley’s old cabin. While the cabin was long gone, I noticed the front yard still had the same beautiful roll to it I had seen in an old picture at Lawrence’s house. I tried to imagine how the cabin would have looked in Ed Haley’s day.

Turley met us near the porch, where Lawrence introduced us and told our reason for visiting him. Turley was immediately friendly and, in his gruff voice, invited us inside. At first, our conversation went pretty slow. Then Lawrence said, “I never did get much about my granddad, Milton Haley. Joe said he’s buried down here somewhere in a graveyard and I thought maybe he was talking about down at the mouth of Trace somewhere.”

Turley’s wife Violet said there was an old cemetery just back of their house, although it had been in terrible condition for many years.

“Well now, they was some graves out there. Turley’s mom told me that some of them were Mullinses and some of them were Haleys. They was some babies and then they was some older people. All unmarked. They was sort of in a row and they was rocks up to them but by the time I married Turley they’d rolled down the hill so you couldn’t tell where the graves really were.”

Oh god. I could just imagine someone finding a Milt Haley tombstone (probably no more than a rock with “MH” carved on it) lying at the foot of the hill and just tossing it in the creek.

“Well one grave we could tell pretty well where it was at, the others we couldn’t,” Violet said. “It had all growed up so we started cutting the bushes and keeping it mowed and cleaned up but we still don’t know where the graves are.”

We walked outside briefly to survey the site.

“They’s eleven graves,” Turley said. “I used to help Uncle Jack Mullins keep them cleaned up a little bit.”

Was this little embankment with a sunken spot the final resting place of Ed Haley’s parents?

Back inside, Turley said he remembered Ed, which seemed to please Lawrence somewhat. He told this story about a local girl who danced to Ed’s music.

“When I was in high school, Ed was around my house and he said, ‘I’d like to fiddle for somebody to dance.’ And I asked this girl, Adeline Adkins from around here on Buck Fork, if she could dance and she said, ‘I can dance to anything.’ She danced three or four tunes and my dad come in. Ed said, ‘By god, John, she’s just like Yellow Leg Spaulding. She can hit ever thing I do on this fiddle. And Dad said that they was a guy that used to go with them and dance that he called Yellow Leg Spaulding.”

“Well I didn’t know whether we’d even find anybody up here now, except Joe,” Lawrence said. “I thought I’d come up and see if I could find him, maybe introduce John to somebody that could give us some information on my dad. I know they couldn’t be very many people old enough to probably appreciate his music.”

“He come to my mom and dad’s house one time and played music all night,” Violet said. “Robert Martin was with him. I guess they’d been drinking or whatever because they was gonna take him out to the toilet and instead of taking him to the toilet they took him into the chicken house. They didn’t pay no attention to what they was doing. But they played all night. I never will forget.”

I had never really considered the possibility that Ed’s cousins and neighbors played jokes on him. I saw him as this great musician — an elevated status that may not have been shared by many of his contemporaries. All of a sudden, I was flooded with images of this little blind orphan — alone in the world — victimized mercilessly throughout his childhood. How did he take it? And how would Lawrence react to hearing these kind of stories? In quick time, I had this latter question answered. Lawrence immediately countered Violet’s story about the outhouse with a tale that cast his father in a more triumphant light.

“Joe said when Pop was just a little kid he got to the point to where he could travel from this house over to Uncle Peter’s,” Lawrence said. “Uncle Peter kept cattle in the field out here or something — a bull or two. Well, the boys teased him. You know, he’d get about half way across that field and then they’d go to snorting like a bull — scare him — and then stand way back and laugh at him. Pop took that for a while and finally found a pistol over here at the old house and he went across the field and they started doing that to him. Well, he just pulled that pistol and, where that sound was coming from, he started shooting that pistol. I guess that broke that little game up.”

Lawrence was obviously determined to guard his father’s legacy, which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Violet got out a few albums filled with old photographs of Ed’s kinfolk from up and down the creek, which stirred Lawrence’s memories.

“Seemed to me like we walked down here to Trace to go up the hill there and there was a store down there,” he said.

Violet said, “Turley’s dad run a store around on Hart at one time and Ewell Mullins had a store up here.”

Lawrence remembered Ewell’s store. “Yeah, he had a store up here, I know that. And then they was one on up and over the hill there where you could go and buy a nickel’s worth of brown sugar. We’d get one of them little penny-paper pokes full of brown sugar and we thought we was having a big time.”

Lawrence’s mind was starting to click in high gear. “I heard Pop talk about how he’d ride a horse up the hollow going up through there,” he said.

Lawrence asked Turley if he knew anything about a George Adams. Turley said his grandfather was named George Washington Adams but he went by the nickname of “Ticky George” to distinguish him from a cousin, “Greasy George.” Ticky George spent most of his life in the woods hunting for ginseng where he apparently acquired a great number of ticks.

“He didn’t have good mind,” Violet said later. “He just knowed enough to get by.”

Turley said his grandmother Adams was a sister to Ed’s friend, Johnny Hager.

“Well, there’s how Johnny Hager came into this,” Lawrence said.

Turley didn’t know much about his genealogy but said his aunt Roxie Mullins could tell us the “whole history” of the Hagers.

“She lives around there above Louie on Harts Creek there,” he said.

Louie Mullins was a grandson to Uncle Peter, making him a third cousin to Lawrence (at least by our count).

This was sort of a confusing moment. Names of people I’d never heard of were popping into the conversation and converging upon one another in seemingly irrelevant connections.

It was great.

There was an unmatchable poetry in it: Turley, Yellow Leg Spaulding, Ticky George… I mean nobody could make this kind of stuff up.

In Search of Ed Haley 22

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Early the next morning, Lawrence and I boarded my Cadillac and drove out of Ashland across the Big Sandy River into West Virginia. We drove past little towns named Kenova and Ceredo on I-64 then turned off onto Route 10 just south of Huntington. For the next hour, we weaved our way on this curvy, two-lane road toward Harts, cruising past small settlements named Salt Rock, West Hamlin, Pleasant View, Branchland, Midkiff and Ranger — all situated on the Guyandotte River. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we saw a tiny green and white sign planted to the right of the road reading “Harts, Unincorporated.” Just past it was a beautiful two-story white home, which Lawrence quickly pointed out as the place where Ed’s mother was murdered in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Excited, I quickly pulled over and took a picture, then took off in a cloud of gravel and dust.

Lawrence and I turned right onto a narrow paved road and snaked our way up Harts Creek, bypassing a high school, trailers, Depression-era framed houses and newer brick homes. It was beautiful country. Cold weather was barely gone and the hillsides were a faint blush of green buds. Lawrence motioned toward the creek — which was up somewhat due to spring rains — and told again how difficult it was to get up Harts Creek in his younger days.

“Biggest part of the time, you was down in the creek bed there, if the weather was right. If it was times like this you had to take to the hillside but the road usually followed the creek bed. It seemed like it took us all day walking up here, but they didn’t have the roadway up on the side of the hill like this.”

After a ride of some fifteen minutes, we reached Trace Fork, the place where Ed Haley was born over one hundred years ago. We drove a short distance up the branch to the site of Peter Mullins’ cabin, which had burned or been torn down about fifteen years earlier. Lawrence pointed out the only remaining relics from the original farm: a lonely tree and an old smokehouse.

After taking in the sights and smells, we went to see Joe Mullins, who lived in a small white house just down the bottom. We first met Joe’s daughters, Connie and Loretta, who said Joe had gone to Chapmanville and would probably be out for most of the day. Lawrence introduced himself as “Ed Haley’s son,” which caused Connie to giggle and say, “Oh, yeah. Don’t we have a picture of him?”

Loretta said, “We got a lot of pictures.”

“The old fiddle,” Connie said. “Remember the old fiddle that used to be up there in that old house?”

What old house?

“That old smokehouse up there at the old house,” Connie said. “There was an old fiddle up in the top of it.”

There was more giggling, as if the two had just shared a secret joke.

I said to Connie, “You don’t think you could find that do you, just to see it?”

She said, “No, I doubt it.”

Loretta said, “We could probably find the picture.”

Boy that would be great.

“I don’t know about right this minute. How long are you gonna be around?”

“Long enough for you to find that picture,” I said.

The next thing I knew, Connie walked us to Uncle Peter Mullins’ old smokehouse and flung open a door. I took a few steps inside — past old furniture and piles of God-knows-what — and quickly spotted a decorative metal lid with Ed and Johnny Hager’s picture on it. In the picture, a copy of which I had first seen at Lawrence’s, Haley was slim and decked out in a suit with a derby and dark glasses. Hager stood beside him with a banjo. Lawrence said it was taken at White Sulphur Springs in eastern West Virginia.

At some point, Connie showed us a large, framed portrait of a woman she identified as Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley — the same picture Pat Haley had seen on her visit to Harts Creek several years ago. Connie said Lawrence could have both pictures.

Deep Secrets

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     “Diary dear, I can tell you many things I can’t no other,” Pearl wrote on October 31. “You keep secrets that no one knows. I’m going to confide in you. I love another. I have said I could no other but one, but I’m not quite sure now. Kindness goes a long way to create love. It’s not good looks. I never knew til now. Oh Lord, what makes me always love some body that don’t love me. But they are so kind I can’t help but love him some but I don’t want to. I never thought of loving him until a certain thing happened. I dreamed so often of him making love to me. Oh Lord, let that love for him cease for I don’t want it ever to be. I want my one I always loved.”

     “This is the last day of our beautiful October weather,” Pearl continued. “Many here to day. October month here me. Oh Lord let us all meet again. Goodby October’s bright blue weather and sad the crimson autumn leaves but sadder that one of her sisters was sick. She was fixing to go and leave me dirty and as always my heart told me Dear was coming and I didn’t want to be so dirty. She quarreled at me for wanting to be cleaned up. I cried till my eyes was all swollen up and red. So you see how it is when you can’t do any thing for yourself. You go blank. Well, after I cried she went and cleaned me up but before I got my slipper on he came. It seems that he is always in a hurry. After he was gone I couldn’t help but think of a song: ‘I grieve that ere I met three, Faith fair would I forget thee. Can river thee? Never! Farewell, farewell forever! We have met, and we have parted yet uttered scarce a word like a guilty thing, Started when thy well-knowing voice I heard,’ Oh, how well those words are formed. I couldn’t have wrote my feelings better if I had tried.”

     “Sunday morning again,” Pearl wrote a little later. “Word came to Mother as I expected but I never seen him — only his well loved voice I heard. He sit down out in the yard and stayed a long time but being an old cripple I couldn’t go out to even get a look at his sweet face. Oh Lord, how I would like to speak his dear name as I can write it but I dare not for none of the folks don’t like him a great deal. So I love him on in secret as I have so long. Dear boy, I love you — love you as I can love no other.”

In Search of Ed Haley 21

07 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Spottswood, Whirlwind

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Later that night, Lawrence, Pat and I talked more at the kitchen table. For reasons I cannot remember — but possibly because I was so determined to get at the root of the music — our conversation kept returning to the subject of Ed’s childhood and birthplace in West Virginia.

Pat said she first went to Harts Creek with Lawrence, Jack and Jack’s wife Patsy in the summer of 1951. Noah and his wife Janet also made the trip.

“We went up in Jack’s Packard,” she said. “Three in the front and three in the back, plus Beverly and two babies. It was a horrible ride and it was at night and all the way up there the boys was telling us what to expect. They was telling us that you better be careful because going up to Harts like that at night — strangers — they could shoot you in a minute. They told us there was a headless horseman that rode up and down that hollow and a screaming banshee and they told us if the creek was up we’d have to walk it. Patsy and I was scared to death.”

I asked about Aunt Liza, the lady who raised Ed.

“When we went up there the first time, Aunt Liza was living in the old log homeplace,” Pat said. “Aunt Liza, Little Liza, Joe and Stella lived there.”

Aunt Liza was Ed’s aunt, Lawrence said, while Joe was his first cousin. Joe was married to Stella and was a close relative to Little Liza.

The Haley trip was a real experience for Pat and her sisters-in-law.

“When we went up there, Joe had a couple of kids,” Pat said. “One was about two maybe and it was wearing a little gown and had this beautiful blonde curly hair. I picked it up and said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful girl you are,’ but when I raised it up I saw that it didn’t have a diaper on and was a little boy. Aunt Liza said Stella had just had a baby the day before and was ‘feeling puny.’ That was a new word to me. Oh, we asked to see the baby and they said it was in the bed. Well, we couldn’t find that baby because it was down in the feather bed. And what surprised us was that Stella was up and about.”

Pat remembered the trip fondly.

“They were very down-to-earth people and I’m assuming that very little had changed from the time Pop grew up there,” she said. “It was like the cowboy movies where they cooked on those wood stoves and the way they served it at that great, big wooden table. Little Liza and Aunt Liza cooked us a meal. The food was good.”

Pat said she and the rest of the Haley wives probably made a big impression on Aunt Liza and company as well.

“We were outside on the porch and Aunt Liza said she’d never seen anybody dressed like us,” she said, laughing. “I guess we looked like painted jezebels. We had make-up on and modern hairdos. Janet was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. I had a short-sleeved yellow dress on. Patsy’s was blue. Patsy used to wear a lot of make-up, always painted her fingernails. Janet didn’t wear too much make-up but she always dressed nice. She loved to wear those silk blouses, and they tied at the neck. I think something else that fascinated them: we weren’t smoking a pipe. Aunt Liza smoked a pipe.”

At one point, Pat said she was standing outside with the girls when this “funny boy” came up and scared them nearly to death. “We were outside when this boy came up through the yard making funny noises,” she said. “He got so excited — moreso than when we saw him — and touched Janet’s shoulder and she screamed bloody murder. Poor old Aunt Liza didn’t know what happened. And of course, Jack and Larry thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.”

Pat made another trip to Harts a short time later with Jack and Lawrence.

“Jack took a movie camera and filmed everybody,” she said. “It seems like Jack took some pictures inside the cabin but I’m not sure. I know he was taking pictures outside of Aunt Liza and Little Liza and Liza’s daughter. I believe they thought he was just taking pictures. When he got back to Cleveland, he had the film developed.”

Later, in 1956, Pat made another trip to Harts Creek with Lawrence, Jack and Patsy. At that time, Joe Mullins was living in the old log cabin and Aunt Liza had moved into her daughter’s home just down the creek. Next door was an old log home covered in dilapidated paneling, which was supposedly built by Ed’s father, Milt Haley.

“And then when we went back the third time, Jack had brought the film from the previous visit,” Pat said. “I can almost hear him now saying, ‘Now Aunt Liza, I’ve got something I want you to see.’ They put a sheet over a mirror that was on the side wall and when the movie started Aunt Liza got real excited and started pointing toward Little Liza and saying, ‘There’s you. That’s me.’ You could see their lips moving in the movie but there wasn’t any sound. And Little Liza got excited too.”

A highlight of the trip occurred when Pat found herself in a conversation with Aunt Liza. “I suppose listening to Aunt Liza and Little Liza and me trying to talk was like a foreign language. Old Aunt Liza was telling me all about her property and I’m talking to her and I’m thinking she is talking about land but she isn’t. She’s talking cattle, dogs, and the oxen. And Little Liza was talking about her daughter going to school. And we got on the subject of the meals and what did she take for lunch. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘she takes her lunch in the lard bucket and she put biscuits and cornbread and different things in it.’ And I asked her about her husband and she said, ‘We’re not certified,’ and I wasn’t really sure what that meant so I said, ‘Oh, Lawrence and I aren’t, either.'” On the way home, Lawrence asked her if she knew what she’d meant to say because Little Liza had meant that she and the girl’s father weren’t married.

Lawrence could tell that I was really interested in his father’s birthplace so he asked me if I would like to see it. I said I would love to — and was more than happy to provide the car and gasoline for such a trip.

Fleeting Years

07 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     The latter portion of Pearl’s second diary closes with a cluster of entries dated from February until June for an unknown year. Thereafter is a smattering of monthly entries.

     “No sadder or lonelier day ever passed over my old head,” Pearl wrote on February 7. “It will long be remembered by me. I never have hardly suffered as I did to day. My very heart was breaking. My yearning for what I knew not.”

     Pearl was obviously inspired to write by some misfortune, although she never specified the source of her troubles.

     “Oh God, what I suffered last night,” she continued the following day. “I cried till I couldn’t cry. No one seemed to notice my sorrow. Physical pain would be better than this some times.”

     Pearl’s happiness was at an all time low.

     “If I could have courage to go through with what I think of doing so often,” she wrote. “It’s a terrible thing to think of doing but I can’t. That would be far better than to suffer for maybe years on this old world of pain and woe. Lord help me to overcome my weakness of courage. Make me, dear Jesus, have something to want to live for. Oh Lord, help me to bear my troubles.”

     It seems, based on the above entry, that Pearl was perhaps contemplating suicide at that point in her life.

     “What a storm is brewing,” she wrote later in February. “The wind is roaring in the trees on top of the hill. The storm is on. The rain is pouring but the tempest out side is not much greater than the tempest in my breast. The storm is over. It is the beginning and ending of everything. Now, if I could only walk, my cup of happiness would be running over.”

     “Oh, the troubled sleep I had last night,” she wrote the following day, on a Wednesday. “The snow is falling so fast and the ground is covered every where. The beautiful snow. This reminded me of a day some years ago, those short fleeing years for me. I was just a kid then and with a kid’s thoughts my future was beautifully paved then but that was short lived.”

     “Today I was sitting alone in the kitchen by the stove with the odor of soup beans going up my nose,” Pearl next wrote in an undated entry. “Mama’s voice floats in on my hearing, singing ‘Shady Grove’ to the baby. Cora is over at Inez’s in bed a groaning with her side. Marg’s wanting a new hat. All of these things is passing through my jumbled up brain. I only wish my good old Friend would come for a talk to me so much. I can’t think.”

In Search of Ed Haley 20

07 Friday Dec 2012

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Later that evening, Lawrence and I went to see J.P. Fraley. On the way, he told me more about his father’s recordings.

“Well, he depended on my brother Ralph to tap him on the shoulder when he wanted him to start, and when he was getting near the end of the disc he’d tap him again, see? And Pop, sometimes he’d stop right then, cut it off real short, and then sometimes he’d go to the end of that run and hit that shave and a haircut at the end of it. Sometimes it sounded like he was gonna quit, see? Ralph hadn’t give him the signal that they was close to the end of the recording, so you can hear a little bit of hesitation at times. I thought Mom was getting ready to stop, too.”

Lawrence figured the records were made in the daytime but wasn’t sure of the time of year. “I guess the good part of maybe one spring or something because I was in the service and I wasn’t home.”

At the time of the recordings, Ed was no longer playing professionally. “He’d go out, like I say, a few times. Somebody’d come and get him, take him somewhere. He thought, ‘Well, if they’re gonna have a good time, I’ll go up and play for them and have a good time with them.’ As time went on, the older he got, the harder it was to get him to go. I guess he was having more trouble with his circulatory system.”

At J.P.’s, we met Virgil Alfrey and Chillson Leach, two old-time fiddlers from around Ashland. Virgil began playing the fiddle as a boy of twelve in the early thirties, around the time he used to see Ed in Williamson, West Virginia. The last time he saw him there he reached Ed a dollar and requested “Fisher’s Hornpipe”. Haley recognized his voice, played the tune then tried to give his dollar back because he liked him.

Chillson Leach, an 83-year-old retired rigger from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, had been playing the fiddle since he was nine years old.

“Uncle Ed was one of the best fiddlers in this country,” he said. “He would get an audience in front of him and he kinda knowed that they was a lot of people by the sound of the money they throwed in his cup. And he’d say, ‘People, they’s a mental strain and a physical strain on playing the violin.’ Now that’s what he would tell them. He wanted them to know that he was earning his money when he was a playing that violin. And lord, when he would pull that bow across that fiddle he’d get some of the prettiest notes that ever you heard in your life. His fingers was long and slim and as nimble right up I reckon till he died.”

Lawrence, who was taking all of this in, said, “Pretty close. He slowed down the last five or six years.”

Chillson said, “Yeah but when I knowed him, my goodness, he’d get way down on that neck. Any position you wanted him to play. He was wonderful. It’s a shame that a person has to die. I’d give him a quarter and I’d say, ‘Play that ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and he played that for me and man he could just make your hair stand on your head. And then he played a lot of reels, you know. He could play anything you’d ask him: ‘Turkey in the Straw’, ‘Arkansas Traveler’.”

Chillson was obviously a fan.

“I just thought the world of him because he entertained everybody in Ashland,” he said. “He had a blind fellow that played the guitar with him and this blind fellow would sit there and man they’d make some pretty music.”

On the way home, Lawrence told me that his father hated to play “Turkey in the Straw”.

Pearl’s Last Request

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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     In August 1925, Pearl’s diary resumed, at first with a small upbeat entry.

     “Pearl and I all alone talking our secrets,” wrote sister-in-law Inez Adkins on the evening of August 3. “Best friends on earth.”

     Following this happy note, Pearl’s writings turned depressingly morbid.

     “My last request,” she wrote on August 14. “I don’t feel that I shall be here so very long at the longest. Friends or relatives, when I die, I want to be buried anywhere where the rest of the family is buried. I want a white casket (a coffin will do). Cover it with white satin if you can’t get white. Any other nice white good will do but I would rather have it satin. I want a white shadow lace dress with a narrow white ribbon — not more than four of them. I want a light blue princess slip. If you can’t get the lace dress, get a georgetta crepe. If you can’t get crepe, get white satin. Put two rows of lace up the front and small bows of ribbon up the front too, or you can have streamers at the neck. Get them as near as you can if you are able to buy them. Buy what I said. Buy as near to it as you can. Comb my hair like I wear it in life. Powder me first a little bit. Remember Pearl.”

     Then came one of the more powerful entries in the entire diary.

     “No, there is not the slightest hope I shall ever be any better than I am now. It is not a pleasant prospect. It is just the thought of it at times that makes me worse. There is days and weeks at a time I don’t want to see any one. My sister tells me it is more my temper than my misfortune that afflicts me and perhaps she is right. I hate people because they expect me to see a blessing direct from God. In fact I am nothing more than a miserable clod on the face of the earth. I wish I could have a house all to myself where I could do as I please. None of them don’t seem to understand me or my way and I need some one to stay with me that could really understand me.”

     “We could live an ideal existence,” Pearl continued, shifting the direction of her thoughts toward the object of her affections. “Nothing would please me better. I am sort of death’s head at home. I’m nothing but an annoyance and a burden to mother. I expect they would be glad if I could make a change like that. I could never be with out you. I don’t know how I ever did get along with out you as long as I did. It seems to me my life must have been cruelly empty. I love you very dearly — you have done more for me than talked with me. I think you have very near saved my soul for I was becoming very hard and bitter when you came. God has surely sent us to each other. You must think that my deformety is all I have to bear.”

     “When God made the cripple he made the mistake of implanting in the poor deformed breast a heart like that which other people have — a heart to love,” Pearl wrote. “Hush, that is something that ought to be buried as deeply from sight as the heart itself. I am a fool to even give it a breath of air to feed upon. Does one think there is no design in that? Do you believe that I shut myself in these four walls because I despise all the world for its strength and beauty? I am not quite as bad as that. Perhaps it is my physical condition that makes me so very weak…; but I can not endure to look upon his face, to hear him speak in his kindly tone to me to know that the only feeling in his soul is pity; and but for that I should be less to him than the very dirt beneath his feet. Oh God! Do you think there is nothing in such suffering as mine? Can you see no further into it than the mere pain that rocks my wretched body? I can tell you it is ghostly. I cannot bear even to look into his face because I know that I shall see there the pitying smile that has grown hideous to me. To know that it can never be different! That I must be like an accursed log until I die, arousing nothing more than pity in the breast of any one. I should at least have the memories of the past — happiness to feed my empty heart. I could look back and say, ‘I was happy then.’ Oh it would be so much! So much! My life.”

In Search of Ed Haley 19

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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On the way home in the car, Lawrence told a story about his father getting drunk and trying to find his way home one winter night.

“We lived on Halbert Street,” he said. “The Prices down the street took Pop off somewhere or brought him back to their house and turned him loose after he got real good and drunk. Well, he was coming home by himself. It might have been two or three city blocks. He was walking on this blacktop street but he was so drunk and it was pretty cold weather, too, and he just fell over in the ditch and went to sleep. They found him the next day at daylight. They said if he hadn’t been drunk he would’ve froze to death. That was way back I guess when I was a baby.”

A hard picture began to emerge: alcohol, music, meanness and the desolation it produces. Lawrence, however, emphasized that his father was actually a happy person who lived an eventful life.

“These people that put these jackets on these albums and things, they take a tune like ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ and make it out like my dad should play a piece of music like that because that was his place in life: being a poor old down-and-out blind man — that he lived the life of ‘constant sorrow,'” he said. “That’s the way they make these tunes seem: that should be maybe my dad’s signature tune or something, playing a dirge like that. When really he enjoyed life and had a good time whenever it could be had. If he had somebody to carouse with, he’d carouse as long as they would and probably wear three or four people out.”

I said, “I get the feeling that as well as he played the dirges, that his favorite stuff was like ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Ida Red’.”

Lawrence agreed, “Yeah, and he enjoyed people dancing. My brother Clyde, I guess he stayed around Pop a lot and he could call any of those ‘birdie in the cage’-type clogging square dance. The old hoedown square dance. He lives in California. He’s in Stockton somewhere out there, or was the last time I heard.”

I wondered if it would be okay to call him.

“Yeah,” Lawrence said, “if Pat has his number at the house.”

In Search of Ed Haley 18

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Lawrence and I drove to an Ashland restaurant where I asked more about Haley’s background between bites of seafood. I was desperate for clues about his early musical experience.

Just where did he learn to play?

Lawrence said his dad was like other mountain folks: music “absolutely come freely to these people.” He said, “A lot of people think old-time music is a simple art form because so many people that play it have a poor educational background. These people think, ‘If they can learn to play it, it has to be a simple thing to do.’ But it’s actually a complicated business.”

A little later, I asked him about Clark Kessinger and Charleston, West Virginia.

“I been to Charleston with Pop a few times, but if Clark Kessinger was around he never let Pop know,” he said. “He’d probably request a tune from him. Of course, Pop was pretty sharp on voices, too. He recognized a lot of people just by their voice. If Clark come up and requested a piece of music from him, Dad probably knew it. He never said anything to me about it. We were just kids.”

I said, “Well, Clark Kessinger studied your dad close. Of course, he knew what good fiddling was.”

“You have to give him credit for that,” Lawrence said, taking a bite of fish.

So Close

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

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     The second volume of Pearl’s diary is filled with entries that specify a month but not a year. Chronologically, it appears a hopeless case, however there are two main clusters of writing periods, from February to March and from February to June. It’s not clear if these are overlapping time frames or if they refer to spring months for different years.

     The bulk of the material seems to take place in 1925.

     Volume 2 begins on January 30, 1925 when Pearl wrote this: “My heart is just as heavy as on that sad day. I’ve lost almost all interest in life.”

     Her dissatisfaction with life more than likely had something to do with her inability to find a companion, which she blamed on her handicap.

     “Sunday morning dawned cold and blue,” she wrote in February. “I had a feeling he was coming. I had not long to wait for he came real early. To my surprise he came in and set down so near me that I could have kicked him with my foot. He got up for some thing and when he set down again he set down on a bed that my chair was tilted back again. He was so clost that time his knee was against my knee. If he had only knew how I loved him and how his nearness caused my heart to beat wildly, he might not have set so clost to me and caused me to suffer untold misery. He got up to spit and motioned for a girl that was there to get in his place. Of course, I would have much rather for my darling boy to sit there as her but I couldn’t stand it no longer. I was afraid Cora would come in and see my confused look and guess the cause of my blushed face. As I have said she didn’t like him. Probably would talk about him. I would rather for them all to talk about him than her for she can say such hurtful things. No body likes to hear some one they love talked about. I love him and I can’t help it. Oh Lord, grant my earnest prayer. Cause him, oh Lord, to love me as I love him.”

     The mysterious object of Pearl’s affection was clearly the primary motive for her taking up a pencil and recording her thoughts.

     “Sunday morning all gone but just mother, Inez and me,” Pearl wrote in March. “I was primping up a little. I had one shoe on and one off when some one knocked at the door. Inez jumped to open it and who should it be but my sweet dream boy who came in smiling so happily and as always sit down facing me again and what causes him to sit down facing me always so clost too I can’t tell. It all happens just as if I had planned it out with him but a higher power rules our feeling. It must be the Lord’s will. I should love [name omitted] but he never speaks to me no more than if I wasn’t in miles of him but I would rather that than pity from my dear for I couldn’t stand it. Well, he didn’t stay long.”

     “News of a joyous nature but not satisfying,” Pearl wrote later in March, “but it will be after while. Every little drought is sweetened by… Aw, I don’t know what.”

     “Diary dear, you are the only thing I can tell my days and sorrows to,” Pearl wrote even later in March, “but it has been some time since I have told you any thing much of interest.”

     In the subsequent months of early summer, Pearl took a break from her diary-keeping, preferring instead to scribble down various items of interest.

     “The happier persons are those who don’t have much sense and don’t seem to know it,” Pearl wrote.

     Poems followed.

     “If to me your heart is true, send me back my bow of blue. If of me you sometimes think, send me back my bow of pink. If for me your love is dead, send me back my bow of red. If you do not wish me back, then send this bow of black.”