Monthly Archives: February 2013

In Search of Ed Haley 74

28 Thursday Feb 2013

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     Mona said Ed loved playing for square dances because he could have a few drinks. If he drank too much he “slid” a lot of screeching notes, seldom finished a tune and cursed like he was “disgusted with the whole world.”

     Noah, who had been sitting quietly by, said Ed didn’t play “real good” when he was drunk — that he played “real slow.”

     Lawrence said, “I was telling John that Pop could cuss a man all to pieces with his fiddle if he wanted to.”

     Mona laughed, “Yeah, or with his mouth either. Pop could cuss the hat off your head. One time we lived there on 17th Street. The railroad trains went by and there was a crossing there, of course. They blew at every crossing. He’d get so mad sometimes, he’d say, ‘Them god almighty goddamn trains just stick their horns in these windows and blow as loud as they can.’ And that was his kind of talk.”

     Mona had terrible memories of Ed mistreating her mother. It was a tense moment as Lawrence listened to her reminisce about a part of Ed’s life that he would have probably rather kept secret.

     “That’s what I remember about him,” Mona said. “Not his music and not him — just how he treated Mom.”

     I told her that I liked a man who wasn’t perfect and she said, “Well, he was far from being perfect. He was a perfect fiddler, I think.”

     She looked at Lawrence and said, “He knows Mom and Pop was divorced, don’t he?”

     No, I said.

     “Well, they were,” she said. “What year was it, Lawrence? 1943 or ’44. We still lived on 17th Street.”

     Lawrence thought his parents had only separated but Mona was sure that Judge Imes actually granted a divorce. Afterwards, Ed went back to Logan County, West Virginia, where he played music and saved up a whole change-purse full of money. After Mona had convinced him to come home, he rattled his change-purse to Ella and said, “I’ve got this plumb full of fifty-cent pieces and I’ll give them all to you if you’ll just let me sit by your fire this winter.”

     “It was just pitiful,” Mona said. “I’m glad I took him home.”

     I asked if Ed and Ella ever remarried and Lawrence said no, that there was a “bed and board” arrangement where Ed only slept and ate in the home. Mona felt her parents got along better after their divorce, implying some sort of reconciliation, while Lawrence remembered Ed giving young women small bottles of “Radio Girl” perfume he bought at a five and dime store.

     Not long after Ed’s return to Ashland, he made the home recordings.

     “Ralph made all those original records, you know,” Mona said. “I can see that now. He was cutting them and his wife Margaret was taking a brush and brushing that plastic off as that needle was cutting. He had to touch Pop on the shoulder when to start and when to quit.”

     “I guess you heard me in some of those records, didn’t you?” she asked me. “I was strumming a flat-back mandolin. Mom was playing on accordion, Ralph guitar, Pop the fiddle.”

     I asked Mona which tunes she liked the best from Ed’s repertoire.

     “I liked those fast ones that Pop and Ralph played, like ‘Down Yonder’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’,” she said. “And there’s a lot of them not on record that they sang, like ‘Little White-washed Chimney’. He played ‘Kentucky Waltz’ and ‘The Waltz You Saved For Me’ and ‘Beautiful Ohio’. He played a lot of Irish tunes — jigs. ‘Humphrey’s Jig’ was on that album wasn’t it? He played ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’. He played ‘Take Me Home Again Kathleen’ and sang it. And another one he played was ‘When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget Me’.”

     Just as I thought we were about to get into some heavy music dialogue, Mona said, “Oh, I didn’t tell you about that time we went up Durbin Creek in the flood. Jack was home on leave from the Navy and it flooded up 37th Street and we went up Durbin to Manuel Martin’s. That’s Nora Martin’s husband. Lived up there then. We had to walk up the Big Sandy Railroad then over a mountain. Pop had brought some eggs from the house in his pocket and he fell down and broke his eggs and he just set there and cried. He said, ‘Oh god.’ And Mom just trudged along like a trooper.”

     In Ed’s later years, he grew a beard and didn’t bath because “it was a waste of water.” He would seldom play the fiddle for Mona when she visited from South Point, Ohio. He was pretty bitter about music, especially what was broadcast over the radio in those days.

     “Did your daddy like Bill Monroe?” I asked.

     “I don’t think so,” she said.

     “He didn’t like too much bluegrass,” Lawrence said.

     “Did your Dad ever talk about or listen to anybody like Roy Acuff or did he ever listen to the Grand Ole Opry?” I asked.

     “I don’t think he’d have much to do with Roy Acuff,” Lawrence said.

     Mona said, “He listened to the Grand Ole Opry some and he said that if he’d been a showman like Natchee the Indian — playing under his leg and behind his back and all that — he could’ve made it.”

     “He didn’t much care for Natchee, did he?” I asked.

     “No, he didn’t like Natchee,” Mona said. “He didn’t like the show-offs. He was a straight fiddler. But a lot of people thought he was great. That Jesse Stuart wrote that poem about him. I guess he thought he was great, too.”

     Mona thought the last time Pop played was with Bill Bowler in Ironton, Ohio. He died not too long afterward at 2144 Greenup Avenue.

     “When he was in the funeral home, somebody took Mom up to say her last goodbye,” Mona said. “She put her hand on him and she said, ‘Well goodbye, Ed. I’ll see you sometime, somewhere.'”

     After Ed’s death, Ella gave their records, which had been wrapped and put in storage, to the children. Mona lost a few of hers when she sent them to Clyde, who was incarcerated at San Quentin in California (“he never brought them back with him”). Around 1956, she lost the rest after leaving them in a trunk at the home of a good friend Dorothy Bates in Ironton. She later came back to get the trunk but Dorothy had moved away.

     “I was young and full of, you know, whatever,” she said. “Going here and there. Traipsing around the country and leaving everything. I lost pictures and I lost those records and I lost a lot of stuff by just leaving it here and there. I would have never sold mine, or pawned them, or whatever. I treasured mine, but evidently not well enough.”

     I asked Mona if she thought Dorothy Bates had kept her things, and she said she doubted it because “she was flighty.”

In Search of Ed Haley 73

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in African American History, Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, Logan, Music, Sports

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Mona’s memories were really pouring out, about a variety of things. I asked her what Ed was like and she said, “Noah is a lot like Pop in a way. He always liked the outdoors, Pop did. He’d get out and sleep on the porch at night. He could peel an apple without breaking the skin. There was an old man up on Harts Creek and I’m almost sure that his name was Devil Anse Hatfield and Pop trimmed his fingernails out on his porch with his pocketknife. Aw, he could trim my nails or yours or anybody’s.”

Ed was good at predicting the future.

“Pop said machines was gonna take over man’s work and we was gonna go to the moon one day,” Mona said. She figured he wrote the song “Come Take A Trip in My Airship” because it sounded like his kind of foresight.

Mona said she remembered some of Ed’s stories but warned me that I wouldn’t want to hear them.

Of course, I did.

I asked her if they were off-color and she said, “Well, not really, but he was kind of an off-color guy. I can’t really remember any of the tales about him. What was that one about him dreaming he was on Fox Cod Knob and dragging a big log chain and he fell over a big cliff and when he come to hisself he was standing on his head on a chicken coop with his legs locked around a clothes line?”

What?

“He told some weird stories sometimes — ghost stories and things that I can’t remember,” she continued. “He told that story about Big Foot up in the hills of Harts Creek. A wild banshee. Pop talked about it. Clyde said he saw a Big Foot.”

Lawrence said, “It was up in the head of the Trace Fork of Harts Creek somewhere. Pop was on the back of this horse behind somebody. They was coming down through there and all at once something jumped up on back of the horse behind him and it was just rattling chains all the way down through there and the more that chain rattled the faster that horse would go. They absolutely run that horse almost to death getting away from it.”

I asked about Ed’s travels. Mona said her parents walked and hitchhiked a lot. Along the way, Ella sang to occupy the kids. Lawrence remembered buses and trains, where Ed sometimes played the fiddle for a little extra money from passengers. I asked if he ever talked about playing on any boats and Mona said, “No, but I know they did because I was with them on the ISLAND QUEEN that was going back and forth to Coney Island. Up by the calliope on the top deck.”

Mona said Ed always set up in towns near a movie theatre so the kids could watch movies.

“Every time he played he drawed a crowd,” she said. “He was loud and he was good. I never seen him play any that he didn’t have a crowd around him — anywhere.”

Ed was “all business” but would talk to people if they came up to him.

“One time we went in a beer joint up in Logan, West Virginia, that sat by the railroad tracks,” she said. “They played over at the courthouse and we walked over there. Pop wanted to get a beer while I ate supper. It was back when Roosevelt was president I reckon and he got in an argument with some guy about President Roosevelt. That was his favorite fella, you know. This guy started a fight with him and he backed off and walked away. Pop just let the man walk the length of his cane, hooked it around his neck, brought him back and beat him nearly to death. He was strong. He was dangerous if he ever got a hold of you, if he was mad at you. He always carried a pocketknife and it was sharp as a razor. He whittled on that knife — I mean, sharpened it every day.”

“Everybody liked Pop — everybody that I ever knew,” Mona said. “He had some pretty high people as friends.”

In Logan County, Ed visited Pink and Hester Mullins on Mud Fork and Rosie Day’s daughter Nora Martin in Aracoma. Mona said Ed was also friends with a famous boxer in town whose father played the fiddle, but she couldn’t remember his name. I later learned from Lawrence that it was Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1919-1926. Dempsey wrote in his biography that his father had fiddled “Turkey in the Straw” so much that all the children thought it was the National Anthem.

Ed mixed freely with some of the colored folks in Logan, and sometimes even left Mona at a “bootleg joint” operated by a black lady named Tootsie. She and Lawrence both felt Ed absorbed a lot of the Blues from the blacks in the coalfields. Mona sang one of her father’s songs — which I had never heard — to make the point:

Done got the [ma]chines in my mind, Lord, Lord.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

‘Chines in my mind and I can’t make a dime.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

 

My old gal got mad at me.

I never did her any harm.

‘Chines in my mind and I can’t make a dime.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

In Search of Ed Haley 72

24 Sunday Feb 2013

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We all met up with Mona later in the day. She acted surprised that I was even interested in seeing her again, joking, “I’m good for something, aren’t I?” She was extremely talkative and almost immediately took over the conversation in a way that gave me the impression she really knew a great deal about Ed and Ella’s music. It was quite a different presentation than my first meeting with her.

“See my brothers don’t know about music like I know about music,” she said right away. “They know the tunes and they know the keys and stuff, but I don’t think they listened like I did. I paid attention to Pop’s music because I love music. I always loved music.”

She told Lawrence, “You don’t have the ear for it like I do.”

It was the first time I had heard someone be so candid with Lawrence. He seemed a little put off by it, muttering, “Probably not.”

We told Mona about talking with Bob Adkins and she said, “Pop’s mother was supposed to had the whole side of her face blown away. Now whether she was killed or not, I don’t know. That happened on Harts Creek and that’s what made Milt Haley get in with Green McCoy ’cause one of the Hatfields shot my dad’s mother’s face away. Side of her face. Well now, that’s how I understood it. But I’ve heard it said about that sinkhole that fills up with blood where that Milt Haley and Green McCoy was beat to death — buried in the same grave — and every time it rains, the grave fills up with blood.”

Noah said of Milt, “Well, ain’t he the guy that shot the person that shot Pop’s mom in the face? I thought Pop’s dad shot and killed the guy that shot his mother in the face.”

Mona wasn’t sure about that but said, “I know that Pop said that if he could see, he would get the guy that hurt his mother. Shot her. Her name was Emma Jean.”

Mona was sure the measles had caused her father to go blind, not Milt or ice water.

“No,” she said emphatically, “Ice water wouldn’t make you go blind. He had the measles.”

She said Ed started playing the fiddle when he was small and never talked about learning from anyone.

“Did you know that he started out on a cornstalk homemade fiddle?” she asked me. “I heard that his uncle or somebody up in the hills made him a cornstalk fiddle. Musta been Uncle Peter, I don’t know. Uncle Peter was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards.”

Noah said, “He was a mean one, too.”

Mona knew little else about Ed’s life on Harts Creek.

“I don’t know if I told you about him talking about… As a young boy he was sitting on one of those log fences that goes this way — zig-zag, I call it — and it was a bull pasture inside. And he always carried a pistol with him. For what, I don’t know. It was a bull pasture fence he was sitting on and he was playing his little cornstalk fiddle and somebody come back behind him and was playing a joke on him by acting like a bull — you know, making noises like a bull. So Pop pulled that pistol out and shot and missed him by about an inch.”

Mona was quick to mention Ella, pointing out that “she figures in a lot of this, too.” I agreed, of course, but hadn’t been able to find out much about her from Lawrence, who seemed to keep his memories of her to himself. Every time Pat brought her name up, he said things like, “John doesn’t want to hear about Mom — he wants to know about Pop.” He always said it in a straightforward way that I knew to basically avoid the subject, as did Pat.

Mona said her parents met when Ella came to one of Ed’s “concerts”.

“I remember a lot of things about Mom,” she said. “Me and Mom was close. She walked around to feel if there was dirt on the floor — to see if it was clean — and if it wasn’t heads would roll. And she could cook. I remember back, I guess, during the Depression, her making lard cans full of soup so she could feed the neighbors and she had big bread pans full of cornbread for the dogs. And she could type as good as any typist.”

Mona looked at Lawrence and said, “Remember that whistle she had for us? It was like a calliope whistle. It was plastic or tin or something. And every one of us had a different tune. Each one of us knew our tunes. Different note.”

Mona’s pride in Ed and Ella seemed a little more on-the-surface than what I had detected with Lawrence.

“If there was a movie made, then there should’ve been one made about that — two blind people raising kids,” she said. “I’m just in awe of them and how they took care of all of us kids. They kept food and they kept shelter for us and we never went hungry. And they kept clothes on us. And I just don’t know how they done it. We always had a stable home. They always kept us occupied. We’d sit around in the wintertime and they’d give us soda crackers and apples and tell us to take a bite of one of them and then try to say a tongue twister.”

Mona said, “And we’re all reasonably intelligent,” although she jokingly pointed out that there were “some rogues in the family.”

Noah smiled and said, “I don’t know but one rogue.”

Mona knew exactly who he meant, so she told me, “That’s my other brother Clyde he’s talking about. He’s a rogue, but he’s all right.”

She said she was probably the real rogue of the family.

“Mom was real strict with me, but I was pretty head-strong,” she said. “I was rougher than all the boys put together, I reckon. At least that’s what they told me.”

In Search of Ed Haley 71

23 Saturday Feb 2013

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     The next day, Lawrence and I dropped in on Noah and told him about our intentions to find Milt Haley’s grave on Harts Creek. He said he had gone to Harts some time ago only to find that everyone who ever knew his father had passed away. Lawrence said Joe Mullins was still around so far as he knew. Joe was a first cousin to Ed and the son of Uncle Peter Mullins…as well as Lawrence’s major source of information about his father’s early life.

     “Well, he should know quite a bit about Pop,” Noah said. “He sure defended him.”

     He looked at me and said, “Pop would get drunk — drunker’n dickens. He’d start on Mom and us kids would take up for Mom. Then Joe would jump all over us. Joe and Noah both would.”

     Noah, Lawrence explained, was referring here to Noah Mullins, a first cousin to his dad and a brother to Joe. Noah Haley was named after him, although it seemed apparent to me he thought more of his mother’s people than his father’s on Harts Creek.

     “Joe should know a lot about those things,” Noah continued. “He knows when we used to get moonshine out of them hills.”

     Well, that was an interesting subject to open with — very different from my talks with Lawrence. I could sense that Noah had brought up a touchy subject with Lawrence — domestic problems and alcohol — but I wanted to know a little more. I asked Noah if Ed drank a lot in his early days and he said, “Well, if somebody’d give it to him, he’d drink, yeah. He’d get stone drunk. But he didn’t drink unless somebody’d give it to him. He was meaner than hell when he was drinking.”

     Unlike Lawrence and Mona, Noah seemed to have no musical inclination whatsoever.

     “Well, the only thing I can show you, he never held the fiddle under his neck. He held it right here,” he said, motioning toward his arm. “That’s about all I can tell you about him holding the fiddle. Of course, when he’d come across this way with the bow, he’d make two chords instead of one with one streak across the bow.”

     Make two notes in other words?

     “Yeah, two chords or notes or whatever you call them.”

     Lawrence said, “I was telling John that Pop could play the banjo real good, too.”

     Noah quickly agreed, “Yeah, he could play the banjo, he could play guitar, he could play a mandolin — any kind of a stringed instrument, just about.”

     Noah remembered Ed living at several different places around Ashland.

     “I was born on Horse Branch,” he said. “We lived in three different places on Keyes Creek — maybe four. Then we lived at Ward Hollow. Then we lived on 17thStreet. We lived in two places on Greenup.”

     Noah told me about Ed and Ella going downtown to play on the streets.

     “Soon as they could get a ride downtown, that’s when they’d go. It would be kinda early, before two o’clock. Sometimes the’d have quite a few people standing around listening to them. And of course, they played for just change that people’d give them. Sometimes they’d have ten, fifteen people standing around wanting them to play a piece of music. He’d never play the same song unless somebody would, you know, give him a quarter or a dime or a nickel or something to suggest a song for him to play, then he might play the same one he just played. Sometimes they would play a couple three hours and then they’d go eat or go to the restroom or whatever. And then they’d come back and play another two or three hours.”

     Lawrence said his oldest brother Ralph was a part of the act during the First World War.

     “There’s a picture of Ralph in a little jumpsuit type of thing and they said he’d be up on a stage,” he said. “Pop and Mom might be playing and he would dance around up here on that stage with them and then when he’d get ready to come off of it he’d stand on the edge and do a flip and come off on his feet.”

     Noah said, “Yeah, Ralph always was acrobatic.”

     I said, “Well that’s what got him, wasn’t it?” and Noah said, “Yeah, hanging by his toes from a tree about two feet from the ground. He slipped and broke his neck. But he always was acrobatic. He could run and make a complete turnover. His whole body.”

     Noah said Ed never played on the street at night, allotting that time for square dances. I asked him how much he made per dance and he said, “I don’t know, maybe he’d go play at a dance, he’d get, sometimes, maybe five dollars. He wouldn’t get a whole lot. Hell, a dollar a day then did what ten does today. I remember Ralph, our brother, going out and working for a dollar a day. If they made a dollar a day — or two dollars a day — they was doing good enough to keep us surviving.”

     I said, “So, by today’s standards, it would’ve been like making twenty dollars a day?” and Noah agreed, “I would guess so, yeah.”

     Lawrence added, “It was according to economic times.”

     Noah didn’t hesitate to brag on his father.

     “I think they come there one time from the Grand Ole Opry and wanted him to come play on it and he wouldn’t go,” he said. “I went with them a lot of times when they was playing at the courthouses. They worked all over West Virginia — Beckley. Well, they went downtown here in Ironton. You know we’d take a bus everywhere we’d go. We didn’t have no car. We’d generally stay with friends there up around Logan or Harts Creek.”

     Speaking of Harts Creek, I wondered if Ed had ever talked about learning to play the fiddle from anyone around there. Noah said no — “he just took it up hisself when he was a kid.” He and Lawrence both agreed that Ed never talked about his early life and only seldom mentioned his parents.

     “The only thing I know about my grandfather on my father’s side is about him shooting this guy and they killed him,” Noah said. “Shot his wife through the mouth, I think it was. I think Pop said it was. And then his dad went after this guy with a pistol, killed him, and somebody killed his dad, is the way I heard it. But he never did confide much in anything like that with us.”

     Well, that sure was a different version of things from what Lawrence had initially heard from his dad — and it was much closer to the truth.

Parkersburg Landing 70

22 Friday Feb 2013

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     Later that evening, Lawrence showed a 1989 home movie of him reminiscing with Clyde, Noah and Mona about their father at Christmas. I immediately focused in on Clyde, a natural storyteller who swooped his arms at just the right moments and embellished every detail. He mostly talked about Ed getting into a fight with someone named Frank Creech.

     “Frank’s the one that Pop put the chair rungs down around his head and was choking him to death till Ralph got him,” Clyde said. “Frank said something pretty nasty to Mom about keeping her mouth shut. Boy, he no sooner got it outta his mouth than Pop had that cane-bottom chair right down across the top of his head. Pop reached through there with his left hand — I’ll remember it just as plain as if it was happening right now — and got his throat with his left hand, and then he was reaching for his Barlow knife in the pocket of his old coat and Ralph got the knife out of his hand.”

     Pat said Clyde reminded her of Ed the most on the tape but pointed out that “Pop was a bigger man than Clyde. He had a heavier face. When he died, I would say he weighed about 180. He was a tall man — 5’11”, something like that. He had very blue eyes. They were very cloudy. If you were speaking to him, you would think he was looking at you. He had peculiar facial expressions.”

     Pat said she and Lawrence had told Clyde about me — that he was somewhere near Stockton, California.

     “Well, he was there for, I would say, eighteen months and he hangs around all the rough, low-down places,” she said.

     What about Noah?

     “Noah is an eccentric,” Pat said, a little later when Lawrence was out of ear shot. “Noah is a gambler. He has a very good income every month and it makes me angry because he draws twice as much as Larry and he blows it all away and when they’re in trouble they come to Larry. Of course, he won’t turn them down. He just doesn’t want to know anything about them. Noah will stop in here once in a while. I think Noah looks a lot like Pop.”

Parkersburg Landing 69

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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     That night, I played some of Ed’s tunes for Lawrence in his kitchen. In spite of the great story opening up about Milt Haley, I didn’t lose sight of the music and my quest to understand it. As I played, Lawrence was brutally honest.

     “Notice how you’re using a fourth of the bow?” he said. “Pop played all over it.”

     “Did you hear a few real strong driving notes in that and then some really weak ones that didn’t hardly get out?” he asked.

     “Pretty good — but never just like my dad,” he stated flatly.

     The closest I came to gaining his approval was when I played “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

     “You got a pretty good version of that,” he said. “Nothing too wrong with that.”

     “Your cannons sounded very good,” Pat added politely.

     When I played Ed’s “Red Apple Rag”, Lawrence said there was one part — what I call the “House of David Blues” part — that didn’t belong in the song, even though I knew Ed had played it there in the home recordings. He remembered his father playing “House of David Blues” as a separate tune and singing:

Bring it on down to my house honey,
Ain’t nobody home but me.
Bring it on down to my house honey,
I need the company.

Now a nickel is a nickel
And a dime’s a dime.
You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
Bring it on down to my house honey,
Ain’t nobody home but me.

     I asked again about Haley’s banjo and Pat said she remembered that it was still around when she first came to Ashland in the late 1940s. She thought it belonged to Ella, but Lawrence said, “No, Mom played what they call a banjo-mandolin. It wasn’t too many years that I remember her playing one. Pop probably had a banjo. He’d just as soon sit down and play the banjo a lot of times. Or he’d play the guitar a lot. He played it like he did the fiddle. He’d make runs and everything else. He could sit down and play a organ or piano if he wanted to. I’ve seen him sit down on that old pump organ we had and he’d start pumping and he’d just play it for a while.”

     I wondered if Ed’s talent as, or even fondness for, being a multi-instrumentalist had been somewhat overstated. It seemed a little odd that, among the hundreds of home recordings, there was not one single sample of him playing anything but the fiddle. Of course, I didn’t bring this up to Lawrence because I totally believed him. Besides, he seemed a little cranky.

     Pat said she remembered Ed playing something about “going down the Mississippi” and Lawrence said it was the “Battle of New Orleans”.

     “Pop used to play that a long time ago,” he said. “That and ‘Soldier’s Joy’ and all those old pieces like that. ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and ‘Mississippi Sawyer’.”

In Search of Ed Haley 68

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

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The next day, Al and his posse headed for Hugh Dingess’ “great old big house” on Harts Creek. Bob’s mother Brooke Dingess was a witness to events that followed.

“They stayed all night there and they wanted to be awful sure that they were right, you know,” Bob said. “See, they didn’t want to kill somebody that was innocent. Well they took Haley outside and put handcuffs behind him and gagged him so he couldn’t make a noise and stuck a gun in his back and told him if he made any noise they’d shoot him, see? And a funny thing happened out there, though. He broke loose from them and pretty near got away.

“And then they told McCoy that they had taken Milton down there to hang in the orchard, and if he had anything to say he had better be saying it, see? He broke down and cried and he told them the truth about it. And he told them that they pulled straws on which one would do the shooting and it fell on Green and he got sick — vomited — and he just couldn’t do it. So Haley said, ‘You ain’t got no nerve. Give me the gun and I’ll do it.’ And he claimed Haley was the one that shot. He didn’t do it.”

As if to prove his story, Green then said something to the effect of, “You go down there and check at that sinkhole and you’ll see a pile of shavings that I whittled with my long razor.”

Bob said, “Well, Haley came out and cursed McCoy and told him he didn’t have any nerve and said everything to him. Said that fellow just cried and said, ‘Now, you know I’m telling every bit the truth.'”

Bob said the mob was convinced by McCoy’s confession, but I felt it had a few holes in it. First of all, what if Green skewed the truth by blaming everything on Milt — who he thought was dead — in the hopes of saving his own life? Second of all, why would he and Milt have only had one gun between them for their ambush? Of course, maybe these details were worked out by subsequent confessions not remembered by any living person today. In any case, the mob was apparently satisfied.

Bob said, “They didn’t do anything to them there. They weren’t nobody’s fool, now. They didn’t want any murder going on around their home; then it would be too easy to pin it on them. They’d go to somebody else’s home.”

Bob said his aunt Catherine Fry — an eyewitness to subsequent events — told him the rest of the story about Milt’s murder. He said she was nineteen years old at the time and lived at the mouth of Green Shoal on the Guyandotte River. She said a mob arrived at her home during the night and woke her from her sleep.

“Well, Cat said the first thing she knew she was sitting in the living room — the front room, you know,” Bob said. “They had whiskey there. A lot of drinking going on and a whole bunch of them… Must have been ten to fifteen maybe. The Brumfields and Dingesses all mixed up, you know. Haley and McCoy were back in the bedroom under guard. They had them both in bed.”

Milt continued to verbally abuse Green for admitting their guilt.

“Around ten o’clock, somebody shot the lamp out and Cat run and jumped behind a flour barrel over in the kitchen corner until the fracas was over.”

Milt and Green were shot in bed then pulled out in the yard where the mob “took an axe and cut their heads open and shot them all up — shot them all to pieces.”

I asked Bob what happened next and he said, “They got on their horses and left — walked off and left them. Al Brumfield was one of the head fellows who was there and he was a first cousin of Dad’s. Evidently somebody else took his horse. He came down to Grandfather’s house, which was his uncle by marriage and he told Grandpaw what they had done. Grandpaw told him to go on upstairs and go to bed. No, he did not want to do that because he was afraid those McCoy and Haley people might come in on him, friends or something, [and trap him in the house]. He slept up in the hollow under a beech tree up there. It was summertime, you know. I bet he didn’t sleep good and if he did he shouldn’t have. And the next morning he got out and he ate his breakfast with Grandpaw and then he went on to Harts — home, you know?”

In the next few days, someone hauled Milt and Green’s bodies to the West Fork of Harts Creek and buried them in a single, unmarked grave.

Bob gave us directions to the grave, which he’d last seen as a boy.

“You go up main Harts Creek. It’s not over a mile, I don’t think. It’s the first big creek that turns off to your left. You turn to the left there across the creek and go up that road about a mile or a mile and a quarter and they’s a little hollow there and they’s a house right in there. It’s been a good while since I been up there. If you’ll ask some of them people there, they’ll tell you right where it is.”

Lawrence and I planned to go to Harts in a few days and find it.

Bob said, “We lived there in a house right down below there for one year before we came down here. We sold our old farm up there and we had no where to go and we moved over there on an uncle of mine’s farm. And I farmed one summer right down below there. I went up there and saw that. Had just a little stone. Two of them there. They was buried in the same grave. Them stones may be torn down and gone now. We left there in 1919 or ’20.”

Bob Adkins Interview, Part 2 (1993)

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Breeden, Ed Haley, Guyandotte River, Hamlin, Harts, John Hartford, Lincoln County Feud

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Wow. So what about Al Brumfield, the guy who got into the feud with Milt?

“Well, he was a little more tamer fellow than old Paris but he was kind of a rough character — mean as a snake,” Bob said. “All those Brumfields were, you know. They was a tough outfit, all of them was.”

Al and his wife Hollena lived in a large white house at the mouth of Harts Creek, which Bob said had recently burned. They had a store and log boom nearby and kept a boat tied up at the riverbank for easy access across the Guyandotte. Things were going great for them until John Runyon (who Bob called “the root of all evil”) moved in from Kentucky.

“That fellow Runyon, he had a saloon and a store right across the creek there at the mouth of Harts, you know — a shebang,” Bob said. “And Aunt Hollene and Al Brumfield, they had a big store over there on the other side of the creek, over on the lower side of the creek. They was competitors in a way, you know. This fellow Runyon hired these two thugs to kill them, so as to get rid of their competition. And he hired Milt Haley and Green McCoy to kill them. They got a side of bacon and a can of lard and five dollars to do that…each. And these fellows, Milt Haley and Green McCoy, were two characters. I don’t know why they ever took a chance on that. Them boys got into that before they knew what they was into. Them Brumfields was mean as the devil up there.”

Bob spun out the details of Milt and Green’s ambush of Al Brumfield.

“Every Sunday, Al and Hollene would get on their horse and they’d ride up to the Forks of Big Hart about ten miles to visit her father. He was old Henderson Dingess, my great-grandfather. Al had a fine riding horse and he’d get on the horse and she’d ride behind him, see? And they’d been up there on a pretty summer day, and they’d done had dinner with her father.”

Haley and McCoy, meanwhile, laid in wait for them in a sinkhole at Thompson Branch with a .30/.30 Winchester.

“And Al and Hollene came along about three or four o’clock in the evening and those thugs laywaid them on the side of the hill up there as they came back down Harts Creek. They shot at Al’s head. That horse jumped and that bullet missed his head and hit Hollene right in the face right there and the bullet knocked her teeth out and came out this side here. It knocked her off of the horse.”

Al was carried on down the creek by his horse, which “sprang and run” so Milt and Green came off the hill toward his wife.

“They aimed to shoot Aunt Hollene again — and she a laying there in the road, her eyes full of blood. She couldn’t see hardly who it was. But she begged them not to shoot her anymore, because she figured they’d already killed her. She told them she was dying and begged them out of it.”

At that point, Al came back up along the creek bed shooting toward them “and they got scared and they run.”

Bob said, “Well, the Brumfields didn’t know who it was so they watched all around to see who it was. They watched Runyon like a hawk but he changed his name and walked right off. He left his store, his saloon and his family and went back to Kentucky. They hunted for years for him but they never did find him. He never poked his head around there anymore, not even to contact his family.”

Milt and Green also disappeared from the neighborhood — which caused locals to assume that they were guilty of some role in the trouble.

“And these two guys just left their family and went into Kentucky and just deserted their families,” Bob said. “Then they knew who it was. And they started looking for them.”

Al Brumfield put out a $3,000 reward for their capture. Detectives were told to search in river towns, as both men had run rafts out of the Guyan River.

A detective caught Green McCoy first in a Cincinnati restaurant. He identified him by noticing a nick in one of his ears. Just before apprehending him, the detective walked up and said, “I think you’re the man I’m looking for.” Once caught, Green gave the whereabouts of Milt, who was found working a butter churn on a steamboat at the river. Both men were jailed. Al Brumfield was informed of their capture by letter.

Brumfield organized two of his brothers-in-law and perhaps one of his brothers into a posse and rode to the rendezvous point (presumably in the vicinity of Cincinnati). He posed as a sheriff, paid the reward, took possession of the two men, then headed across eastern Kentucky and up the Tug River to Williamson. He and his gang rode a train on the N&W across Twelve Pole to Breeden, where they crossed the mountain and spent a night at the home of John Dingess, Hollena’s brother. Dingess ran a large country store and saloon, Bob said, but “nothing exciting happened around there.”

Bob Adkins Interview, Part 1 (1993)

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Hamlin, Harts, Huntington, Lincoln County Feud

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The next day, Lawrence and I decided to go see 89-year-old Bob Adkins in Hamlin, West Virginia. In a recent Goldenseal article, Bob had given his biography, including his family’s connection to the story of Milt’s murder. Since reading his narrative, I’d been anxious to ask him about Milt, as well as to confirm or disprove my suspicion that his father’s first wife Emma Jane Hager was the same person as Ed’s mother.

To get to Bob’s house, we took Route 10 out of Huntington to Lincoln County. We turned off onto Route 3 just inside the county line at West Hamlin, then drove on for about ten minutes, crossed a hill and cruised into Hamlin — Lincoln County’s seat of government. Bob Adkins’ nice two-story house sat just past a block of small struggling businesses and through the only red light in town. We found Bob out back relaxing on a patio near a flower garden in full bloom.

After all the introductions, I mentioned my theory about Ed’s mother, which Bob shot out of the water right away. He was positive that Emma Jane Hager was not the same person as Emma Haley.

“No, Emma Jane Hager was old man Philip Hager’s daughter,” Bob said. “Dad got her from Griffithsville, 10 miles toward Charleston. Dad come down there and stole her.”

Bob knew all about Milt’s death but stressed that what he knew about it was hear-say, that he didn’t want to get sued and that we couldn’t take his word as gospel because there was “so dern many of ’em a shootin’ and a bangin’ around amongst each other” in Harts that he sometimes got his stories confused. Maybe Bob did have a foggy memory, as he claimed, but I found him to be a walking — or rather, sitting — encyclopedia of Harts Creek murders.

“I was born and raised up there until I was nineteen years old, but I was never afraid,” Bob said. “I walked all hours of the night and everything and do as I please, but I always tended to my business, you know. Kin to most of them. I never bothered nobody. Nobody never bothered me, but that doesn’t say they wouldn’t shoot you. Well, all you had to do was tend to your own business.”

Bob eased into the story of Milt’s death by giving Lawrence and I some background on the Brumfields. He knew a lot about them because Hollena Brumfield, the woman Milt supposedly shot, was his mother’s aunt and “about half way raised her.” She was a Dingess prior to marrying Al Brumfield.

“Now those Dingesses up there, I never knew of them to bother anybody much,” Bob said of his kinfolk. “Some of the older ones shot and banged around a little bit. But look out for them Brumfields. They was into it all the time. If they couldn’t get anybody else to shoot, they’d shoot theirselves — their own people.”

Al Brumfield’s father Paris was the most notorious of the old Brumfields.

“Well, one thing, he killed an old pack peddler up there at Hart, took his stuff and threw him in the river,” Bob said of the Brumfield patriarch. “And he killed another man, too. I forget the other fellow’s name. Son, he was a mean old man, I’ll tell you that. Why, he’d kill anybody. He lived about three quarters of a mile from the mouth of the creek down the river there in at the end of a bottom, see?”

Bob kind of chuckled.

“Yeah, killed that old pack peddler,” he said. “That’s what they said he did. I don’t know. He was a mean old devil. And boy, he’d killed two men.”

I wanted to know more about the Brumfields since they seemed to have been so wrapped up in the story of Milt Haley.

“What happened to Paris Brumfield?” I found myself asking.

“I tell you, old Paris, he got what was coming to him,” Bob said. “He was as mean as a snake and he would beat up on his wife every time he got drunk. And Paris’ wife got loose from him and she came down to her son Charley’s for protection. Charley was a grown man and was married and had a family and he lived down the road a quarter of a mile. Charley told her to come on in the house and there’d be nobody to bother her there and he told her to stay back in the room and he would take care of it. Old Paris, he was drunk and he didn’t get exactly where she was and he finally figured out where she was and old Paris come down there to get his wife. When he come down, Charley, his son, was setting on the porch with a Winchester across his lap. A Winchester is a high-powered gun, you know? And that day and time, they had steps that came up on this side of the fence and a platform at the top of the fence and you walked across the platform and down the steps again. That kept the gates shut so that the cattle and stuff couldn’t come into the yard. Well, he got up on that fence and Charley was setting on the porch with that Winchester. He said, ‘Now, Paw don’t you step across that fence. If you step across that fence, I’m going to kill you.’ And Paris quarreled and he fussed and he cussed and he carried on. That was his wife and if he wanted to whip her, he could whip her. He could do as he pleased. He was going to take his wife home. Charley said, ‘Now, Paw. You have beat up on my mother your last time. You’re not going to bother Mother anymore. If you cross that step, I am going to kill you.’ And he kept that up for a good little while there. ‘Ah, you wouldn’t shoot your own father.’ Drunk, you know? And Charley said, ‘You step your foot over that fence, I will.’ Paris was a little shaky of it even if he was drunk. Well, after a while he said, ‘I am coming to get her,’ and when he stepped over that fence, old Charley shot him dead as a doornail.”

You mean he killed his own father?

“His own father,” Bob said. “He killed him. That got rid of that old rascal. And that ended that story. They never did even get indicted for that or nothing. Everybody kept their mouth shut and nobody didn’t blame Charley for it because old Paris had beat up on his mother, you know? Everyone was glad to get rid of him.”

Parkersburg Landing 65

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     About an hour later, Lawrence and I headed back to his house where we spent the evening talking at his kitchen table. I hung onto his every word hoping for some little detail about Ed.

     “Pop smoked a pipe,” he said. “He’d fill it up with tobacco and then he might take a cut apple and put apples in it to flavor it. He enjoyed his tobacco. He would go to a lot of places to people he knew and they’d give him maybe a hand of tobacco and he’d make his own twists out of it. Mom never could stop him from chewing. He was fairly clean with it around the house. He usually kept a good size vegetable can for a spittoon. If he was setting in a chair, he’d put it down in the chair and he’d pick it up and hold it up close to his mouth and spit in it.”

     Lawrence spoke more about the extent of his father’s travels.

     “Pop’s range was northeastern Kentucky mostly,” he said. “West Virginia and southeastern Ohio. In West Virginia, he might’ve took it all in except maybe the far panhandle up in there. I think he’d been as far as Morgantown. I can remember being up the Big Sandy River with them on the West Virginia side and at Louisa.”

     Lawrence didn’t think Ed made it to Hazard and Harlan.

     I asked if there was much money to be made in the coalfields and he said, “They had money, I guess, when mines were running good. And I guess during the timber business when them guys grabbed logs down out of the Sandy at Catlettsburg.”

     I really wanted to get at the source of Ed’s music, but Lawrence said his father never discussed his early life or musical influences with any of the kids. Lawrence never heard him talk about those things with buddies either because most of them stopped coming around by the time he was a teenager.

     I jarred his memory a little bit when I mentioned the name Ed Morrison, whose father (Christopher Columbus Morrison) had learned “Blackberry Blossom” from General Garfield during the War Between the States.

     “Ed Morrison, as far as I know, lived right out here on Belmont Street for a while,” he said. “He was a buddy of Pop’s.”

     Thinking back to Ed’s experience on Harts Creek, I wondered if a lot of his music came from pain.

     “No, I don’t think Pop was…,” Lawrence said. “He mighta been…”

     “Anger?” I asked.

     “Anger, yeah, maybe.”

     That made sense to me. He sure had a lot to be angry about.

In Search of Ed Haley 64

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Big Sandy Valley, Ed Haley, Music

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Early that summer, I was back at Lawrence Haley’s in Ashland with plans to visit Lynn Davis in Huntington, West Virginia. Lynn had been mentioned in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes as a source for Haley’s biographical sketch and was the widower of Molly O’Day, the famous country singer. Snake Chapman had told me that Molly and her family were close friends to Haley, who visited their home regularly in Pike County, Kentucky. I was sure Lynn would have a lot of great stories to tell about Ed. At our arrival, he was incredibly friendly — almost overwhelming us with the “welcome mat.” All we had to do was mention Ed’s name and he started telling us how he and Molly used to pick him up in Ashland and drive him up the Big Sandy Valley to see Molly’s father in southeastern Kentucky.

“That was back in the early forties,” he said. “We’d come to Ashland and get him at his home up on Winchester about 37th Street. They was a market there or something you turned up by and we’d go there and pick him up and take him up to Molly’s dad and mother up in Pond Creek, Kentucky — above Williamson. There’s an old log house up there — it’s been boarded up and sort of a thing built around it so people couldn’t get in and tear it up or something — but it’s falling down. He’d stay up there with Molly’s dad and mother for several days. They’d take him to Delbarton, a coal town over there from Williamson, and they’d just drive him around, buddy. Now Molly’s brother, he really loved Ed’s fiddling.”

Lynn was referencing Skeets Williamson, Molly’s older brother and a good fiddler by all accounts. Lynn showed me an album titled Fiddlin’ Skeets Williamson (c.1977), which referenced him as “one of country music’s more skilled fiddlers during the 1940’s — one of the best in his day.”

Skeets was born in 1920 at McVeigh, Kentucky, meaning he was approximately 35 years younger than Haley. As a child, he played music with Molly and his older brother Duke Williamson, as well as Snake Chapman. “During these years, the famous fiddler of Eastern Kentucky, Blind Ed Haley, became a tremendous influence on him,” the album liner notes proclaimed. “Skeets (along with Clark Kessinger) still contend that Haley was the greatest fiddler who ever played.” During a brief stint on Texas radio, Skeets met Georgia Slim Rutland, the famous radio fiddler who spent a year listening to Haley in Ashland.

I asked Lynn more about his trips to Haley’s home on 37th Street.

“We used to go down to his house and Molly’d say, ‘Uncle Ed, I’d just love to hear you play me a tune.’ Well he’d be sitting on the couch and he’d just reach over behind the couch — that’s where he kept his fiddle. He always had it in hand reach. So he would get it out of there, man, and fiddle.”

Sometimes Lynn and Molly would join in, but they mostly just sat back in awe.

“You’ve seen people get under the anointing of the Holy Ghost, John,” Lynn said. “Well now, that’s the way he played. I mean, I’ve seen him be playing a tune and man just shake, you know. It was hitting him. I mean, it was vibrating right in his very spirit. Molly always said, ‘I believe that fiddlers get anointed to the fiddle just like a preacher gets anointed to preach.’ They feel it. Man, he’d rock that fiddle. He’d get with rocking it what a lot of people get with bowing. It was something else. But he got into it man. He moved all over.”

Lynn said Ed was a “great artist” but had no specific memories of his technique. He didn’t comment on Ed’s bowing, fingering or even his fiddle positioning but did say that he mostly played in standard tuning. Only occasionally did Ed “play some weird stuff” in other tunings.

Lynn’s memories of Haley’s tunes seemed limited.

“Well, he played one called ‘Bluegrass Meadows’,” he said. “He had some great names for them. Of course one of his specials was ‘Blackberry Blossoms’. He liked that real good, and he’d tell real stories. He would be a sawing his fiddle a little while he was telling the story, and everybody naturally was just quiet as a mouse. You know, they didn’t want to miss nothing.”

What kind of stories?

“Well, I know about the hog’s foot thing. He said they went someplace to play and they didn’t have anything to eat and those boys went out and stole a hog and said they brought it in and butchered it and heard somebody coming. It was the law. They run in and put that hog in the bed and covered it up like it was somebody sleeping. And Ed was sitting there fiddling and somebody whispered to him, said, ‘Ed, that hog’s foot’s stickin’ out from under the cover there.’ So he started fiddling and singing, ‘Shove that hog’s foot further under the cover…’ He made it up as he went.”

The next thing I knew, Lynn was telling me about his musical career. He’d been acquainted with everybody from country great Hank Williams to Opry star Minnie Pearl. We knew a lot of the same people — a source of “bonding” — and it wasn’t long until he started handing me tapes and records of Molly O’Day and Georgia Slim Rutland. He said he had a wire recording of Ed and Ella somewhere, but couldn’t find it. He promised me though, “When I find this wire — and I will find it — it’s yours.”

Sometime later, he called Dave Peyton, a reporter-friend from the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, to come over for an interview. With Peyton’s arrival, Lynn (ever the showman) spun some big tales.

“Now, Molly’s grandfather on her mother’s side was the king of the moonshiners in West Virginia and he was known as ‘Twelve-Toed John Fleming’,” Lynn said. “He had six toes on each foot. Man, he was a rounder. Little short fella, little handlebar mustache — barefooted. He was from the Short Tail Fork of Jenny’s Creek. And the reason they called it that, those boys didn’t have any britches and they wore those big long night shirts till they was twelve or fourteen years old.”

Lynn was on a roll.

“I preached Molly’s uncle’s funeral. Her uncle is the father of Blaze Starr — the stripper. That’s Molly’s first cousin. In her book, she said she would walk seven miles through the woods to somebody that had a radio so she could hear her pretty cousin Molly sing. She was here in town about three or four months ago. We had breakfast a couple times together. She’s not stripping anymore. She makes jewelry and sells it. She’s about 60 right now.”

In Search of Ed Haley 63

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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After listening to Gerry’s tape, I gave Brooks a call. His voice was extremely weak compared to the 1988 interview, indicating that his health had taken a turn for the worse. As I introduced myself and tried to explain the reason for my call he told me to speak up because his hearing wasn’t very good. Just when I figured he hadn’t heard a word I said, he remarked, “I’ve got a lot of tapes of you, John. I’ve been listening to you for twenty years.” He also had Ed’s record, which he said was a good representation of his fiddling.

“It had his zip on the bow,” Brooks said. “The record that I’ve got was made off of some old discs that his wife had saved. They was a record man visited him and talked with him and wanted him to make records but at that time they just paid you for it and that was it. And Ed said, ‘I won’t make a record unless you give me royalty on it. You’ll have to give me a percentage of what you make on it.’ So he never made no records.”

I wanted to know more about the “zip” in Ed’s bowing, but Brooks didn’t remember any specifics.

“No, at the time I met Ed Haley I was just a big young boy entering into manhood,” he said. “But I’ll never forget Ed Haley and his fiddle as long as I live. My my, he fiddled fast. He had the smoothest bow hand I ever heard. Soft as silk — soft as a woman’s voice. And he had fingers like a baby. You see, he never did work any. I think he went blind at about nine years old.”

I asked where Ed positioned the fiddle when playing and he said, “He held the fiddle high on his shoulder. Not on his arm nor not up under his chin.”

As for Ed’s tunes, Brooks said, “He played these old Clay County-Braxton-Calhoun-Gilmer tunes. These old John Cottrell tunes — ‘Mississippi Sawyer’. The old-time ‘Sally Goodin’ — mercy mercy he could play ‘Sally Goodin’. And ‘Sally Ann Johnson’.”

I asked Brooks where he used to see Ed and he basically repeated what he had told Gerry Milnes about him playing at the courthouse in Spencer, West Virginia. I wondered if there was a crowd around him.

“You betcha there was a crowd,” Brook said. “Generally, they was ten or fifteen men standing around up as close to old Ed as they could get. He was sitting on a chair and had that tin cup on the arm of that chair. Them nickels and dimes was just cracking in that tin cup. I even put a quarter in his tin cup. Course he’d empty it every little bit. That was back in the late 20s, early 30s. You take a tin cup half full of nickels and dimes and you could buy a pretty good sack of groceries with it. It wasn’t like it is today.”

In spite of Ed’s popularity, no one in the crowd danced.

“Them old farmers wouldn’t hit a lick with their feet,” Brooks said.

Brooks said he never heard Ed play the banjo but got really excited when I asked him about his singing.

“Oh, I’m glad you mentioned it,” he said. “The first time I heard ‘Stackolee’, Ed Haley played it and sung it sitting in the courthouse yard at Spencer. Now I’m telling you, he could make you hump up when he’d sing that song. And he knew it the old original way. That’s the first time I ever heard a man sing with a fiddle. Back in that day, it was seldom you heard a man do that. French Carpenter, he was a good singer with the fiddle. He was a good old-time fiddler. His daddy was named Solly Carpenter. Old Sol Carpenter’s favorite was Emery Bailey. He was fifty years ahead of his time.”

I asked if Emery Bailey was as good as Ed Haley and Brooks said, “He wasn’t as good as Ed Haley by no means. Ed Haley was far ahead of everybody at that day and time. But Emery Bailey was one among the best of the fiddlers in Calhoun-Braxton-Clay-Gilmer Counties. Now, there’s a contemporary of Ed Haley — have you heard of Clark Kessinger? He could fiddle just about… Well, not as good — there was nobody could fiddle as good as Ed Haley could, but I’ll tell you, Clark Kessinger could come close to him.”

Brooks pointed out that being a fiddler in those days wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“No, at that time the fiddle was looked down upon. People wouldn’t fool with a fiddler,” he said. “The fiddle seemed to be a disgrace. You take a man going along the road with a fiddle and he was looked down upon and talked about.”

Things got kind of quiet, then I asked him if Ed played a tune called “Jimmy Johnson Bring Your Jug Around the Hill”.

“Oh, you betcha,” Brooks said. “Ward Jarvis learned to play that just about as good as Ed played it, too. Ward Jarvis was among the best fiddlers in the country.”

Brooks said Ed also played “Dusty Miller” and “Lost Indian”. He played everything in the standard key.

“Now you take a lot of tunes that some of our country fiddlers — Laury Hicks and Ward Jarvis and others… French Carpenter. They would tune their fiddle and put it up in A — they called it the high key. Ed never changed his fiddle that I seen.”

Brooks didn’t remember Ed playing some of his most famous cross-key pieces, like “Old Sledge” or “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

“Now them’s Sol Carpenter tunes that you’re talking about,” he said. “That’s back a generation behind Ed Haley.”

In Search of Ed Haley 62

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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At that point, Gerry asked Brooks about Ed Haley, and it was clear from his remarks that he thought he was an incredible fiddler.

“I’ve saw Ed Haley and stood and listened to him and sat in houses and listened to Ed Haley play,” he said. “Ed Haley is the best fiddler I ever listened to and I’ve heard a lot of them. And I’m a pretty good judge of what good fiddling is. And Ed Haley was the slickest, hottest… He bluegrassed it — he’s another fellow that was 50 years ahead of his time, like I mentioned about Emery Bailey. Ed Haley could lay the leather on that fiddle bow and so smooth it was out of this world.”

Brooks told Gerry about seeing Ed at the Roane County Courthouse in West Virginia before the Depression.

     I walked up in the courthouse at Spencer one time back in the 20s and there was a crowd in the courthouse yard and there sat Ed Haley fiddling. He had a tin cup sitting there on a little stand. Ed Haley wouldn’t play unless that tin cup kept rattling with nickels and dimes. A dollar bill was out of this world in them days. I listened to Ed Haley play and Homer Bailey, Emery’s brother, was at the stock pen. The stock pen was just across the stream from the courthouse and I hurried to tell Homer. I wanted Homer to hear Ed Haley. I said, “Homer, Ed Haley’s over here at the courthouse yard playing the fiddle. Let’s go over and hear him play a tune or two.” And as we was crossing the bridge going back over the courthouse Homer said, “Plum honor, Brook. I wonder if he can fiddle ‘Chicken Reel’ as good as Emery can?” I said, “I don’t know but we’ll find out pretty soon now and you be the judge.”

     And we walked up close to Ed. Ed wasn’t playing — there wasn’t no nickels going in the cup. I put a big Bull Moose nickel in the cup and rattled it and I said, “Ed, I’d like to hear you play ‘Chicken Reel’.” And he reared back and leveled off on that fiddle and you never heard such a ‘Chicken Reel’ in all my life. Homer turned sideways and bent over and held his head right forward towards Ed Haley and took that tune in. Shortly, when Ed quit playing, Homer looked at me with a big gold-toothed smile and said, “Plum honor, Emery can’t play it can he, Brook?” So he really took a spell over Ed Haley. But Emery was good on it but that was what Ed Haley would do for a fiddler. When you heard Ed play, that was it.

Brooks said to Gerry, “Now Emery Bailey never did see Ed Haley but Clark Kessinger copied Ed Haley fiddling. Ed Haley made a statement before he died. He said he hoped that his type of fiddling had rubbed off on somebody that could carry the thing along and keep it going. Well now, Clark Kessinger was the man. He could imitate Ed Haley’s stroke. But I had the privilege of seeing and hearing Ed Haley play. Nobody could fiddle as good as Ed Haley could, but Clark Kessinger could come close to him.”

Gerry asked Brooks what brought Ed into the Calhoun County area of West Virginia.

“I would say it was Laury Hicks,” Brooks said. “Laury Hicks was another fiddler. Laury Hicks had his own stroke. He never copied nobody. Laury Hicks was rough as a cob but my my he could put stuff on a fiddle that was out of this world. They lived on Stinson, over in that Nebo country. And he would go down to Charleston and bring Ed Haley up and keep him a week — maybe two. Ed enjoyed that. That was free board for Ed, you see. That day and time, it was nippity tuck to make a living if a man didn’t live on a patch of land somewhere. And Laury picked up a lot of his stuff, too.”

Brooks told about a time when Ed was staying with Hicks and visited John McCune, an old fiddler who lived “in that Nebo country” a half-mile below Hicks.

   Now, Frank Santy told me this and Ward Jarvis and Senate Cottrell. They fiddled till midnight and Laury thought of old John McCune. He couldn’t play much but he had one tune that they said he was out of this world on. Laury thought of that and he said, “Ed, if you ain’t too tired I’d like to go down to John McCune’s and have him fiddle a tune for you.” Ed was going home the next morning and he said, “We may not have time to do that tomorrow.” And they went down to old John McCune’s John got out of the bed and fiddled that tune. And Ed Haley sat there and listened to it. When John got through, Ed Haley said, “Mr. McCune, you never need to hesitate to play that tune for anybody. There’s nobody living that can beat you playing that tune.” So that was an honor to John McCune on his number.

Brooks knew a little about Ed playing over Laury’s grave, which I had first read about on the Parkersburg Landing liner notes.

“When Laury Hicks was on his dying bed, he said, ‘I would like to have Ed Haley play a few tunes over my grave when I’m dead and gone.’ And Ed Haley made a special trip up to Stinson and fiddled over Laury Hicks’ grave. They said he played some of the sweetest tunes they ever listened to. He took a little group with him and he played the fiddle over Laury’s grave. That’s a true story.”

In Search of Ed Haley 61

02 Saturday Feb 2013

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Later that fall, I met Gerry Milnes, an old-time West Virginia fiddler and banjo-picker, at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in Cedar of Lebanon State Park near Nashville. Gerry said he’d heard a lot about Ed Haley through his interviews of older musicians in central West Virginia. It was obvious that he was some type of folklorist but I didn’t realize to what degree until a few months later when I received a letter in the mail declaring him to be the coordinator of the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia. In his letter, he wrote about his suspicion of Ed learning tunes from Jack McElwain (1856-1938), who he called “the premier fiddler in the state of West Virginia around the turn of the century.” He felt there were clues in Haley’s repertoire: his “Old Sledge” was a McElwain specialty and his “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom” was very much like McElwain’s “Yew Piney Mountain”.

A few months later, Gerry sent me a cassette tape of a 1988 interview with Brooks Hardway. Brooks was an old-time banjo player who knew first hand about all of the old musicians in north-central West Virginia — “Laury Hicks country.” He also knew about Ed Haley. On the tape, he gave a little bit of information about his own life, important to note in order to keep his stories in context.

“I’m 81 today,” Brooks said. “I was born at Walnut, West Virginia. Walnut is in Calhoun County. I was seven years old when we moved over to the Left Hand Fork of West Fork. My daddy bought a store at Gip. So there’s where I grew up from seven until I got married at the age of 32. Grandpa Santy moved from Walnut to Gip when we did and he lived in a little country Jenny Lynd house where we did. And he had a boy named Willie Santy. He was a clawhammer banjo-picker. I would give the world if I could do it like he did. But he had a hook with his thumb that I never could learn. That is, to get down and hit that second string and walk it back up with his thumb. My goodness, he could put the double shuffle on them tunes.”

Brooks’ maternal family, the Santys, was a key player in the musical history of Calhoun County. Aside from his uncle Willie Santy, who was apparently an accomplished banjo player, his great-uncle Frank Santy was a popular left-handed fiddler.

“When I was a boy — ten, twelve, fourteen — he played for dances on the West Fork,” Brooks said. “He’d fiddle all night and they’d charge fifteen cents a set and he’d have the next morning five or six dollars. Frank Santy could fiddle ‘Piney Mountain’ so good it’d bring chills of hilarity throughout your body. It’s an old Clay County number. I think he learned it from old Sol Carpenter — one of the original old-time fiddlers. Old Senate Cottrell, that was his favorite tune.”

Ward Jarvis, a son of Jim Jarvis who lived in the head of Walnut in Braxton County, was a good banjo picker and fiddler.

“I practically stayed at Jim Jarvis’ and played with Ward,” Brooks said. “Will played a banjo and I played a banjo and guitar. We’d cut wood of a daytime and burn it up of a night a playing the fiddle, banjo and guitar. Ward Jarvis is the origin of my clawhammering the banjo. Ward Jarvis was one of the best. He played the banjo for a while while he was a young man. And Ward Jarvis played the banjo with Frank Santy and then he got to picking Frank’s fiddle up and he learned to play that fiddle and he got better than Frank was. Frank got jealous of him and dropped him.”

Emery Bailey was a top fiddler in Calhoun County, according to Brooks.

“Emery Bailey was the top of the tops at that day and time,” he said. “Emery Bailey fiddled 50 years ahead of his time. Emery lived just below where we did and he had a brother named Homer. Now they was at the top of the list in their day in fiddling and banjo-picking. They had a contest at Sutton one time — old time fiddlers’ contest — and Emery went. That woulda been back in the late 20s or early 30s. When Emery come back I asked him what he did. ‘Plum honor Brooks, they didn’t let me play. They wouldn’t let me enter the contest.’ I said, ‘Did you play a tune or two for them, Emery?’ Emery said, ‘Plum honor I fiddled ‘Sally Goodin’, Brooks. They said I didn’t fit in an old-time fiddlers’ contest.’ I said, ‘What was wrong?’ Emery said, ‘I think I put too much diddle on the bow.’ Now Emery’d been laying the leather to ‘Sally Goodin’.”

How did Emery Bailey compare to Ward Jarvis?

“Now Ward Jarvis always was more of an old-time, old-fashioned fiddler,” Brooks said. “He had a different lick to what Emery had. Wherever Ward played in a contest in that day and time he took first place. He had the best shuffle I believe I ever heard.”

Brooks was also familiar with French Carpenter, one of the most well-known fiddlers from Clay County.

     I never heard Solly Carpenter play but I’ve heard his son French Carpenter play. I was at my grandpa’s house… I was ten or eleven, twelve years old and looked down the road and seen a man coming up the road with a flour poke in his hand and we watched him till he got up in front of Grandpa’s house and it was French Carpenter with the fiddle in a flour poke and about four inches of the neck of it sticking out the top of that poke and he had his hand around that fiddle neck. Well, Grandpa never let a man with a fiddle or a banjo pass the house without stopping him and bringing him in so he halted French Carpenter and French Carpenter stayed all night with Grandpa Santy and they had music and the house was full of people that night. First time I’d ever seen French Carpenter and he was the first man that we in that part of the country ever heard sing with the fiddle. And he played some of the sweetest tunes that I ever listened to and sung them and fiddled till twelve or one o’clock in the night and held the attention of them people. You could have heard a pin drop a listening to French Carpenter sing them pretty songs.