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’.”