Monthly Archives: April 2013

In Search of Ed Haley 89

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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Clyde’s memories of Ed playing in contests were much more detailed than anything I had heard from the other kids.

“I’ve seen him go to contests and look like a farmer and he won every one he ever got into,” he said. “He’d go down to the Armco there in Ashland — they’d put up a bandstand up there — and when they’d have contests they had these eight or ten fiddlers up on the stage and he’d be up in all that mess. He fiddled with some of the best that there was in that country in that particular part of the time. I know he had a lot of people used to come to the house and play music with him.”

I asked Clyde what tunes Ed won contests with and he said, “Well, ‘Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and tunes like that. Not any particular ones. He could play any kind of music if he knew it. If he knew the words, he could make music like nobody you ever heard in your life. He had one tune called the ‘Flop-Eared Mule’. I remember ‘Brownlow’s Dream’, ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’.”

Gradually easing into specifics, I wondered if Ed held the bow in the middle or out on the end.

“It would depend on what kind of music he was playing,” Clyde said matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen him hold a fiddle bow down at the end, where the hair hooks up. Depending on the tune, the fastness of the tune, he could hold a bow anywhere he wanted to.”

Did he bow with short strokes or long strokes?

“Well, it would depend on which way he was sitting,” Clyde said. “If he was sitting on a chair with his right leg put out far… He never held the fiddle like anybody else I ever saw. He held it way low on his chest, almost down to his belt-line. My dad had long arms, you know. He was a long, thin man. We have a tendency to want to exaggerate a little bit and say he was bigger than he was, but I knew him pretty well. His hands were real thin — looked like a piano player. He could finger that fiddle like nobody you ever heard or saw.”

I asked if Ed picked the banjo and Clyde said, “Oh, yes. He was better with a banjo than he was with his fiddle. It didn’t have a thumb-string on it. I tried to learn how to play the banjo, too, but I never could do any good at it. Well, my mother bought me a fiddle in the store somewhere and she tried to get me to learn how to play the fiddle because she knew she was gonna be dead one of these days and him too and she wanted to have all that music made for posterity. My mom didn’t want me to do it, but my dad wanted me to. He called me his favorite son and said he wanted me to carry on his tradition. I tried, but I got my fingers cut off when I was a lot younger — two-thirds of my first and second fingers on my left hand — and that messed me up from noting. Ralph was the one that played with my dad a lot. He played the guitar like Roy Clark played. He had a big Martin guitar that was a double-header and he could play on both necks of it at the same time. Ralph was a good musician. He died in 1945.”

Clyde talked a lot about Ed being a drinker, which was something Lawrence kind of kept “under wraps”.

“He was a rip-snorter, don’t think he wasn’t,” he said. “You know, he could be pretty boisterous when he wanted to be. Ed Haley was a mean person — believe me he was. I loved him… He used to take me because he knew I liked to go with him. He would give me a drink every once in a while. He knew I got to liking that and he’d take me with him just about everywhere he went. I think he was the one who got me to drinking too when I was a kid and it’s the worst thing I could’ve done. Course I had no control over it then.”

I asked Clyde what Ed’s drink of choice was and he said, “Whiskey. He wasn’t a beer drinker much, or wine. He didn’t go much for that kind of stuff. He drank moonshine when he could get it, and he generally got it.”

Clyde had seen Ed drunk but said it didn’t hurt his fiddle playing.

“I think if anything, it made it better.”

In Search of Ed Haley 88

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Clyde paused, then asked, “Did Lawrence show you them pictures of my dad? Did you ever see him in that big coat?”

Before I could answer, he took off again, “He wore that long as I remember about him, and he’d go to the bootlegger and get him a pint of moonshine — one in each pocket in that overcoat — and he’d go over to Portsmouth. I’ve seen him have an old clay pipe in his coat pocket and he smoked that when he was out playing anywhere. He smoked Strader’s Natural Leaf Tobacco. He’d take out his pocketknife and chop it up real fine and put it in his pipe. He also chewed Brown Mule tobacco and he carried a tobacco can in his pocket to spit in. He always had a cane with him. Always. He’d feel with it. That was his ‘seeing eye-dog.’ And if anybody’d look him in the eyes, his eyeballs were real messed up from the measles. That’s exactly what put him blind. My mother had a accident with her daddy’s wagon. He had a carnival wagon. I think she started out in her life teaching kids, but then she had so many kids herself she got away from that. She could’ve been a music teacher.”

Clyde said, “I wish you could’ve known him personally. He could pin you down somewhere and tell you stories that you wouldn’t believe could happen. And I’ve thought a lot of times about things he told, and it had to be true ’cause how else could they happen without somebody really knowing it?”

I kept hearing these references to Ed’s story-telling abilities and was becoming somewhat fascinated. “What kind of stories did he tell?” I asked Clyde.

“Well, just like a hillbilly mountaineer, you’d get him started on a story and he wouldn’t quit,” Clyde said. “He was a storyteller’s storyteller. I tell you, he could tell some big ones. My dad could walk you down talking the Bible and he wasn’t a religious man. Well, my mother would read that Ziegler Magazine, you know, and that was a lot like blind people’s Reader’s Digest. My mother would read to him. They’d sit for hours and hours at a time and he’d drink and she’d read the magazine to him. Used to be so much of it, it would get monotonous.”

Right away, I thought Clyde’s memory of Ella reading to Ed for hours as he drank was one of the best lines I’d heard up to that point. I mean, it really told an incredible amount about their life at home. As I thought about that image, Clyde told about his father playing music on the streets.

“My dad done most of his street playing over there in Ironton,” he said. “And he didn’t like to go out on the street and play with my mother. He didn’t like to go anywhere with her. It made him feel lower than he was. My mother played a mandolin. She had an old five-string Gibson banjo, too. One of them short ones. Banjo-mandolin, they called it.”

Clyde said Ed sometimes put out a hat for money when he was playing on the street, but never a tin cup. Ella did that.

“She had a Army drinking cup — one of those old-time tin cups,” he said. “My mother would put it out because my mother played an accordion, too. Things like ‘Stackolee’, ‘Black and Jet’… My mother and my father sang that. They had a duo, you know. Did you ever hear ‘The Lightning Express’? About the conductor on the railroad and he got run over by that train in the end of it?”

I hadn’t, so I asked Clyde to name more of his father’s tunes.

“‘Forked Deer’, and all the old-timers,” he said. “He was real well-versed in most of them.”

What about “Indian Squaw”?

“‘Indian Squaw’?” he said. “Yeah, yeah. He knew ‘The Lost Indian’ and all the old tunes like ‘Paddy on the Turnpike’ and ‘Pigeon on the Gate’. And he even made one tune for my brother Lawrence called ‘8th of January’ and that was one of the best tunes I ever heard him play.”

Of course, “8th of January” was an old fiddle tune commemorating Andrew Jackson’s victory against the British at the Battle of New Orleans — not Lawrence Haley’s birthday — but it sure was interesting that Clyde made the correlation.

How about waltzes? I asked.

“Well, he knew quite a few of them, you know,” Clyde said. “He was a fiddler’s fiddler. Most of his tunes that he played, my mother played with him on piano or an accordion. And my dad, you could call the name of a tune, and he knew it by heart. He didn’t have to study about it, he just played it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 87

11 Thursday Apr 2013

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In January of 1994, Lawrence put me in touch with his brother Clyde Haley, an old bachelor who had spent most of his life roaming the country, working here and there and always managing to get into some kind of trouble. Lawrence called Clyde “the black sheep of the family,” while Mona laughingly dubbed him as a “rogue.” He was Ed Haley’s oldest son and some seven years older than Lawrence. Each time I went to Harts Creek, people had asked about Clyde. Apparently, he made quite an impression.

When I first called Clyde, he lived in a minimum-security nursing home in Stockton, California. Our conversation started like this:

“Hello, John!”

     Hey, Clyde.  How’re you doing?

“Well, I’m still in the hospital.”

     Well, all right. I been wanting to talk to you for two years now.

“Who is this?”

     This is John Hartford in Nashville.

“Well, I don’t know whether I know you personally, do I?”

     Well, you may not. I’m a real good friend of Lawrence and Pat’s. And I play the fiddle myself and I’m on television. I wear a little derby hat and I dance while I play the fiddle.

Clyde laughed.

     But the reason I want to talk to you is I think your father was the greatest old-time fiddler that ever lived.

“I do, too,” he said.

Apparently, Clyde spent a lot of time bragging on Ed’s music at the nursing home. I told him I would send him copies of his father’s music and he got really excited.

“Okay,” he said. “We do a lot of little dancing here in our recreation periods. I think I’ll be outta here in March. It’s not a jail or anything — it’s a hospital.”

I told him I would be touring California in June and he said, “Well, you’ve got my address. Drop by and see me. I’m in Stockton.”

In the meantime, there were a lot of things we could talk about over the telephone. I could tell early in our conversation that Clyde was sometimes right on with his stories, while at other times he was completely out to lunch. His memories were sporadic — in no particular order — like bits of broken glass in a huge pile of garbage that you have to sort through and put back together.

I knew Clyde was Lawrence’s oldest living brother, but wasn’t exactly sure of his age.

“I was born in 1921,” he said. “That’d make me about 73.”

Clyde said he went with his father on trips more than any of the other Haley children.

“When my dad wanted to leave Mom and get away from her for a change, he’d always take me as his crutch,” he said. “I was his favorite son outside of Ralph. He called me ‘Reecko’. That was his nickname for me. I used to carry the fiddle case for him. And I went with him when he’d go to Logan County and go up on Harts Creek and up in Dingess and up that way. And he’d go over around Wayne County. He knew people up there.”

I asked Clyde to describe his father and he said, “My dad, he was about 6’2″ and he had real small feet. He had feet like a dancer would have and he wore a size six shoe. I remember that because I used to wear his shoes. I never saw him with a suit on in my life.”

In Search of Ed Haley 86

07 Sunday Apr 2013

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Around that same time, I called Brandon Kirk, a great-nephew to Lawrence Kirk. Brandon was into genealogy and local history; for the past several years, he had been heavily researching the Brumfields. A college student and library assistant at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, he spent his weekends at Harts interviewing neighbors, gathering up old photographs and documenting cemeteries. He said his family had told him about my recent trip to Harts; he was eager to make contact and compare notes on the story of Al Brumfield’s trouble with Milt Haley, especially since I represented a “non-Brumfield, non-Harts Creek” perspective.

After my initial call, Brandon sent me detailed letters in giant manila envelopes full of information about the Brumfields, the death of Milt Haley and the Adams and Mullins families on Harts Creek. It went a long way in explaining who some of the people were in the stories Lawrence and I had been hearing. It was clear that Brandon had a lot of information to offer. He knew all the genealogies, geography, and chronology that we’d been lacking to completely understand the story of Milt Haley and Ed’s connection to Harts Creek.

At the time of the Haley-McCoy murders, according to Brandon, Harts was in the midst of a timber boom. It was a tumultuous time: a whole new economic system had descended on locals who’d previously been primarily small farmers. Competition and the desire to accumulate wealth and status had created a lot of jealousy among and within local families. This new way of life was made worse by the arrival of “new faces” in town, many of whom were transients from Kentucky looking for work. Brandon figured that Milt Haley and Green McCoy were among these immigrants, as their family names were absent from the old records around Harts Creek. In his estimation, Milt and Green may have been like so many of the new arrivals: outlaws trying to escape a seedy past in a somewhat isolated but moderately booming town. He cited at least one such example in his own family tree.

As for the Haley-McCoy murders, Brandon and I seemed to have traced down roughly the same versions of the story. He said it was just one of many murder stories in Harts’ past that had caught his interest — and only one of several involving his ancestors. As a result, he had neglected to hunt down many possible leads regarding it. It was one of probably a hundred incredible stories pertaining to Harts.

I told Brandon about my recent trip, how I had gone to Milt and Green’s grave with Lawrence Kirk. He said he had never been to the grave but had heard that Milt and Green were buried together in a single hole. I wondered why they were buried together and he suggested that if they were handcuffed together at the time of the murders maybe it was a practical decision; or maybe their mutilated bodies warranted a “rushed job.” There may have also been a customary aspect to the burial: in 1882, during the Hatfield-McCoy feud, three of Randolph McCoy’s sons were buried together after their single-night execution.

Around that time, I compiled Xerox versions of my notes on Ed’s life and sent it to Lawrence Haley and Dr. Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe showed his copy to Judy McCollough of the University of Illinois Press who immediately called and told me that I had a book in the works and that she wanted to print it. It was the first time I had really thought about my research regarding Ed Haley as anything more than an obsession to totally immerse myself in his life. I told her that it wasn’t a book yet, but if it was gonna be there was a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done.

In Search of Ed Haley 85

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Harts, John Hartford

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I returned to Nashville talking not so much about new musical developments but rambling on to my wife about murders and the people I’d met in Harts. I spent a lot of time studying over Joe’s photographs, especially the faded family group shot. One of the boys in the picture was propped inside a young woman’s arms and appeared very much to be blind. Was it Ed and his mother? Unfortunately, since the woman was almost completely faded away I couldn’t make a positive identification of her, even when I compared it to the photo of Emma Jean found by Lawrence and I on our first trip to Harts.

There was another interesting development: when I removed the picture of Bill and Peter Mullins from its frame, another equally large picture of the “old couple” kind of popped out from behind it. That made three pictures of those folks and it sure seemed logical to me that Joe Mullins would’ve had three pictures of his grandparents — meaning Ed’s grandparents — and not of an uncle and an aunt.

I sent copies of Joe’s old pictures to Turley and Violet Adams to see if they could show them around for identification. A few weeks later, we spoke over the telephone and they said Liza McKenzie had fingered Ed as the child to the right in the faded group picture. She also said the old folks in the back row were Jackson Mullins and his wife, Chloe.

In Search of Ed Haley 84

01 Monday Apr 2013

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     Lawrence, Clifton, and I headed back down to Joe’s in order to see more of his pictures. We first looked in a smokehouse near Joe’s trailer. As Clifton took hold of the door, he proudly mentioned that it had come from Uncle Peter’s old log home. Almost as soon as I stepped inside, just back of an ancient spinning wheel, piles of rotting furniture and bags of god-knows-what, I spotted the large framed photograph of Bill and Peter Mullins — two very serious young men with thick mustaches. Thinking that the picture showed Peter and his brother Weddie, Clifton began to tell of Weddie’s death.

     “They went over to Dingess and they got into a fight about an election or something and one of them got shot over there and they brought him back across the mountain, you know, on the horses. Weddie, he got killed.”

     Nearby this picture was a faded one of equal size featuring what appeared to be a whole family of people. My first inclination was to assume it was the Jackson Mullins family, maybe even showing Milt Haley and Ed somewhere in the shadows.

     Clifton said we were welcome to borrow the two large pictures. He then fetched a box from which we borrowed 22 small photographs. Satisfied, we headed down to Turley’s for his input on their identification.

     Turley was very interested in the large photo of what we thought was Weddie and Peter Mullins, since Weddie was his grandfather.

     “They shot and wounded a constable or sheriff or something another over at Dingess,” he said. “John Dillon was the sheriff over there, or deputy-sheriff. He killed Weddie, and Peter, he got away. Peter come home and Uncle John went back over there and Peter went with him but he didn’t go in, I don’t think. He went in, said this guy was laying there dying, said he asked him how he was. They said, ‘Well, seems to me like he’s a dying.’ Said he just pulled a gun there and shot him and said, ‘He’s dead now.'”

     I was most interested in the large faded photo of what I presumed to be the Jackson Mullins family. The picture showed a very old couple, who I figured to be Jackson and Chloe, Ed’s grandparents. There was another smaller picture of the couple, which we had borrowed from Joe’s box. Turley, though, didn’t think it was Jackson and Chloe Mullins.

     “I can tell you who I think that is,” he said. “Lude and Van Mullins.”

     Van Mullins, he said, was a brother to Peter’s wife Liza.

     “So Aunt Liza was a Mullins before she married Peter Mullins?” I asked.

     “Yeah, I guess so,” Turley said, as if he’d never thought of it before.

     After looking at more of Joe’s pictures, I asked Turley about the location of the old Milt Haley house. He said it used to sit at the site of his present-day home.

     “When I was a little boy I could remember it,” he said. “They was a big old log house front and they was a big long porch. And they had guest rooms. And then the kitchen was back there. Had a big chimney in it. And then they had that porch and everything back through there. Had that big kitchen in it and big fireplace. They could just put a big kettle in there and make a whole big kettle of stuff.”

     It resembled the old Stonewall Workman home, Turley said, although I had no idea what that meant.

     “The year I was six years old is when they remodeled that house — seven,” he said. “I remember after they took a part of it off the top, made it a story and a half.”

     I drew out a floor plan of “The Milt Haley House” based on Turley’s memories.