A few weeks later, I met Lawrence and Pat Haley at my show in Lexington, Kentucky. Lawrence was having more health problems, but he looked pretty good. I told him to stay active — at least walk a little every day — but he said he’d walked enough as a mail carrier to fill several lifetimes. After the show, Lawrence was quick to offer his advice on my playing.

     “That piece you played there at the theatre — ‘Catlettsburg’ — that was a real good rendition to me of it,” he said. “But the only thing, John, that I could see you going wrong on is you’re not using the force that my dad used to have when he’s playing them high notes especially. You’re a little bit too light on the strings with your bow there. You gotta use a little bit more ‘umph’. I really wouldn’t know how to explain it except Pop had the perfect note for everything he played and he played it with strength. You gotta use a little bit more pressure.”

     Lawrence said, “The only time I knew he ever got beaten in a contest was down here… They used to have a big ballpark and things down at the steel mill. They called it Armco Park. And they’s having a contest and old Natchee the Indian come out there playing over his shoulder. He had the hair on his bow strung up underneath and playing it that a way and all that kind of stuff and it pleased the crowd I reckon, and he beat Pop out at the fiddling contest there. He was kinda mad that day. He talked like, ‘I’ll never enter another contest.’ To let somebody like Natchee the Indian beat him out, it kinda made him mad.”

     Lawrence said Ed did something in that contest he’d never seen him do before: stand up while playing the fiddle.

     I asked Lawrence if he remembered a lot of fiddlers visiting his father when he was young — especially the famous radio fiddler, Georgia Slim Rutland.

     “They had a couple of three recording studios here in Ashland back in the early twenties,” Lawrence said. “They was a lot of these fellas passed through Ashland, but I can’t say that I ever met any of them because Pop would get out and go on his own when I was in school a lot of times. And then in summer months, we’d take off to West Virginia or Morehead or Sandy Hook or someplace like that where my mother was from — Wrigley — and we might stay half the summer with Aunt Liza or somebody like that up on Harts Creek or Aunt Minnie. Or we might stay at home and Pop and Mom would take off somewhere, and old Rosie Day would stay with us usually — Jilson Setters’ wife.”