I spent the spring of 1994 triangulating the many different versions I had heard of Ed Haley’s life and trying to make some sense of the direction of my research. There were so many avenues to explore: Ed’s background and the story of his father’s death on Harts Creek; Ed’s family and professional life in Ashland; Ed’s experience in places like Portsmouth or Calhoun County… Really, I seemed to only be scraping the tip of the iceberg — and it appeared to be a large one at that. It was amazing to consider how much I might learn about someone who I had first read about as being “a misty legend.” Almost daily, some little scrap of information came in.

     I called Wilson Douglas several times with very specific questions in mind. I asked him if Ed played a lot in the second and third position and he said, “Oh, yeah, he did a lot of that. Well, you know it’s like this, John. When he wanted to show off he would play in the standard position then he would let loose and get down the violin neck — way down — and play down there a while. He’d do a lot of that where he had competition, you know, and more or less to show off. That is, if somebody provoked him that’s the way he would do. I don’t know how he did it, but you wouldn’t detect any change, any hesitation, any loss of time, or nothing like that. But the man was a genius, they’s no question about it. He played the fiddle so many different ways, you had to listen close to tell what he was a doing.”

     I asked Wilson if he knew anything about Ed’s personal history.

     “No, not too much,” he said. “You know, he had the measles when he was two or three years old and that put him blind. He told me, ‘Wilson, where I was born and raised there on Harts Creek in Logan County, we almost starved to death.’ Said, ‘All we had was greens and green onions to eat of a summer and practically nothing of a winter.’ He said, ‘Now you know what the Depression is.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well that was a picnic to what I was raised on .'”

     I said to Wilson, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about Ed’s background and see if that rings any bells. His daddy was lynched.”

     “Right,” he interrupted. “They was mean people. They were mean, violent people.”

     I asked if Ed ever talked about his father.

     “Not too much,” he said. “He didn’t want you to ask him too many questions about a thing like that, you know? He did mention one thing to me one time — said something about his dad, but he didn’t comment much, you know. Not enough to make any sense of it. Ed Haley wouldn’t tell you too much. You had to be in his confidence strongly before he’d tell you much of anything.”

     When I mentioned my theory about Josie Cline being Ed’s half-sister, Wilson said, “Well, I heard him telling Laury Hicks that he had a sister, but he didn’t say his ‘half.’ He said his sister.”