After talking with Ugee, I called Lawrence Haley, who’d been “laid up” since my trip to Ashland. He and I talked more about finding the photograph of Ed and Ella getting ready to play music on the street. In no time at all, he was revealing new details about his father’s “street life,” first telling how he’d get a crowd together.

“He might just bow the fiddle a little bit and get a few sweet notes out of it. Stop. And if it looked too dead to him, he’d just get up and leave. ‘There’s no use of staying here.’ Pop wouldn’t play if it wasn’t something that he knew he could make money at. He wouldn’t get out and work for nickel and dime stuff all day long. Maybe ten, twelve cents an hour, just sitting there playing music, and taking requests or something and sitting on the street. But my mother did. She’d get out… I’ve seen her go in times so cold she’d cut the fingers out of gloves so she could play the mandolin, and have a harp and I know that thing’d almost freeze to her lips in weather like that. But Pop, he wouldn’t do that. Of course, I don’t guess a violin player could do too well outside. His fingers’d get stiff as they could be.”

When Ed wasn’t playing on the street in the winter, he would go inside public buildings.

“Well, I’ve seen them inside the courthouse main lobby some,” Lawrence said of his parents. “They played in theaters. Concourses of train stations, and places like that. Anywhere where they’s a lobby big enough to they didn’t interfere… You know, they could get over out of the way of main traffic flow, of pedestrian traffic. Sometimes they’d let them play and sometimes they wouldn’t. He was pretty well known in some places, and they tolerated him — if they didn’t outright appreciate it. They tolerated it anyway, because they knew that that’s how they had to make their living.”

Lawrence gave me more information on Bake and Lula Lee, the “other” blind husband-wife team working on the streets of Ashland.

“Lula Lee was blind and Bake Lee was blind,” he said. “They lived in Catlettsburg, Lula and Bake did, as long as I can remember. They raised two or three kids. Bake Lee was the flower huckster that Pop got accused of being when he died. ‘The Flower Huckster of Winchester Avenue.’ Lula Lee went to school with my mother at the School for the Blind. She played the mandolin and the harp. She had a harmonica rack. My mother played one like that, too. She did a lot of street work like that on her own, too. Pop might be in Logan, she might be in Gallipolis, Ohio, or Ironton or Portsmouth. And Pop might be off somewhere with a bunch of his cronies learning new music up in West Virginia or Kentucky. If the need for money come up, somebody had to bring it in. We didn’t eat quite as good for a day or two or something, but none of us would ever starve.”