Ella provided most of the family entertainment.

“Pop never tried to sing any songs to us,” Lawrence said. “Mom sang songs. She had one she called ‘The Coo Coo’s Nest’. A lot of religious songs, little nonsense songs and rhymes, like ‘The Watermelon’. She had a principal, I guess, or the headmaster of the school — Dr. Huntington, or something like that — he’d come into the class and he’d have a reading session with them. Read them a story and he would read all the parts in different voices. And my Mom kinda got to using inflections a lot more than any of us would. Like, she used to read us Robin Hood from her Braille magazine.”

I wondered if Ed ever entertained the kids with stories.

“Ah, maybe a ghost story or two,” Lawrence said. “He’s telling one time about somebody a riding a… I guess it was a story he heard when he was a kid, too. Somebody was coming down Trace Fork from somewhere riding a horse way up above where Aunt Liza and them lived. Said they began to hear this rattling kind of sound, this guy did. And they said he began to speed up his horse a little bit, and this rattling kept getting louder and louder and he’s a going faster and faster. Said all at once this thing jumped right up on the horse behind him and locked its arms up around him and just stayed with him forever it seemed like. And just all at once got off. Pop could tell stories like that, now. Those stories kinda filled our lonely days, too. That was the thing that they did back in them days, I guess, was tell stories, but Aunt Liza never told any stories like that, or Uncle Peter didn’t.”

I asked Lawrence if Ed “worked on” tunes at home and he said, “Well, yeah, he’d kinda play the general outline and then maybe start working on some of the real, I guess, it would be the depth of a piece of music that he wanted to put in there. Depth or body to it. He’d add to it. But mostly he might just hear a piece of music and maybe just hit every fifth or sixth note or something just to get an outline of how he wanted to play it.”

I don’t think Lawrence realized what an important and sophisticated piece of musical insight that was. What he meant by saying that Ed hit “every fifth or six note” was that he was coming down on the big accent notes that made up the “spine” of the tune. I later wondered if Lawrence’s statement was based on observations or genetic memory or both.

I asked him about Ed playing for dances, but he said those memories had left his mind years ago.

“I was walking from Clay over to Clay Junction there that one night and there was nothing but the moon — it was a full moon — but it was a hazy… It had a big ring around the moon. It was the first time I ever noticed that. Now I can’t remember where we came from, but I know that they had their instruments with them. I guess we’s a gonna go back up on Stinson up there to Aunt Minnie’s. I think this was after the time of Laury’s death, so I guess we’s heading back that way. And if we could get to Clay Junction there, we’s supposed to get a ride or something, I think. Like I say, I can’t remember what kind of function we’d come from, and what we did after that. My recollection of that was walking down this highway — a dark night, except for a hazy, ringed moon. Now that hazy ringed moon kept that in my mind all these years. The rest of it I don’t know. So there’s a lot of stuff that you forget and you never remember.”