The next day, Billy and Brandon suggested that we visit 70-year-old Joe Adams on Trace Fork. Joe had all the right genealogical connections to know about many of the major characters in Ed and Milt’s story. According to Billy’s records, both of Joe’s grandfathers were brothers to Ben Adams, a key player in the 1889 feud. Joe’s grandmother was a Mullins, while the other was a half-sister to Burl Farley. (Burl Farley of course was in the Brumfield mob and even “gave the order to shoot” Milt and Green, according to some sources.) Brandon reminded me that he had talked with Joe earlier in the summer and heard him speak about having played music with Ed in his younger days.

As we pulled up to Joe’s nice house at the mouth of Trace, he and his wife met us at the end of their driveway. Joe, I noticed right away, looked a lot like Kenny Baker and was dressed in work clothes, indicating that he was probably in the middle of some project (a garden, working under a truck hood…). When we got out of the car, Mrs. Adams laughed and jokingly said, “Billy, is that you? What are you a doing up here?” Billy told them who I was and the reason for our visit and Joe basically said, “Well, come up to the porch and I’ll tell you boys all I can.” We gathered in chairs and swings under Joe’s carport where the conversation just took off. Joe was born in 1925.

I asked Joe when he first played with Ed and he said, “I’d say that was around ’40 up to ’43. It was before I went in the Army. We was down there at old man Peter Mullins’ — just out in the yard up there. They had a big old porch and they had a bunch of seats out under a bunch of big apple trees and stuff. Big shade. Had a swing out there. And I said, ‘How about bringing your fiddle out and playing a few tunes?’ And he told one of them boys — I forgot which one it was — said, ‘Go in there and bring my fiddle out here.’ He didn’t have it in a case that day but they brought it out and he played ‘Red Wing’ and he played ‘Soldiers Joy’ and he played ‘The Arkansas Traveler’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m tired now,’ and he just laid the fiddle down and we just quit. Sat around and talked a few minutes. He had some of them boys take it back and put it back in the house when he got through playing it. He took good care of his fiddle.”

“Now after I come out of the Army in ’46 and it seems to me like I seen Ed once after that and he left here and I never did see him anymore,” Joe said.

Brandon asked Joe where he remembered Ed staying on Harts Creek.

“I remember him staying up there with old man Peter and Liza and he stayed there off and on for years,” he said. “His wife and some of the children were there. Aunt Rosie married George Mullins on Buck Fork — he stayed up there a lot, too. Johnny Hager stayed with Ticky George Adams — old man George and Vic — that lived up in that holler up here at this store. Greasy George lived across the creek. And old man Ed, he’d go up there.”

What about Johnny Hager?

“Johnny Hager, he played a fiddle, too,” Joe said. “He didn’t play much. Just once in a while maybe he’d pick it up and play one tune. I had an older brother that’s dead, Howard — he played with them a lot. He played a fiddle, a guitar, mandolin, accordion, anything. He played anything he picked up. And we played around here for years.”

Joe said, “I played with a man lived right up in the head of this creek — I don’t know whether you ever heard tell of him — Robert Martin. He lived on top of the hill back there. Him and John Martin was the only two houses back there. He was a good fiddler. Robert played like ‘Lady of the Lake’ and ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Sugar Tree Stomp’. He had one he said he made it hisself and he made it for old man Will Farley — he called ‘Possom Creek’.”

Robert Martin left Harts, Joe said, after his brother John was murdered at Big Branch.

“You may have heard something about that,” he elaborated. “When they got in that trouble and his brother got killed down here at Big Branch they claimed that Robert cut him, but I don’t think so. I think it was somebody else. And he moved down here at Branchland and me and my brother’d go down there and play with him. He lived on that riverbank and he’d come out there and play with the fiddle till the bow got plum wet and he’d take it in and hang it up and go get another one. We played lots of times till three or four o’clock in the morning with him and then we’d come back to the house.”