I wondered if people around Trace listened to the radio, especially the Grand Ole Opry, in the early days.

“They was a few radios,” Joe said. “We had one here. We ordered it from a company called Jim Brown. It had five batteries. And like Jerry Clower said, you’d take them and set them in front of the fire and get them hot and then plug them in, they’d play. They was kindly hard to get — they didn’t cost much. I think they was about ten or twelve dollars for all of them. But Robert Martin had one on top of that hill and my brother had one on Twelve Pole, and on Saturday night when the Grand Ole Opry come on, it was a sight to watch these people a going. It come in good and clear. Robert learned a lot of Arthur Smith tunes off the radio. Yeah, Arthur Smith come down there at Branchland and stayed a week with him and I was talking to Robert after he left and he said, ‘I wish you boys’d come down.’ I said, ‘Well, if you’d a let us know, we woulda come.'”

Brandon said to Joe, “I remember you were telling me last time I talked to you that you thought Robert Martin was about the best around.”

Joe said, “In the modern music. Now, in the old-time music, you’d take Ed Haley and Johnny Hager and Ed Belcher. Ed Belcher, he stayed at George Mullins’ and he was like my brother: he was an all around musician. He could tune a piano and play it, he could play an organ. He could play anything he picked up. I never did hear him play a banjo but he could play anything on the fiddle or guitar. He’d note the guitar all the time. He played like these fellers play on Nashville. They was several people around here had banjos and played. Geronie Adams — Ticky George’s boy — he played a banjo a little bit. And they was a fella — Johnny Johnson — played with Robert Martin out on that hill. He was from someplace in Kentucky.”

I asked Joe what kind of banjo style Johnny Hager played.

“He played the old…,” he started. “They’s some of them calls it the ‘overhand’ and some of them call it just ‘plunking’ the banjo. They was several people played like that. Bob Dingess down here, he played that a way a little bit. My dad, he played the banjo and he played that.”

I asked Joe how Ed dressed in the early forties.

“Well, he wore dress pants most of the time,” he said. “He wore mostly colored shirts — blue or green or just any color. Work shirts. Most of the time he wore suspenders with them. And had buttons sewed on them to buttom them with. Buttons on the inside. Mostly he wore slippers. They was a lace-up slipper. Three laces. He could tie his shoes just as good as you could tie yorn. He wasn’t a big man — he was a little small man. About 5’4″, 5’5″.”

Brandon asked what Ed was like when he wasn’t playing and Joe said, “Well, he’d just sit around and talk and tell tales about first one thing and then another. They’d just talk about how hard they was raised and how they come up.”

Did the ladies like him?

Joe said, “They all liked him but they wasn’t girlfriends. If he went into a place to play, they’d all come around and hug him and talk to him.”