When I pressed Joe for specific details about Ed’s technique he said, “He’d play up on the bow about four or five inches, but he played the full stroke with the bow all the time. He didn’t jiggle it.”

I asked if he always sat down when he played and Joe said, “I’ve seen him sitting down and standing up both. They said he danced, but I never did see him dance none. He pat his foot when he played. You’d never hardly know he was patting it. He just patted one foot. He had that chin rest…”

“So Ed put the fiddle up under his chin?” I interrupted.

“He put it up under his chin and played,” Joe confirmed. “Ed Belcher, he played with it under his chin, too. Now Robert Martin, sometimes he’d have it under his chin, sometimes he’d have it down here on his chest.”

Brandon asked if Ed packed his fiddle in a case and Joe said, “Yeah, he had a case. If it was raining or something, I’ve seen him with it under his coat. He had two or three bows. I’ve seen him take the bow loose… He took the end of it loose and put it under the string and played some kind of a tune. They was just one tune he played like that. I believe it was some kind of a religious song. I don’t know how he done it.”

I asked Joe if Ed sang any and he said, “I heard him sing a little bit one or two times on one or two tunes. He’d play a verse and then he’d sing a little bit but not much. Seems to me like that his wife sung a little bit with him on some of them but they didn’t do too much singing. He’d play a little bit, then sing a little bit. They was just a few tunes that he done like that. He didn’t play none of this modern music or nothing like that. He played old-time tunes, like ‘The Arkansas Traveler’. He’d play that and some of them boys’d be sitting off someplace and talking about the big rock in the field and all about the feller digging the taters out and that old sow rooting them out. Ed would play the music and they’d put that in. They’re all dead now, them boys that used to do that. Noah Mullins and my brother Howard and Burl Mullins and Cary and them.”

Joe’s memories seemed to stretch back fondly to that time.

“Yeah, it was all right,” he said. “Every time I played with him he played ‘Lady of the Lake’. Real old tunes.”

Joe said Ed played “Love Somebody”, “Birdie”, “Brownlow’s Dream”, “Hell Up Coal Hollow”, “Hell Among the Yearlings”, “Wild Hog in the Red Brush”, and “Jenny’s Creek”. He also played “Mockingbird” with “everything in it.”

“He’d make the bird holler and everything else,” Joe said.

I asked Joe if Ed played a tune for a long time and he said, “Well, some of his tunes he played a long time and some of them were just short and sweet. He put a lot extra in them sometimes. It went along with it but if you didn’t know him pretty well and watch what you was doing you’d get off. It just come natural for me to follow him because he played good time.”