Around that time, I got my fiddle out to see if I could coax Jake into playing a few tunes. He said he couldn’t play anything — he’d quit years ago.

“I got shot through this shoulder with a high-powered rifle during World War II,” he said. “My fingers is stiff and my arm don’t operate just right. You’ve got to have a good bow hand to play a fiddle. I used to fiddle, but I can’t do no good no more.”

I asked Jake if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “I don’t know — he played so many. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Wild Horse’, ‘The Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Cluck Old Hen’, ‘Casey Jones’. They was all kinds — you could just keep naming them. Never did hear Ed sing.”

Thinking back to those times caused Jake to say, “Dad fiddled with Ed, you know. Dad never did own a fiddle. Ward Brumfield gave him one and he kept it all of his life. My dad used to like one called ‘The Blackberry Blossom’. ‘The Money Musk’ — man, it was a fast tune when he played it. They’d play ‘The Sourwood Mountain’. Pluck that string, you know. Play that ‘Sally Goodin’. Called one ‘Bear Dog’. It was something like ‘Bonaparte’s’, more or less. I used to, when my dad fiddled, get me two sticks this a way and beat on the strings of the fiddle.”

I asked Jake if he ever heard a tune called “Pharaoh’s Dream” or “Getting Off the Raft” and he said, “I’ve heard of ‘Pharaoh’s Dream’ but never heard of ‘Getting Off the Raft’. Can you play that ‘Danced all night with a bottle in my hand. Swing around the corner with the other man?'”

I asked Jake if he knew anything about Ed’s father and he said, “His dad was a mean guy. My dad has told me many times that Ed had the measles when he was a kid and his daddy took him out up here on Rockhouse and stuck him in the creek and that’s what made old man Ed Haley blind. His daddy stuck him in the creek. His daddy was a bad character. They went on a rampage, him and Green McCoy. My daddy knowed them from the beginning. They shot old Aunt Hollene Brumfield with a .30/.30 Winchester and it come out in her mouth. Never killed her. These fellers went to Kentucky — Ed’s daddy and Green McCoy — and they went and got them somewhere and took them up to Green Shoal up in there and massacred them. Someone took them up on the West Fork and buried them kindly up on the side of the hill. They probably just dug a hole and put them in it.”

Jake remembered Hollena Brumfield well.

“She was an old lady that run a store,” he said. “She was bad to drink — fell down a stairway and broke both of her thighs. She couldn’t get around very good. She had a big garden right there where Taylor Brumfield’s wife’s home is and she’d get out there… She’d keep every bum that come along and work them. She was good to them — she’d feed them, you know — and put them out there in that garden. She’d have them take her a chair out there and she’d hobble out there and sit in that chair and watch them work that garden. Boy, I dreaded her. When she’d talk, the spit would work out that hole there.”

Just before we left Jake’s, I asked him if he knew anything about Ed’s death. He basically repeated what Stump had told us earlier.

“I don’t know what happened. They killed him on the Crawley Creek side of the mountain over there. They beat him to death over there in a beer joint called the Cow Shed Inn. Some drunks did it, you know.”

I was flabbergasted. I mean, how could those Dalton boys tell such an off-target story?