After talking with Mrs. Rutland, I called Bobby Taylor, a fiddling acquaintance and all-around nice guy in Dunbar, West Virginia. Bobby was a protégé of Clark Kessinger, the famous Charleston fiddler who regarded Haley as the best fiddler he ever heard. I told him about spending months trying to unlock the secrets behind Ed’s bowing before concluding that he played a long bow using the Scotch snap to get smoothness and note separation. Bobby agreed, telling how Clark Kessinger did the same kind of thing in “Sweet Sixteen” — “real fast and almost no bow. He would shuffle with his fingers.”

Bobby didn’t think that Ed used that one bow style for every tune, though.

“From what I could hear of Ed Haley’s fiddling, he done almost any type of style with the bow,” he said. “And I could hear his styles changing from one tune to the next and the way he would phrase. Like when I fiddle, it just depends on what mood I’m in and what style I want to play in. But Haley had to be what Kessinger would call a ‘down-bower,’ because Kessinger hated a ‘bow pusher.’ In other words, the accent’s on the up-bow. What little bit I can hear through all the scratches and everything, I hear Haley being a little more smoother, a little more fluid than Kessinger, but I still see the same bow. But Kessinger’s fast as greased lightning.”

I told Bobby how I’d really gotten into writing out Haley’s tunes note for note lately — every little slide — because I wanted to see what was going on.

“Of course, the deeper I get into it, the less I realize I know about it,” I said.

Bobby wasn’t surprised.

“Kessinger and Haley were both very complicated fiddlers, as any fiddler is,” he said. “But Kessinger was a master with the bow. I kid you not. I mean, that man could bow. Kessinger, if you listen at him fiddle, listen especially at his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’. Man, could he fiddle that. Very few people realize how well he could fiddle it until you start really listening to what he’s doing with that bow and note correlation. It’s a masterpiece, his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’ is. Just as Ed Haley, when I heard Ed Haley play it, I could hear where Kessinger got his idea. I could hear it all coming together. Now my style, when you get a real good guitar player that I like playing with, I have a tendency to throw Mike Humphreys into my mesh — a little bit of Kessinger — and I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I sound a great deal like Ed Haley when I do that because I play a little bigger note in a way — not quite as fast as Kessinger — and try to smooth it up a bit.”

“Lawrence has told me repeatedly about how his dad held the fiddle,” I said to Bobby, “that he didn’t stick it up under his chin but he sat it kinda there at his shoulder.”

Bobby chuckled and said, “That’s the way I hold it when I’m jamming.”

I asked Bobby if he rotated the fiddle slightly with it at that position and he said, “I don’t, but my father does. My father, I don’t think, ever met Ed Haley, but is certainly old enough to have known him. My father’s 82. But he’d always heard of him. His favorite fiddler was Sam Jarvis. He was a very prominent person — well educated. He sold insurance. He was my dad’s schoolteacher way out in a little one-room school. My father just says one word for Sam Jarvis, and he says he was ‘perfect.’ I remember when I was a small kid, my father pointed him out and talked to him for a little while and he introduced me. I’ll remember it as long as I live, he said, ‘Here is the greatest fiddler that ever lived, and someday you will learn to appreciate what I have said now.’ And to this day, if you ask me who the smoothest fiddler was I ever heard, it’s Sam Jarvis. Jarvis’ note was not of this world. He was the same age as Clark. He died in 1967.”

That was the first time I’d heard of Sam Jarvis, so — figuring that Ed likely knew him — I pressed Bobby for more information.

“Oh man, he could fiddle. Very little did he play professionally. He would just show up and terrorize the contest world occasionally. I never have heard about Sam Jarvis playing against Ed Haley, but Sam Jarvis only lost one contest in his life — and he was disqualified. You won’t catch anybody in the Charleston area that knew both the fiddlers — Kessinger and Jarvis — that will tell you Kessinger was better. The two greatest fiddlers, when you hear people talk, one’ll say Sam Jarvis and the other will say Ed Haley and most people say they wouldn’t turn their hand over for the difference.”

I asked Bobby who he thought Ed and Jarvis patterned their fiddling after and he said, “That is what is very interesting. They learned from old Edison records, somewhat. I know Jarvis did. They said that his dad wouldn’t hardly let him have a hold of the fiddle, he was so little. And he said that his feet wouldn’t even hit the floor, and he wrapped his toes around the rungs of the chair, and put the record on, and his dad said, ‘You can play the fiddle today if you’re careful with it.’ And he sat down with that record, and they said when they come home that evening, not only had he mastered the record — he had snowed the guy on the record. And he was not even six years old. So he was just automatic.”

Bobby said Wilson Douglas had been talking a lot about Ed Haley lately. Apparently, my telephone call to him had stirred some of memories.

“You will find that if you ask him off the top of his head something, he’ll say, ‘I don’t know,’ but you ask him two or three days later and he has the Brittanica version,” Bobby said.