I said, “Now when they played, would they play at the same time?”

“Oh yeah,” Ugee said. “Sometimes they played at the same time. Then one time maybe one would be a playing and the other would be a listening. Say, ‘Oh, you pulled that bow the wrong way.’ ‘Now that didn’t sound right to me. Go back over that again.’ They’d sit maybe not for ten minutes but for hours at a time when I was a growing up. Trying to out-beat the other. Which could make the best runs and which could do this. They never was mad at each other or anything like that, but they’d argue about it. ‘I know I beat you on it.’ ‘Well, you put that run in it at the wrong place.’ But Ed Haley is the only man I ever heard in my life second the fiddle. Dad’d play the fiddle and he’d second his with the fiddle. Like if you’re playing the ‘fine,’ why he might be playing the bass. That’s the prettiest stuff ever you heard. I heard Dad try to do it but Dad never got that good on it.”

I asked her if Ed ever played “Flannery’s Dream” and she said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that.”

When I played “Wild Hog in the Red Brush”, she said Ed definitely played it, although she didn’t remember it having that title.

Just before I played another tune, Ugee said, “This is my birthday gift. My birthday’s the 19th. I’ll be 88 years old. Oh, I do pretty good, I reckon, for the shape I’m in. I remember pretty good but I’ve got trouble on this here voice box.”

“You remember pretty good, like your mother,” Harold said. “She was a hundred years old and she remembered when every kid was borned in that part of the country.”

Ugee said, “Mom delivered over five hundred children. She knowed every one of them and their name.”

Harold said, “And where they come from and up what hollow she had to walk and everything else. She never forgot nothing, that woman.”

Ugee said, “I don’t want to be that old. It’s all right if you can walk and get around. But if you’re down sick in the nursing home, let the good Lord take me away. I don’t wanna be there. My dad had leukemia and cancer of the stomach when he died. And it’s hard to see someone suffer like that.”

I told Ugee what Wilson Douglas had said about people gathering at her father’s home and listening to music on the porch and she said, “Sure, you ought to have seen my home. We had one porch run plumb across the front of the house. Ed and Dad just sat right along behind the railing.”

She pointed to the picture of John Hicks’ house and said, “Our house was even bigger than that. It was plank. But I remember when they all come over there and they’d gang around on that porch. Everybody. When Ed Haley was in the country, they come from miles around to our house. Word would get out that Ed was there or Ed was gonna be there a certain day.”

Inspired by Ugee’s memories, I got some paper from Harold and tried to sketch the Laury Hicks place. Ugee said things like, “It didn’t have no fireplace — we had gas then. And over on this end the steps went plumb down the hill to the road. That’s after they put the paved road down there, you see. Our house sat almost in a curve. Garage is down there at the road.”

I said, “So people gathered in front of the porch to hear all the music?” and Harold said, “They didn’t have much room. The yard only went out there maybe thirty or forty feet and then it dropped off down to the road. A pretty steep bluff — fifteen-, eighteen-, twenty-foot drop. On this side of the house was the garden spot and out the other end the yard didn’t go very far.”

Were there shade trees around the house?

“Yeah, three or four big oak trees over to one side and then we had apple trees on the other side,” Ugee said.

I asked if the crowds came at day or night or only on weekends and Ugee said, “They’d come through the day and Dad and Ed would play music all day and half the night. Weekends, why, it was always a big crowd. I’ve studied about them so much, about how good a friends Ed and Dad was. And always was that way. And they’d have the most fun together.”

Ugee said Ed never put a cup out for money.

“I never seen him put a cup out in my life. Maybe they’d be somebody to come around and put a cigar box to the side and everybody would go through and put money in it. Course when he was playing in the city — Cincinnati or some place like that — why he’d make quite a bit of money there. Whenever he played them religious songs, the hair’d stand on your neck. You’d look at two blind people sitting and singing.”

I interrupted, “Did he play Cincinnati a lot?”

Ugee said, “He played Cincinnati a lot. He went to Cincinnati to make records one time, too. That’d a been in the thirties. He fell out with them. They wanted to pick the tunes. Ain’t nobody picked tunes for Ed — Ed picked his own tunes. When he found out what they was trying to hook him on, he quit right then. Ed went down to Nashville once. I don’t know that he went to the Grand Ole Opry but he went to Nashville. When he found out what they done, he didn’t have no use for that.”