I met Lawrence a few weeks later at the Fraley Family Festival near Grayson, Kentucky. He gave me Ed’s newly located bridge and I showed him Ed’s fiddle — pointing out all of the things I had discovered about it. I specifically pointed out a “V-shape” pattern worn into the varnish on its back toward its bottom. At its top were what appeared to be “sweat marks” where Ed rotated the fiddle and slid his fingers up to get notes in second and third position (which contradicted what Snake Chapman had said about him rarely getting out of first position except when, every once in a while a finger would sneak and grab a note or two from the upper positions). As we talked about such things, J.P. Fraley showed up along with Nancy McClellan, a local folklorist.

     After some small talk, I played “Half Past Four” for Lawrence on his dad’s fiddle.

     “Where he got a name like that, I don’t know,” he said. “I think, though, it was possibly when my oldest brother Sherman Luther Haley was born. My mother went into labor about 4:30 in the morning. He was named after one of Mom’s brothers. It was the one that died.”

     I said, “Now, I’m not totally used to these Black Diamond strings and I’m not playing it note for note the way Ed did. I’m just scratching the surface.”

     Lawrence said, “I know. Them old records are hard to hear.”

     “There is so much on them records you wouldn’t believe what’s in there,” I said. “Just all kinds of little things. Like his notes, he gets certain long notes and they’re like words. Some of them are moans. And he uses certain little tones.”

     Lawrence said, “I notice a lot of you guys, it looks like it’s really hard work for you to do this. Pop never had a bit of trouble playing a fiddle. It wasn’t work to him. If he enjoyed the group he was with, you could absolutely hear it in his music. If he had good accompaniment, he’d stay all day.”

     “I’m also curious about that bridge because I think he might have played with a little bit lower action than what I’ve got here,” I said.

     Lawrence said, “Yeah, a little bit lower. You could look at that bridge I brought you.”

     I said, “Yeah, I’ve already had it on and looked at it. The thing that’s interesting about that is if you look at that bridge, that bridge has been handled a lot because he would feel of it and that’s why all that finger grease is on it. I can just see him. What I may do, I may try that on but what I might do is carve a duplicate of that because sometimes when they get old, they’ll crack.”

     Nancy McClellan asked Lawrence, “Were there other fiddlers in the family?” and he said, “No, I couldn’t play. I was left-handed and when I was a little tiny fella I nicked the whole end of this finger off and I didn’t have any meat on the end of it and that hindered me from picking a violin, see. I couldn’t work up a callus on it. Bone’s right underneath it.”

     You know, I’d never really thought much about that — the fact none of the Haley children played the fiddle. Ralph, of course, was a guitar player — but he wasn’t actually Ed’s son. It was only natural that the kids — no matter how intense their exposure or no matter their possible distaste — would at some point pick up a fiddle and at least try it. This had been Lawrence’s confession — and his reason for not carrying it any further.

     J.P. played a little on Ed’s fiddle and commented on the Black Diamond strings. “Have these strings been on there all that time?”

     “No,” I said.

     “Where’d you find them?”

     I said, “I’ve got a friend that used to carry them and he had a couple of sets and he gave them to me.”

     J.P. said, “I can remember when they was a quarter. Wonder what those fiddlers would have done if they’d had access to the strings and stuff that we can get now?”

     There was a little pause then J.P. said, “Remember I was telling you about a tune called ‘Maysville’? It had to do with Maysville, Kentucky. I don’t know where the people in Elliott County learned it. They was a tobacco house down there and those people had to wagon tobacco from back in Elliott County plumb to Maysville to sell it.”

     Lawrence said, “Pop played a lot of pieces named after…”

     J.P. interrupted, “Now he played ‘Maysville’.”

     Lawrence continued, “He played a piece of music that I really liked that he called ‘Catlettsburg’.”

     Lawrence said to J.P., who still held Ed’s fiddle, “That isn’t as fine a fiddle as you played that used to belong to my dad that the Holbrooks got.”

     J.P. said, “Paul’s got it. Well, what he done… That’s a good fiddle, too. He let me have it. I told him if he ever wanted it back… It was in the awfulest shape that ever was. But I had it fixed up. Not embellished now. Just restored. And suddenly Dr. Holbrook’s daughter was gonna take violin lessons. They took it. There’s something else he told me. See, I didn’t know the old Dr. Holbrook…”

     Lawrence said, “He’s the one delivered me.”

     J.P. said, “His son Paul — our doctor — told me that old man Holbrook went to fiddling, too. Well, Paul said that he supposedly took Ed and Ella to Columbus to do a record.”

     Lawrence said, “That was that ‘Over the Waves’, I think. Big aluminum record.”

     J.P. said, “It was the closest thing to a commercial record that Ed ever made.”

     Lawrence spoke some about his father’s travels.

     “Pop didn’t get all the way down into Old Virginia, I don’t think. He made it to Beckley and Bluefield and places like that. I can remember walking from Morehead to Farmers right down the railroad track. They went down there to somebody’s house to play — I was just a kid then — and seemed to me like they played all night.”

     Nancy McClellan said, “Well, that’s what Wilson Douglas said happened up there in Calhoun County, West Virginia. He said a fiddler named Laury Hicks would ask for ‘The Black-Eyed Susan’ and said Laury Hicks would sit there and cry while Ed Haley played.”

     I told about my recent visit with Laury’s daughter Ugee Postalwait and Lawrence said, “When Pop come around and they was playing, she’d get fiddle sticks and she’d just clog around Pop’s fiddle and every time he’d note it she beat the sticks on that. Dance right around him.”