After visiting Curly and Wilson, I went to Pat Haley’s and met Mona, who was waiting to see me. Mona and I sat down at the kitchen table, while Pat washed dishes. It was my first visit with Mona in some time. I told her about visiting Curly Wellman, hoping to stir a memory, but she didn’t even remember him. I pulled out his picture and she and Pat both really bragged on his looks.

“He must have been a hunk when he was young,” Mona said. “You know, I always fell in love with guitar players.”

We all laughed and things got kind of loud, which caused Pat’s two little housedogs, Shady and Josie, to bark furiously from under the table. A few seconds later, after Pat’s commands had calmed the dogs, Mona surprised me by saying that she had heard “all her life” that Curly was the person who taught her brother Ralph to play the guitar. (It was actually the other way around.)

I had a lot of questions for Mona, who was exuding an openness I had not seen up to that point. It was obvious that she was going to be more candid in Lawrence’s absence. Before I could ask anything, she apologized for having not been more helpful in my efforts to know about Ed. I quickly pointed out, though, that she had been helpful, especially in regard to “the family troubles.” That aspect of Ed’s life was really important because it likely helped to explain a lot of the rage and lonesomeness I heard in his music.

“I wasn’t really scared of Pop,” Mona said. “I loved Pop. I just didn’t like the way he done Mom. It hurt all of us kids, I guess. The earliest memories I got is of me running away from Pop fighting with Mom and that has a whole lot to do with me not getting close to him like I did my mother. I think my mother was a remarkable woman. She probably taught Pop a lot of that music, too.”

I told her what Lawrence had said about Ed and Ella getting a “bed and board divorce” and she said, “No, I remember Mom did divorce him because she got Judge Imes to do the divorce. I think she divorced him when we lived on 17th Street. I never looked at them as being divorced because they had long since stopped being man and wife before they divorced.”

I got some paper from Pat’s granddaughter and asked Mona to describe Ed’s residence at 17th Street. In addition to serving as Ed’s home at the time of his divorce from Ella, it was also the place where he made his recordings. Mona described the downstairs, then the upstairs where “there was two bedrooms and a bathroom. Large bedrooms.”

After I’d sketched everything out based on Mona’s memory, she said, “I was gonna tell you about that living room couch that you drew the picture of with the radio on the end of it. I went in one day and I was just a teenager or young kid and I turned on some jitterbug music. Pop was laying on the couch and he said, ‘Turn that off,’ and I said, ‘No Pop, I want to hear it.’ And he said, ‘Mona, I’ll cuss you all to pieces.'”

Speaking of radios, I wondered if Ed ever listened to the Grand Ole Opry.

“No, I don’t think so,” Mona said. “He listened to mysteries, like ‘The Shadow’ and ‘The Green Hornet’ and all that kind of stuff. And ‘Amos ‘n Andy’ and ‘Little Abner.’ ‘Lone Ranger’, I remember that. And those opera singers, he called them belly shakers.”

While I had the pen and paper in hand, I asked Mona to describe Ed’s house at Ward Hollow.

“Well, they was a porch, then a living room, dining room, and kitchen — straight back — and all the way down through here was another bedroom and hallway and another bedroom. Then in through here was a bathroom and back here was another bedroom. That’s where Pop slept. And right off the kitchen was another little porch.”

Mona said she could draw it better than describe it to me, so I gave her a pen and some paper. When she was finished, she seemed pleased with her effort, saying, “I might have a good memory after all.”

Satisfied, I got out my fiddle and played some tunes for Pat and Mona. After I finished “Dunbar”, I told them how I figured it was one that Ed made up.

“See,” I said, “I’ve got all these lists of tunes at home and lists of tunes on other tapes and so I look these tunes up and try to find out where they come from. And some of them you can research and some of them just ain’t there and those are the ones I think he wrote.”

Mona figured Ed made the tune “You Can’t Blame Me For That”:

My dog she’s always fighting, in spite of what she loves.

And when her little pups was born we all wore boxing gloves.

An old hen once was sitting on twelve eggs. Oh, what luck!

She hatched 11 baby chicks and the other was a duck.

But you can’t blame me for that, oh no, you can’t blame me for that.

If a felt hat feels bad when it’s felt, you can’t blame me for that.

 I got the impression in watching Mona sing those words to me that she was able to picture Ed playing.