Tag Archives: Bill Monroe

In Search of Ed Haley 328

26 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Lincoln County Feud, Music

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From Naaman’s, we drove out of Trace and on up Harts Creek to see Andy Mullins, who Brandon had met a few months earlier at Bill Adkins’ wake. Andy had just relocated to Harts after years of living away in Michigan; he had constructed a new house in the head of Ticky George Hollow. Andy was a son to Roxie Mullins, the woman who inspired my fascination with Harts Creek. Andy, who we found sitting in his yard with his younger brother Dobie, was very friendly. He treated us as if we had known him for years.

“I was just catting when you fellas come up through there,” Andy said to us. “One of the girls lost a cat down there over the bank last night — a kitten. This morning I went down there and it was up in that rock cliff and I took its mother down there and it whooped the mother. And I took one of the kittens down there and it whooped the kitten. The old tomcat, he come down there and he whooped it. It went back up under that damn rock.”

I liked Andy right away.

We all took seats in lawn chairs in the front yard where Andy told about Ed Haley coming to see his parents every summer when he was a boy, usually with his wife. He described him as having a “big, fat belly” and weighing about 200 pounds.

“He wasn’t much taller than Dobie but he was fat,” Andy said. “I can remember his eyes more than the rest of him because his eyes was like they had a heavy puss over them or something. It was real thick-like. Not like they were clouded or anything.”

Even though Ed was blind, he could get around all over Harts Creek and even thread a needle.

Andy had heard that Milt caused Ed’s blindness.

“They said that Ed got a fever of some kind when he was a baby and Milt went out and cut a hole in the ice and stuck him under the ice in the creek to break the fever,” he said.

Andy knew very little about Milt.

“Just that Milt got killed, that was it, over shooting the old lady down at the shoal below Bob Dingess’ at the mouth of Smokehouse,” he said.

“All the old-timers that knows anything about his daddy is probably dead,” Dobie said.

Brandon said we’d heard rumors that Milt and Green were innocent of shooting Hollena Brumfield and Andy quickly answered, “That’s what my father-in-law told me.”

Changing the conversation back to Ed, Andy said, “Ed used to go up on Buck Fork to George Mullins’ to stay a lot and up to Grover Mullins’. He lived just above George’s place — the old chimney is the only thing still standing.”

He also went up in the head of Hoover to see George Baisden, a banjo-picker who’d hoboed with him in his younger days. The two of them had a lot of adventures, like the time Ed caught a train at Dingess and rode it over to Williamson to play for a dance or at a tavern. Just before they rolled into town, George pushed him off the train then jumped off himself. It made Ed so mad that George had to hide from him for the rest of the night.

I asked Andy if Ed ever told those kind of stories on himself and he said, “He told big tales, I’d call them, but I don’t remember what they were. Well, he set and talked with my grandmother and grandfather all the time he was here, and Mom. I never paid any attention to what they talked about really. I guess, man, I run these hills. I was like a goat. Hindsight is 20/20.”

Not long into our visit with Andy, he got out his guitar and showed me what he remembered about Bernie Adams’ guitar style. From there, he took off on Bill Monroe tunes, old lonesome songs, or honky-tonk music, remarking that he could only remember Ed’s tunes in “sketches.”

I asked, “Do you reckon Ed would sing anything like ‘Little Joe’?” and he said, “I don’t know. It’s awful old. I heard him sing ‘The Maple on the Hill’. He played and sang the ‘Black Sheep’.”

“He played loud, Ed did,” Dobie said.

“And sang louder,” Andy said immediately. “He’d rare back and sing, man.”

The tune he best remembered Ed singing was “The Drunkard’s Hell”.

I wanted to know the time frame of Andy’s memories.

“1944, ’45,” he said. “I was thirteen year old at that time. Now in ’46, we lived across the creek up here at Millard’s. Him and Mona Mae and Wilson — they wasn’t married at the time — went somewhere and got some homebrew and they all got pretty looped. That was up on Buck Fork some place. Ed got mad at Wilson and her about something that night and that’s the reason they didn’t play music — him and Claude Martin and Bernie Adams.”

I asked Andy about Ed’s drinking and he said, “Just whatever was there, Ed’d drink. He didn’t have to see it. He smelled it. Ed could sniff it out.”

Brandon wondered if Ed ever played at the old jockey grounds at the mouth of Buck Fork. Andy doubted it, although it sure seemed to me like the kind of place for him to go. There was moonshine everywhere and men playing maybe ten card games at once.

“They’d get drunk and run a horse right over top of you if you didn’t watch,” Andy said. “It was like a rodeo.”

The last jockey ground held at the mouth of Buck Fork was in 1948.

In Search of Ed Haley 256

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Ugly Creek, Ed Haley, Music

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At the turn of the century, Jim Lucas was the best fiddler on Big Ugly Creek — that peculiarly named creek located a few miles downriver from Harts Creek. Jim was born in 1881 to Irvin Lucas (a fiddler), and was a nephew to Boney Lucas and Paris Brumfield. Based on interviews with Jim’s family, Jim always went clean-shaven and wore an overcoat year round because “whatever’d keep the cold out would keep the heat out.” He was also an avid hunter and cowboy — he could supposedly command cattle from across the Guyan River. As for his fiddling, Jim either cradled the fiddle on the inside of his shoulder or held it under his chin. He gripped the bow with two or three fingers right on its very end, used a lot of bow, and patted one of his feet when playing. He sometimes sang, typically played alone, and devoted a great deal of his time fiddling for children. Every Saturday, he’d get with Clarence Lambert at his home on the Rockhouse Fork of Big Ugly or at Sam Lambert’s porch on Green Shoal. Some of Sam’s daughters sang and played the guitar. Jim’s grandson Jack Lucas said they played a lot of gospel and bluegrass music but could only remember one tune Jim played: “Ticklish Reuben.” Jim had to give up the fiddle when he got old but always put an almost deaf ear up against the radio and listened to Bill Monroe on the Grand Ole Opry. He died in 1956.

Charlie Paris, a long-time resident of the Laurel Fork of Big Ugly Creek, remembered Jim Lucas coming to visit his grandfather Durg Fry in the thirties. He said his grandpa Durg lived on Laurel Fork in a home with cracks between the logs so large that “you could throw a dog through” them. He was a fiddler himself, as were his brothers Leander and Jupiter and his nephew Frank Fry. Charlie said Durg played with the fiddle under his chin and never sang or played gospel or bluegrass. He patted his feet when playing and, in his old age, would hold himself up by a chair and dance to music. One time, when he and Jim were hanging out on Laurel Fork, Jim reached his fiddle to a younger fella named Carl Toney and said, “Your turn.” Carl was a very animated fiddler and when he took off playing “Orange Blossom Special” Jim just shook his head and said, “I’ve quit.”

In Search of Ed Haley 139

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Around five o’clock that evening, Bobby Taylor drove over to Lawrence’s from Dunbar, West Virginia. Bobby was a Clark Kessinger protege and friend to Wilson Douglas. We gathered in the kitchen where Bobby got acquainted with Lawrence. He told about the first time he heard Clark Kessinger speak of Ed Haley.

“I was setting there and I was like a sixteen-year-old boy just hanging on his every word. I remember it just as well as if it was yesterday. I asked him who the best fiddler was that he ever heard in his life and he said Eck Robertson was really great on about four pieces. He said Ed Haley was the best fiddler he ever heard because Ed Haley played them all great. And Lefty Shafer’s dad, Von Shafer always thought the two fiddlers who were the best he had ever heard — and he said he wouldn’t turn his hand over for the difference — was Sam Jarvis and Ed Haley.”

Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve heard Pop talk about Jarvis.”

At that point, Bobby showed Lawrence how he thought Sam Jarvis had played — “a lot like Haley: smooth and even” — then said, “But Haley had a little bit more bow motion than Jarvis did.” He played a little bit for Lawrence, showing him what he thought were some of Ed’s “licks.” Lawrence tapped his fingers on the table a few times, then laughed and said, “John, watch him. He can teach you pretty well how my dad played.” He really liked Bobby’s fiddling, which made perfect sense. He had patterned after Kessinger, who patterned after Ed.

For the next hour or so, Bobby and I played a mess of tunes. Bobby’s favorite Haley tune was “Dunbar”, which he’d learned many years ago from the Parkersburg Landing album. For the most part, Lawrence watched us quietly, only periodically commenting on notes or bowing when something sounded or looked familiar. After I played my version of “Shortnin’ Bread”, Lawrence said it sure sounded like one of his father’s tunes. When Bobby played “Soldier’s Joy” he said, “Well, that’s about the way my dad played it. I mean, the notes.”

We seemed to be off on Ed’s bowing, because Lawrence kept reminding us, “Pop ran the bow from one end of the bow to the other.”

Bobby told him, “That’s the way I do if you catch me about two o’clock in the morning warmed up. I use the entire stroke of the bow.”

Occasionally, Bobby would mention old fiddlers around Charleston — Kessinger, Jarvis, Shafer. He seemed to be a big fan of Mike Humphreys, a Depression-era fiddler who turned down an offer by Bill Monroe to become a Bluegrass Boy in 1943 and spent the next twenty years competing in contests against Clark Kessinger. Lawrence said all he remembered about Ed’s trips to Charleston was that a fellow named Ruffner usually guided him around town and that Kessinger was always there watching, listening and trying to copy his father’s style. He must have been really good at it because Ugee Postalwait had said Kessinger “was as near like Ed as any fiddler I ever heard.”

Just before I headed back to Nashville, Lawrence agreed to let me borrow all of Ed’s home recordings and copy them using the latest technology. Considering how Lawrence guarded them through the years, I felt his loaning of them was an overwhelming expression of trust. In a few days, I excitedly took them to Bruce Nemerov at the Center for Popular Culture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. As Bruce “did his thing,” Lawrence, Steve, and I talked about maybe having them cleaned up and released commercially. Lawrence liked the idea of giving any profits from such a project to the Kentucky School for the Blind.

In Search of Ed Haley 1

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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In 1981, roughly thirty years after Ed Haley’s death, my search to know everything about his life and music began at a second hand music store in Boulder, Colorado. While thumbing through a box of records by early radio stars and bluegrass artists with such familiar names as The Skillet Lickers, Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs I saw this certain green and yellow album cover. On its front was a picture of a blind fiddler buttoned up in an overcoat. On its back was a drawing of a steamboat landed at a wharf. Nearby the drawing was a brief note: “This album consists of home recordings made in 1946 by Ed Haley, a blind Kentucky fiddler who never made a commercial record. The original discs were prepared by his family in order to preserve some of their father’s music and were never intended for public use.”

The album was titled Parkersburg Landing, an apparent geographical reference to the small city by that name on the Ohio River. “Even twenty-five years after his death, anyone researching fiddle music in West Virginia or eastern Kentucky is certain to learn of Ed Haley,” the album cover proclaimed. I had never heard of anyone named Ed Haley, but I bought the album and mailed it home to Nashville anyway. I knew that part of the country was a traditional hotbed of great musicians.

Some time later (I forget exactly when – it’s difficult to recall now), I rediscovered Parkersburg Landing filed away on one of the crowded shelves in my office. I put it on the record player and as soon as the title track started, I thought, “Uh oh. This is pretty good.” I turned up the volume knob and slumped down in my chair. I sat there stunned for the next twenty or so minutes listening to Haley plow through tunes with names like “Humphrey’s Jig”, “Cherokee Polka” and “Cherry River Rag”. By the time I reached out to flip the album to Side 2, my fingers were trembling and I was almost breathless. I tried to focus on every nuance as Haley played “Flower of the Morning”, “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Dunbar”. Then, when he took off on “Forked Deer”, I almost fell out of my chair. It was a profound experience…the kind that pulls you away from everything you’ve done up to that moment and sends you off into another direction. I don’t even remember listening to the rest of the album, although I’m sure I did.

Where did these recordings come from?

“The present recordings were made by Ralph Haley, who also plays guitar on several selections,” I read in the album liner notes. “Ralph had served in the Signal Corps during the war and used a home disc-cutting machine of the Wilcox-Gay type. After Ralph’s death in the late forties, the collection of discs were evenly divided among the five remaining children. It is estimated that the 106 sides presently accounted for represent approximately one third of the original total. Most of these records were preserved by Lawrence Haley of Ashland, who kindly gave us permission to issue them here. The discs were transferred at the Library of Congress under the supervision of Larry Haley and Alan Jabbour and were remastered at Intermedia Studios in Boston.”

I spent the next several years glued to Parkersburg Landing. I talked about Haley constantly. Every now and then I would call up friends and play some of the album, saying, “Now, that’s how it’s supposed to go.” No one had a clue who Ed Haley was; most seemed unimpressed. But to me, the scratchy recordings were like old faded photographs and I was so excited by what I heard that the imperfections in recording technique quickly disappeared to my ear.