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In Search of Ed Haley 347

01 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music, Shively

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After a few minutes of downplaying his ability, Charlie had his wife fetch his fiddle from inside the house. With some hesitation, he put it against his chest and took off on “The Fun’s All Over”.

After he’d finished, I asked him if Ed played with the fiddle at his chest and he said no — he put it under his chin.

Charlie played some more for us: “Birdie”, “Stagolee”, “Twinkle Little Star”, and “I Don’t Love Nobody”.

He seemed a little displeased with his playing, remarking, “Boys when your fingers stop working like they used to, you don’t do as you want to. You do as you can.”

Brandon asked Charlie, “Do you remember how Ed pulled his bow when he played?”

“He held it like that toward the middle and just shoved it,” Charlie said. “He played a long stroke. When he’d be playing a long stroke, I’d be a playing a short stroke and every now and then you’d see him turn his head around and listen to ya. If you missed a note, buddy, he called you down right there. ‘That ain’t right,’ he’d say. ‘That ain’t right.’ Man, he’d sit in playing ‘er again just like a housefire.”

I asked, “When Ed would play a tune, how long would he play it for?”

“He’d play as long as they’d dance,” he said.

Would he play it for fifteen minutes?

“No, hell, he’d play for an hour at a time,” Charlie said. “After he finished a tune, he’d hit another’n.”

I wondered if Ed ever played “Down Yonder”.

“Yeah, I’ve heard him play it,” Charlie said. “He played everything in the world, Ed did.”

What if someone asked him to play something he didn’t like?

“He’d shake his head no and he’d play something else,” Charlie said. “That’s just the way he was…he was a stubborn old man. He had one he played he called ‘Handsome Molly’.”

“That’s almost ‘Goin’ Across the Sea’,” I said. “Did Ed play ‘Goin’ Across the Sea’?”

Charlie said, “Yeah, that old woman would sing it.”

I got out my fiddle, hoping to get Charlie’s memory working on more of Ed’s tunes. I played “Blackberry Blossom” and “Brushy Fork of John’s Creek” with little response other than, “Yep, those are some of old man Ed’s tunes.”

Then, when I played “Hell Among the Yearlings”, Charlie caught me off guard by saying, “That’s called ‘Pickin’ on the Log’.”

At that juncture, he took hold of his fiddle and played “Arkansas Traveler” and “Billy in the Lowground”.

I could tell he was loosening up, so I got him to play “Warfield”. It was about the same thing as the Carter Family’s “Dixie Darling”, to which it would be real easy to sing:

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Naugatuck’s gone dry.

It was great to watch Charlie because he was the first active fiddler I’d met on Harts Creek.

During our visit, Brandon and I were able to formulate some idea of Charlie’s background. He was born in 1923. His father Charlie, Sr. went by the nickname of “Goo” to distinguish him from his uncle Charlie Conley — the one who’d killed John Brumfield in 1900. Charlie’s earliest memories of fiddling were of watching his father play “some” on old tunes like “Drunken Hiccups”. He also remembered Dood Dalton.

“Yeah, I’ve heard him play,” he said. “I don’t know how good he was, but I’ve heard him jiggle around on the fiddle. He used to come up home. I was raised right up in the head of this creek up here. Him and my daddy was double first cousins and my daddy had an old fiddle. They’d get it out and they’d play on it half of the night — first one and then another playing on it — but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they was playing.”

Charlie didn’t know that his great-grandfather Wog Dalton had been a fiddler.

Charlie told us a little bit about his early efforts at fiddling.

“My daddy had that old fiddle and I heard him fool with it so much I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll just see if I can do anything with it.’ And I started fooling with it and the more I fooled with it the more I wanted to fool with it and I just got to where I could play it a little bit.”

Charlie got good enough to fiddle for dances all over Logan County, sometimes getting as much as fifty dollars a night at Black Bottom in Logan.

“You had to duck and dodge beer bottles all night,” he said. “Man, it was the roughest place I ever seen in my life. They’d get their guts cut out, brains knocked out with beer bottles and everything.”

It sounded a lot like my early days back home.

I asked Charlie how he met Ed and he said, “I got acquainted with him up there at Logan when him and his wife played under that mulberry tree there at that old courthouse. And I’d hear about him playing square dances. I was playing over there at this place one time — he was there. This guy had got him to come there and play, too. He just sit down there, buddy, and we set in playing. We fiddled to daylight. People a dancing, I’m telling you the truth, the dust was a rolling off the floor.”

Charlie said the last dance he remembered on Harts Creek was in 1947.

In Search of Ed Haley 310

26 Monday May 2014

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

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A week or so later, Brandon and Billy visited Ward Browning, an older gentleman in Ferrellsburg whose wife was a descendant of Henderson Dingess. Ward said Milt Haley was from “back in the country at the head of Harts toward Mingo County.” The first year of Ed’s life, Milt dipped him repeatedly in water because someone told him it would make a baby healthy; instead, it made him go blind. Milt was hired with Green McCoy to kill the Brumfields. Later, they were captured and taken across the river from Green Shoal and kept under a dogwood bush where they were beaten through the night and then killed around daylight.

Ward said he used to see Ed Haley at Dood Dalton’s home on Big Branch in the late 1930s. Ed would stay around Dood’s place for two or three weeks at a time. He was a “star” — the best around. He and Dood sat on the porch and played for crowds of people in the yard who clapped their hands and had a good time. There was never any trouble. No one took him for granted. He sometimes made up to four dollars a day playing there in hard Depression times.

Ward said Ed carried his fiddle in a case and kept a stick to find his way in the road. He had a great personality and would tell wild stories of his exploits. He drank heavily and was “bad to fight,” but was always sober at Dood’s. Ward said he played “Billy in the Lowground”, “Lop-Eared Mule”, “Arkansas Traveler”, “Soldiers Joy”, “Blackberry Blossom”, and ‘8th of January”.

Brandon was also busy at the Haley-McCoy grave on West Fork. He seemed to be coming around on my idea to exhume Milt Haley and Green McCoy. I’d joked him relentlessly that we might do it only to find it completely empty. He was still against the idea, although his curiosity was getting the better of him.

“As I had been dwelling a lot on the Haley-McCoy grave recently, I finally decided to satisfy my curiosity to a limited extent,” he wrote. “I borrowed a metal detector and raced up to the grave on West Fork at the edge of dark to see what it would pick up (belt buckle, handcuffs, perhaps even the murder weapon). I first tested it on my keys, which I laid upon the ground. Running the detector over them caused a loud buzz. I then placed a pile of leaves over the keys and the detector still buzzed. As a last preliminary test, I laid a thick rock on top of my keys and ran the machine over it and it still registered the buzz. Content that the machine worked fairly well, I then eagerly began gliding it over the grave. Unfortunately, I picked up no real buzz. There was one spot that seemed to repeatedly register a slight buzz but nothing conclusive.”

Brandon signed his letter, “Digging Around (Almost Literally)…”

In Search of Ed Haley 308

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Back in Nashville, I called Wilson Douglas to thank him for being such a good host on my recent trip to West Virginia. I also had a few questions, starting with whether or not Ed played a tune called “Gunboats Through Georgia”.

“Oh, yeah,” Wilson said. “Well, they wasn’t very many, John, that he didn’t play. And he played a danged tune, him and French Carpenter, called the ‘Flatfoot Nash’.”

Wilson paused, then said, “I told you about Ed Haley commending Georgia Slim, didn’t I? He said he believed that Georgia Slim was the best fiddler on some of them there Southern tunes he ever heard. He said nobody could touch him on the ‘Billy in the Lowground’. Now, Georgia Slim — way back there in ’37, ’38 — he went and stayed with Ed Haley a lot in the wintertime.”

Wilson’s memories of Georgia Slim caused me to recall my theory that Ed was a grandfather of the Texas contest fiddling style. I hadn’t thought much about that lately so I called up Charles Gardner, an authority on Texas fiddling. Charles said Georgia Slim had influenced a lot of Texas fiddlers when he played over Dallas radio in the early 1940s. At that time, he was fresh from the Ashland-Charleston area, his playing no doubt filled with Haley and Kessinger licks. It seemed very possible to me that the unfamiliar parts he played on tunes like “Done Gone” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat” were learned from Ed or at least based on his approach.

In Search of Ed Haley 89

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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Clyde’s memories of Ed playing in contests were much more detailed than anything I had heard from the other kids.

“I’ve seen him go to contests and look like a farmer and he won every one he ever got into,” he said. “He’d go down to the Armco there in Ashland — they’d put up a bandstand up there — and when they’d have contests they had these eight or ten fiddlers up on the stage and he’d be up in all that mess. He fiddled with some of the best that there was in that country in that particular part of the time. I know he had a lot of people used to come to the house and play music with him.”

I asked Clyde what tunes Ed won contests with and he said, “Well, ‘Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and tunes like that. Not any particular ones. He could play any kind of music if he knew it. If he knew the words, he could make music like nobody you ever heard in your life. He had one tune called the ‘Flop-Eared Mule’. I remember ‘Brownlow’s Dream’, ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’.”

Gradually easing into specifics, I wondered if Ed held the bow in the middle or out on the end.

“It would depend on what kind of music he was playing,” Clyde said matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen him hold a fiddle bow down at the end, where the hair hooks up. Depending on the tune, the fastness of the tune, he could hold a bow anywhere he wanted to.”

Did he bow with short strokes or long strokes?

“Well, it would depend on which way he was sitting,” Clyde said. “If he was sitting on a chair with his right leg put out far… He never held the fiddle like anybody else I ever saw. He held it way low on his chest, almost down to his belt-line. My dad had long arms, you know. He was a long, thin man. We have a tendency to want to exaggerate a little bit and say he was bigger than he was, but I knew him pretty well. His hands were real thin — looked like a piano player. He could finger that fiddle like nobody you ever heard or saw.”

I asked if Ed picked the banjo and Clyde said, “Oh, yes. He was better with a banjo than he was with his fiddle. It didn’t have a thumb-string on it. I tried to learn how to play the banjo, too, but I never could do any good at it. Well, my mother bought me a fiddle in the store somewhere and she tried to get me to learn how to play the fiddle because she knew she was gonna be dead one of these days and him too and she wanted to have all that music made for posterity. My mom didn’t want me to do it, but my dad wanted me to. He called me his favorite son and said he wanted me to carry on his tradition. I tried, but I got my fingers cut off when I was a lot younger — two-thirds of my first and second fingers on my left hand — and that messed me up from noting. Ralph was the one that played with my dad a lot. He played the guitar like Roy Clark played. He had a big Martin guitar that was a double-header and he could play on both necks of it at the same time. Ralph was a good musician. He died in 1945.”

Clyde talked a lot about Ed being a drinker, which was something Lawrence kind of kept “under wraps”.

“He was a rip-snorter, don’t think he wasn’t,” he said. “You know, he could be pretty boisterous when he wanted to be. Ed Haley was a mean person — believe me he was. I loved him… He used to take me because he knew I liked to go with him. He would give me a drink every once in a while. He knew I got to liking that and he’d take me with him just about everywhere he went. I think he was the one who got me to drinking too when I was a kid and it’s the worst thing I could’ve done. Course I had no control over it then.”

I asked Clyde what Ed’s drink of choice was and he said, “Whiskey. He wasn’t a beer drinker much, or wine. He didn’t go much for that kind of stuff. He drank moonshine when he could get it, and he generally got it.”

Clyde had seen Ed drunk but said it didn’t hurt his fiddle playing.

“I think if anything, it made it better.”

In Search of Ed Haley 50

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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I asked Curly if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “Ah, I remember ‘Forked Deer’ and I remember ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and I remember the ‘Old Sledge’ and I remember ‘Poplar Bluff.’ ‘Blackberry Blossom.’ The longer he played a tune, the meaner he got on it. If he got the feel, it hit him. And the more he played the better he got and the more tunes come to him. He played one waltz — ‘Westphalia Waltz’ — and that’s really the only waltz that I can recall that he played. And it was all double stop fiddle.”

Curly never heard Ed sing a note — a very surprising recollection considering the way that Ugee Postalwait had hyped Haley’s singing abilities.

“I got a copy of a song from him,” Curly said. “He had somebody to write it down. Because at this time, out at Morehead, Kentucky, they had a feud out there. And they had a shoot-out there on the steps and then somebody wrote this song called ‘Rowan County Crew.’ And Ed, they tell me, would sing that at different places throughout Kentucky. At that time, it was like Floyd Collins that was in the cave and like the Hatfields and the McCoys — only this was called the ‘Rowan County Crew.’ Well, at that time it was hot as a pistol through the state. Now evidently he sang that song, but he never sang it for me.”

Curly said, “Ed could have been as great as the Blue Yodeler or any of those people. He could have been right on those records with them but under no reason did he want to record commercially. Had he been living today and with the equipment they’ve got today, he would’ve been in more demand than Elvis Presley ever was. Nobody played ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ like him. And a very humble man. I never heard Ed down anybody else, I never heard him put anybody below him and I never had him to tell me how good he was. In fact, I wonder sometimes if he knew how good he was. But I knew it. He was a brilliant man. He’d just about keep a check up on everything during his lifetime. He knew the news, he knew the political field, he knew what was going on in the state.”

I asked Curly about the first time he ever saw Haley play.

“I played with Ed when I was a kid — twelve, thirteen years old — and we lived at a place called Horse Branch. That’s as you enter Catlettsburg, Kentucky. And I was a kid carrying an old flat-top guitar — no case — trying to learn how to play. In the evening, he’d come out on the front porch after dinner and Ralph would get the guitar and the mother would get the mandolin and the neighborhood would gather because at that time radio was just coming into being. And I’d go down there and sit and bang while they were playing. And that’s where I first heard Ed Haley.”

Curly lost track of Ed when he started playing music out on his own at the age of fifteen. Throughout the mid-thirties, he played over the radio on Huntington’s WSAZ and Ashland’s WCMT with the “Mountain Melody Boys,” then made several appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and Knoxville’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round with Curt Polton’s band. It was during that time, he said, around 1936, that Ed got into a contest with Clark Kessinger and Clayton McMichen at the WCHS radio station in Charleston. Clayton was the National Fiddling Champion, while Clark was the National Fiddling Association’s champion of the East. The whole thing was “built up for months — it was a showdown.” In the contest, each fiddler got to play two tunes and someone named Banjo Murphy seconded every one using a three-finger picking style on a four-string banjo. First prize was a “live baby” (a little pig) and the winner was determined by a clapping meter. Curly wasn’t sure what tunes Ed played (probably “Cacklin’ Hen,” his contest specialty) but remembered the results clearly.

“Ed Haley beat the two men on stage,” he said. “McMichen was out of it in a little bit but it took several rounds to eliminate Clark Kessinger.”

Curly returned to Ashland in the early forties and found Ed living in the bottom of a weather-boarded, two-story apartment building on 37th Street (Ward Hollow). He started visiting Haley again, usually on cold days when he knew that he’d be close to home. He’d put his D-18 flat-top Martin guitar in the trunk of his car and “go pick up a pint or a half a pint of moonshine,” then head on over to Ed’s house.

I’d go in. I wouldn’t take the guitar in at all. I’d just knock on the door and go in and I’d say, “Hi, Uncle Ed.” “Hi, Curly.” He knew me by my voice. And I’d go in and sit down, you know, and say, “How’s the weather?” and “How’s things?” and “How’s the family?” and so forth and so on. We’d sit around there and talk a little bit. I’d say, “Ed, been playing any lately?” “No, I haven’t felt like it. I just haven’t felt like it.” I’d say, “Well, how about a little nip? You think that would help?” “Well now you know you might have something there.” So I’d go on to the car and I’d get the bottle and come in and we’d sit back down and I’d pass it to him. He’d hit it. He’d sit right there a little bit you know and I’d say, “Take another little nip, Ed.” “Well, I believe I will,” he’d say. “It’s too wet to plow.” And he’d sit there and he’d rock a little bit in that chair and… Being blind, he talked a little loud. “Hey, did I ever play that ‘Old Sledge’ for you?” I’d say, “Well, I can’t remember Ed. Just can’t remember.” Well, he’d get up and he’d go over and he’d lay his hand right on that fiddle laying on the mantle of the fireplace. By that time I’d be out the door and getting the Martin. I’d come back in and he’d tune ‘er up there and feel her across you know and touch her a little bit here and there. He’d take off on it.

Curly and I got our instruments out and played a few of Haley’s tunes. He showed me the type of runs he used to play behind Ed and gave me a few more tips about his fiddling. He said Ed was “all fingers…so smooth” and could play all over the fingerboard — even in second and third positions. He “put a lot of his upper body into the fiddling” and patted one foot to keep time. If he fiddled for a long time, he put a handkerchief under his chin for comfort (never a chinrest) and dropped the fiddle down to his arm and played with a collapsed wrist.

Just before Lawrence and I left, Curly said, “I’ll tell you somebody that’s still living in Charleston and he’s a hell of a fiddle player — or was. They called him Slim Clere. He’s about 82. He knew Ed. In fact, he was the man that Clere looked up to as he was learning. And he could probably give you more information than I could because he’s followed the fiddle all of his life.”

Curly also recommended Mountaineer Jamboree (1984), a book written by Ivan Tribe that attemped to detail West Virginia’s contributions to country music. It briefly mentioned Ed: “Blind Ed Haley (1883-1954), a legendary Logan County fiddler who eventually settled in Ashland, Kentucky, repeatedly refused to record, but did belatedly cut some home discs for his children in 1946.”

In Search of Ed Haley 7

26 Monday Nov 2012

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A few days later, while re-reading the liner notes for Parkersburg Landing, I focused in on the name of J.P. Fraley as one of the informants for Ed’s biographical information. Encouraged by my success in contacting Snake, I got J.P.’s telephone number from a mutual friend and just called him up. He lived near Grayson, Kentucky, a small town southwest of Ashland and roughly mid-way between Ashland and Morehead on Route 60. I could tell right away that Ed Haley was one of his favorite subjects.

As soon as I mentioned Haley’s album, J.P. just took off. “You know, he never did make a commercial record. Those little old things, they had a cardboard center. They was home recordings. At the time, Rounder was a making the record that I did, The Wild Rose of the Mountain, and I told them about Ed Haley. And we was lucky with Lawrence, one of his boys…”

J.P. stopped.

“John, I’ll tell you quickly the story of it. Lawrence was really proud of his daddy, but people around Ashland would say, ‘Aw, he was just a bum.’ Well, he wasn’t a bum. Anyway, I got a hold of Lawrence and he was dubious about even letting us make an album of the records. He was pretty well put out because his daddy never did get recognition, but I told him Rounder was legitimate. He said, ‘I’ll go with you and take them records.’ He insisted on it. He was on the verge of being a retired postman. So he went to the Smithsonian and finally come out with the album. It tickled me to death that they did it.”

J.P. paused and then said, “Well, so much for that. I’m on your nickel,” – as if what he’d just told me was something I didn’t really care to hear.

I asked him to tell me more, specifically about his memories of seeing Haley on the street. He said, “You know, he fascinated me. When I was just a kid learning to fiddle, my daddy was a merchant. He’d take me into Ashland and stand me on the street just to listen to this blind fiddler and his boy play. I was about twelve or fourteen. Well, even earlier than that I was listening to him on the street – watching him – and I swear to god, his fingers, when he played the fiddle just looked like they was dancing. It was out of this world. Now, I don’t know which world’s fair it was, but they picked him up – I think it was Mr. Holbrook, the doctor – and took him to the world’s fair and the critics in New York – might have been ’35 or somewhere in there – wrote about him. Said he was a ‘fiddling genius.’ Just what I already knew, and I was just a kid.”

In the 1940s, one of J.P.’s friends, Clovis Hurt, had a run-in with Haley at Murphy’s Ten Cent Store in Ashland. “Clovis Hurt played fiddle in a band. He discovered Ed playing on the street and it just had him washed away. So Clovis told Ed that he was a fiddler. Ed said, ‘Have you got a fiddle?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Ed said, ‘Where’s it at?’ He said, ‘It’s in the car.’ Ed said, ‘Get it and play me a tune.'” J.P. chuckled. “Now, this happened. They was several of us around there when this took place. Clovis never did like Ed after what happened. He got his fiddle out and he played a tune called ‘Grandmaw’s Chickens’. It sounded like a whole flock of them – scared chickens. Ed said, ‘Listen, I wanna tell you something. Don’t you play the fiddle in public anymore. You’re just a learning it a little bit.’ Clovis hated him. Well, I mean he didn’t hate him, but he said he didn’t like him. Said he didn’t have any personality. I said, ‘Well, Clovis, he didn’t have to have. He made it with the fiddle.’ But he was nice enough.”

So Ed wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even though he was blind?

“Oh, no,” J.P. said. “I’ve heard him get loud. He would actually try to fight if somebody bothered him. He’d tell them, ‘Come around here.'”

Haley apparently had a cranky side: according to Parkersburg Landing, he “was known for his irascible moods and anyone who did not properly appreciate music was liable to his scorn.

I asked J.P. about Haley’s fiddle and he said, “Well, Ed wouldn’t fool with a cheap instrument. Over the years, he had several fiddles. This doctor I told you about – Doc Holbrook – he had one of Ed’s fiddles and I got to keep it for two or three years.”

As for Haley’s technique, J.P. said he “leaned” the fiddle against his chest when playing and held the bow at its end. I wondered if he played long or short bow strokes. “He done it both. I know when he played for his own benefit he used more bow. But he played a lot for dances and as they used to say they had to play ‘quick and devilish.'”

Did he play in cross-key?

“Oh Lord, yeah.”

What about bluegrass music? Did he like it?

“I honestly don’t think Ed woulda fooled with it. He didn’t do a whole lot of double-stopping or too many minors and stuff.”

Being an avid collector of fiddle tunes, I was very curious about Haley’s repertoire. J.P. said, “Oh, Lord. I play some of his tunes: ‘Birdie’ and ‘Billy in the Lowground’. And he played tunes like ‘Old Sledge’. He played all the standards like ‘Soldiers Joy’ and ‘Forked Deer’ and all of that. ‘Wagner’. He didn’t call it ‘Tennessee Wagner’, but he called it ‘Wild Wagner’. He played a tune that I woulda loved to learned – one called ‘Flannery’s Dream’. He was limited but now he would play hymns, too – especially on the street, on account of this is the whole Bible Belt. He played some waltzes. They were crudely pretty. I don’t remember him a singing at all, but now I have heard his wife sing and him backing her on the fiddle.”

I asked J.P. if he remembered Haley playing the eastern Kentucky version of “Blackberry Blossom” and he said yes – that he played it, too. He knew a little bit about the tune’s history: “Well, General Garfield was a fiddler. A lot of people didn’t know it. I guess it had to be in the Civil War. The ‘Blackberry Blossom’ – the old one – was General Garfield’s favorite tune. Ed – I never will forget it – he told me that that was General Garfield’s ‘Blackberry Blossom’.” This “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”, J.P. said, was a different tune entirely than the one made famous by Arthur Smith. J.P. said local fiddler Asa Neal also played the tune. “He was from around the Portsmouth area. He’s dead, and he was quite a fiddler. Now, he knew Ed. Fact of the matter, he learned a lot from Ed, but he was about Ed’s age.”

J.P. said Haley never talked about where he learned to play. “I have an idea that it was probably a lot like I learned. See Catlettsburg was a jumping off place, I call it, for loggers and coal miners and rousters and so forth, and they was always some musicians in them. And Ed had this ability – he couldn’t read – but he had an ear like nobody’s business. If he heard a tune and liked it, he’d play it and he’d just figure out his own way to do it.”

J.P. was on a roll: “See, Ed has become more or less of a legend now…and rightfully so. His range was from, say, Portsmouth, Ohio to Ashland, Catlettsburg, and up to Charleston, West Virginia. I think he was at Columbus, Ohio, and then he went to the world’s fair. He played consistently up and down the river. He made good money on the boats.”

I asked J.P. how Haley got around to all of those places and he said, “What he would do, especially when that boy was living… He drank all the time and it was easy for him with his cronies. Somebody would move him here or yonder in a car. But now, like if he was a going to Portsmouth or someplace, usually Mr. Holbrook – he lived down at Greenup – he’d take him anywhere he wanted him to. And doctored him. I mean, if he got sick or anything, he took care of him.”

Doc Holbrook “was a pretty famous doctor in the area. He was known pretty well for a pneumonia doctor, which was hard to find then.”

J.P. kept mentioning “that boy” – meaning one of Haley’s sons – so I asked him about Haley’s family, particularly Lawrence. He said, “Fact of the matter, I didn’t know Lawrence at all. I had done something. I don’t know what it was. I think I’d played at the Smithsonian and had given Ed credit for some of the tunes and Lawrence read about it. And he called me and he almost cried thanking me for recognizing his daddy for what he could do. You see, when it comes to his daddy, he’s got up like a shield. He’ll say, ‘You can come this far, but you ain’t gonna go no farther.’ But once you know him, well, he became a good friend of mine. Now Annadeene, my wife, she worked with his wife a little while at a sewing factory and she broke a lot of ice, too. They’re on good terms with us.”

I told J.P. how much I’d like to meet Lawrence and his family sometime and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, John. You’re welcome to yell at us anytime you want to and we’ll get you in contact with them.”