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In Search of Ed Haley 293

21 Monday Apr 2014

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The more I played for Mona, the more Pat’s little dogs barked at me — especially when I got up and danced. Their commotion caused Mona to say, “We always had an animal. We used to have an old blue-tick hound named King and every time Pop would play the fiddle he’d howl. Uncle Luther gave him to Pop when I was a baby. I don’t know if it was as much Pop as it was Mom, but they all loved King. All of us did. He was smart. He was a good hunter. He taught all the dogs in the neighborhood to hunt. Everybody wanted to hunt with him — they come from miles around to borrow him to go hunting — and someone stole him one time and he was gone about a week and when he came back blood was running out of all four paws and he just flopped on the front porch. He had a broken-like front paw right here in the first joint. He was young then. We had him till he died. He growed old and died. I was about fourteen when he died — maybe thirteen.”

I wondered if Ed ever used a seeing eye-dog and Pat said no, although Ella did. She said the family had a pet dog named “Jaybird” when she married Lawrence.

I could tell that Mona was in the mood to talk, so I put my fiddle away and told her about our recent research on Milt Haley. When I told her that Milt appeared to have been an illegitimate son of Nellie Muncy, she immediately told me how Ed visited a family of Muncys around Williamson, West Virginia. Her memories of such trips were vague.

“I remember a place we had to go in an automobile so far and then we had to cross the river in a boat to get to where we was a going — in a rowboat — but I don’t remember where it was. It had to be in West Virginia somewhere. I remember a store building where we went and we slept upstairs over that store building. I remember Pop getting real mean and mad at Mom up there one night and I wanted to crawl under the covers and pull it on me. He was getting real nasty with her.”

I asked Mona what they were into it over and she said, “Sex, I reckon. He wanted it and she didn’t want it and he said he had to have it. That’s how nasty he was — but he didn’t say it in those nice words. My dad happened to be drinking that time, too, so it made it that much worse.”

Trying to lighten the memory, I told her that sex had been a sore spot with married couples for thousands of years.

Pat said what was remarkable about Mona’s memories was the fact that Lawrence had never said a bad word about his father.

“He never talked bad about Pop,” she said. “Of course, he was Momma’s boy.”

Mona said Ed only whipped her once.

“It was on my birthday and I was getting ready to cry and he said, ‘Four, five, six.’ That’s the only time he ever whipped me. I do remember a time that Jack and Noah got into a fight and they was young men. And Pop jumped up — he wore suspenders — and he had them down. He jumped up to part them and got a hold of each of them and his pants fell down. The fight stopped and we all started laughing.”

Pat said that happened at 1040 Greenup after she’d married into the family — “right out on the front porch.”

Mona added, “But he had long underwear on.”

That fond memory caused her to say, “You know, The Waltons remind me a lot of the way we were brought up. We had a pretty good family life. We’d tell each other good night and stuff. Lawrence and I usually slept with Mom.”

Pat said, “Scratch each other’s backs,” and Mona said, “Yeah.”

I asked if Ed came around and kissed every one goodnight at bedtime and Mona said, “No, no. Mom did. Pop didn’t. If she’d tell him to go see about one of us, why, he would.”

For entertainment, the family gathered around the radio or listened to Ed’s “wild stories.”

In Search of Ed Haley 290

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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Curly suggested that we visit Wilson Reeves, a local record collector, for more information about Ed. Wilson was glad to talk to us. He remembered seeing Ed and his family play on the streets of Ashland during World War II.

“This was in the early forties,” Wilson said. “I came up here to take training at the old Ashland Vocational School. I lived on Carter about 17th. There was a house there where I had a room upstairs. And every evening I’d cross over from Carter over to Winchester, go down Winchester, and on down to a little restaurant — what they call a ‘hole in the wall.’ Greasy food, but it was cheap. And she [meaning Ella] would be sitting in a chair there by the Presbyterian Church close to 16th Street. Most of the time she’d be playing the mandolin. Sometimes, I’d see her with the accordion. The little girl would stand on her side — I believe the 16th Street side — and she’d be holding the tin cup. I didn’t notice whether people put money in it or not.”

Where was Ed?

“Well, I don’t remember too much about them,” Wilson said. “I was twenty years old and other things to think about and on my way. Mr. Haley, I don’t remember whether he was sitting down or what. I’ve seen him over at the old Alphon Theater. He would sit right there. Best as I remember about him, he was by hisself. And there was times — and this is very vague in my memory — that I saw them get off the bus. They’d drag a chair out with them. Just a straight-backed chair, I believe. After the war was over, I went back to Fleming County for a while. Sometime in 1947 I came back up here, but I don’t recall ever seeing them any more.”

Wilson said he was never really acquainted with Ed or his family and was never at his home.

“Course I was in the house,” Curly said. “Poorly furnished. The family was rich in being family but very poor as far as living conditions. You might say if it was possible at that time, they would have been on food stamps.”

Curly was speaking of Ed’s home at Ward Hollow. I asked Wilson for some paper so I could sketch it out based on Curly’s memories. We started out with the living room.

“Just a square room,” Curly said. “No rug. A pine floor and a fireplace and a mantle and a little side table and his rocking chair and an old cane-backed straight chair. There was another doorway here that went into the next bedroom back. It was just an open door really. It was a shotgun house. I was never in their kitchen. They had about four rooms. But this was in a big building that there was a lot of apartments in — several apartments in this building — and Ed and his family lived downstairs in the first apartment as you went up the hollow. Big old community house — all wood — weather-boarded house. In my time, it mighta been sixty, seventy years old. They had a name for that building but it won’t come to me.”

When I’d finished my sketch of Ed’s home at Ward Hollow, I said to Curly, “Now what about his home at Horse Branch?”

“It was about a four room house — and one floor — and set up about six foot off a the ground because the creek run down through there and if they hadn’t a built it up on these sticks that it set on they woulda got flooded out every time it rained,” he said. “And you had to go up a long pair of steps to get up on their porch. Handrails down each side of the steps. Porch all the way across the front. I’d say the porch was six feet deep. I was never inside. In fact, the front room is as far as I was in the other house.”

Curly said he used to play music with Ed on the porch. Ed always sat to the right of everyone, probably so he wouldn’t have to worry about pulling his bow into them.

Wilson said Ed played with David Miller, a blind musician sometimes called “The Blind Soldier.” Miller (1893-1959) was originally from Ohio but settled at 124 Guyan Street in Huntington just prior to the First World War. He played on WSAZ, a Huntington station, with The Guyandotte Mockingbirds in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He also made it as far up the Guyan Valley as Logan where he hosted at least one fiddling contest.

“Saturday night, September 17th at 8 p.m., sharp at the court house, Logan, W.Va., David Miller, an old time recording artist, will open a real old time Fiddlers Contest, awarding three big cash prizes to contestants and one prize to best old time flat-foot dancer,” according a September 1927 article in the Logan Banner. “It is expected that this will be the season’s big meeting of old timers and lovers of old time music. See Miller at Grimes’ Music Shop Saturday afternoon.”

According to one source, Miller lost his radio job around 1933 after threatening to throw his manager through a window. Wilson heard that Ed taught Miller the tune “Rose Connelly”, as well as Red Foley’s “Old Shep”.

Aside from the Blind Soldier, there were several other well-known musicians working in Huntington during the Depression. In the mid-thirties, Riley Puckett and Bert Layne (two of the famous Skillet Lickers) spent a few months there, while Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas (a friend to Natchee the Indian), and Arthur Smith were featured acts during the World War II era.

In Search of Ed Haley 289

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Curly said he lost contact with Ed Haley in the mid-thirties (other than seeing him on a street corner or at court days).

“When I got about fourteen, fifteen years old, I went to playing around with younger musicians and I left Catlettsburg and I come down to Ashland,” he said. “I started playing bars at fifteen.”

Curly told me all about how he “rediscovered” Ed toward the end of the decade.

Along about 1937, we were working WCMI and Mother and I was talking one day and I asked her, I said, “Well Mother, do you know anything about Ed Haley or the Haley family or where they’re at? I haven’t heard from them in years.” And my mother told me, said, “Why, they live right up there at Ward Hollow.” I said, “Well, I didn’t know that.” See, what I used to do, I’d get lonesome to hear him. And I knew him and he knew my voice and he knew my mother and my father and all my brothers and sisters and I’d get lonesome to play with him. And I’d get a pint of “moon” — bought it from old Maude Johnson down there at 29th Street — and walk all the way to Ward Hollow. The front door was never locked. And when I’d open the door — I’d know where he was gonna be, in that rocking chair — I’d say, “Uncle Ed?” “Well Curly, come in.” And I’d go in — wouldn’t even carry a guitar or nothing — and I’d go in and I’d sit down. He’d go get the straight chair when he played, but he would be sitting in there. A little old fireplace. I’d say, “How are you, Uncle Ed?” “Well, I don’t feel so good today. I’m not as pure as I should be.” And I’d say, “Well, do you think maybe a little hooter…?” And he’d say, “Well, uh, yes.” Talked loud then. I’d say, “Well, I brought one along.” Moonshine. I’d go out and get it and come in and give it to him and he’d hit it.

We’d sit there and talk a little more — about this and that and the weather and so forth and so on — and I’d say, “You better getcha another little drink there, Ed. Maybe if you got a cold it’ll help you.” He’d hit it again and he’d sit there and all at once he’d say, “Say, did I ever play ‘Blackberry Blossom’ for ya?” And while he was saying this, he was getting up… He knew exactly where his fiddle was on the mantle, he knowed where the bow was on the mantle, and he never touched a thing that was on that mantle — just them two things. I never saw him finger for the fiddle: he always picked it up by the neck and got the bow with his right hand. And then he’d throw that fiddle under there — the chin was holding it — and he never even had a chin-rest — then he’d sit down and he’d say, “Well, you brought your old box along, didn’t ya?” I’d say, “Yeah, it’s out there in the car.” I think it was a D-18 Martin. Sixty-five bucks. Go get the guitar, come in, sit down, tune up with him. And that’s another thing about that man. I often wondered how he kept the fiddle at 440 tuning. I know he didn’t use a pitch pipe.

Curly said it was during that time that Ed met Bernice “Sweet Georgia” Brown, who he called “Brownie.” He elaborated: “Brownie’s father owned a business here, which was in the making of tombstones, right down on Winchester Avenue, and his mother was from Cartersville, Georgia. And he was a tremendous old-time… The old English fiddle tunes and a lot of that stuff — the hornpipes. He was just marvelous on them. He would’ve loved to have played jazz fiddle, but he didn’t have it. Because he was from Georgia, Big Foot said, ‘I’ll teach you how to play ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, so from then on that was his name. We had him and Big Foot playing twin fiddles. During the time that he was here, I wanted him to hear Ed Haley. Neither one of us had a car at that time, but we were in walking distance of Ward Hollow, which was just up the road from me about eight, nine blocks. We’d walk up there and take a little hooter along and finally get him started. Well, Georgia wouldn’t pull a bow in front of Ed Haley, but he would watch him awful close. Every move — even the way he tuned the fiddle with his chin and his knee mostly. He was an amazing man.”

I asked Curly if Ed played “Sweet Georgia Brown” and he said, “Never. I don’t think he woulda even rosined his bow to play a thing like that.”

Thinking back about that time in his life caused Curly to talk about his personal memories of Ed.

“I had a lot of experiences with that old man. I loved the old man. Really loved him. He was a swell old man. He was a dear friend. So timid. He was easy to be around and knew a joke as quick as he heard it. He wasn’t boastful or pushy — just a very little timid man that would sit in the corner for hours. He let everything out with the fiddle. He turned everything loose that was inside and he done it with the instrument. I think his first love really was his music.”

I asked Curly if Ed got along with other fiddlers like Clayton McMichen and he said, “I don’t think he woulda even talked to him. When Clayton mouthed off like he did — and was all mouth — I just think Ed would have set back and not taken any part in anything. Brassy and forward — Clayton was awful bad for that. I didn’t care for Clayton McMichen myself other than I appreciated the group he had together, The Georgia Wildcats.”

In Search of Ed Haley 280

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Ugee and I turned our attention back to the family photographs, where she spotted a picture of Ed’s son, Clyde. I told her about my visit with Clyde the previous year in California. She totally dismissed his story about Ed teaching him to drink, saying, “His dad never done no such stuff as that.” She paused for a second then said, “I went out and stopped Ed from whooping him one time. I think he’d stole some money or something. But he didn’t steal it. Noah did. I walked out and Ed had his belt off and I just took a hold of it. He said, ‘Who’s got a hold of me?’ He thought it was Ella. I said, ‘It’s me. You hit him another lick and the next lick’s mine. If you’re gonna whip him, whip the other’n.’ I said, ‘Noah’s the one was in your wallet.’ I seen Noah in it. I thought they’d sent him to get it. And Ed walked in and said, ‘Goddamn him, I ought to kill him.’ Then he told me, said, ‘Ugee, you ought to be careful with Clyde. He’s dangerous. He’ll sneak around and hurt ya.'”

Ugee had other run-ins with Noah, who was apparently one of Ella’s favorite children.

“Noah was picking on Lawrence and if he cried Noah’d say, ‘I never touched him.’ I said, ‘You do it again, I’ll whip you.’ Ella took Noah and went to Clay Hicks’ and stayed three days and when he come back he done just what I told him not to do. I never let on — I was a cooking. I said, ‘Noah, come here.’ I gave him three licks. I said, ‘I told you I’d whip you and I will.’ I looked at Ella and I said, ‘You needn’t take him and leave the country with him because I’ll follow wherever he’s at a whooping him.'”

This was interesting new information in the daily goings-on for Ed’s children. It was logical that since their parents were both blind they could get pretty wild. No doubt, Ed and Ella depended on family and friends to help raise the kids. Ugee, I noticed, had a close attachment to and interest in Ed’s children, almost as if they were her own family. She didn’t hesitate to tell how mean they could be.

“See, them kids had a hard time ’cause their dad and mother was blind and a lot of people didn’t want to bother with them,” she said. “People wanted the music of Ed and Ella but they didn’t want to put up with the family. That’s the truth of the matter. They was ornery. In other ways they wasn’t bad, either. You know, they was just children.”

Ugee seemed to think Mona was the meanest of the children.

“Mona was the orneriest young’n you ever seen in your life — to the core. She had to have all the attention. And she was pretty as a doll baby — curly-headed — just pretty as she could be. But my god, you couldn’t turn your back on her for a minute. If you was a baking a cake, she’d stick her hand in it. She could really get under your skin. I said, ‘Mona, you’re gonna keep on till I smack you.’ Ella said, ‘You don’t have to — I’ll give it to her.'”

Ugee lightly patted the air mimicking Ella.

“That’s the way she smacked — didn’t hurt them a bit. Mona would get up and look at her and laugh. Mona’d get out and go play a while, then she’d think of something to get into, like picking up chickens — ‘gonna weigh them’ — ringing their necks, throwing them down. ‘I’m weighing the chickens,’ she’d say. Killed about six or seven of them chickens. But that Ralph, he even shot hisself to see what it felt like. He’d do anything. You didn’t trust him out of your sight. He wouldn’t a cared to go out there and cut a cow’s throat or anything like that.”

I told Ugee what Mona had said about Ed being mean to her when she was growing up and she said, “Oh, I don’t think he was really mean to her. He’d fly up and cuss maybe. Now, the one they was really mean to was Clyde. Ella and Ed both was mean to Clyde.”

Wonder why?

“I’ve studied about that,” Ugee said. “Dad kept him all summer there at home to keep him from going to reform school. Now my dad woulda fought over him in a minute ’cause whatever he told him to do he minded him. And Mom, too. But I guess he was awful ornery when they were living in town. You know, kids a getting up to twelve, fourteen years old or something like that, there’s so much to get into. Now it would be awful to raise a family. I don’t remember Lawrence ever being like that. Jack and Lawrence was so good. Jack was a beautiful young man. Slender, dressy. He was a fine boy, but none of them came up with Lawrence far as I’m concerned. He was the best ole boy you ever seen. He would lead his mom and dad anyplace. I can see how careful he was. That little hand of his leading his mother ’round this mudhole — and his dad, too. I always called him my little boy. He was always better than the rest of them.”

Ugee said Lawrence always seemed bothered by the family troubles, even as a child.

In Search of Ed Haley 264

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Ed Haley, Music

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Around that time, I got my fiddle out to see if I could coax Jake into playing a few tunes. He said he couldn’t play anything — he’d quit years ago.

“I got shot through this shoulder with a high-powered rifle during World War II,” he said. “My fingers is stiff and my arm don’t operate just right. You’ve got to have a good bow hand to play a fiddle. I used to fiddle, but I can’t do no good no more.”

I asked Jake if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “I don’t know — he played so many. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Wild Horse’, ‘The Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Cluck Old Hen’, ‘Casey Jones’. They was all kinds — you could just keep naming them. Never did hear Ed sing.”

Thinking back to those times caused Jake to say, “Dad fiddled with Ed, you know. Dad never did own a fiddle. Ward Brumfield gave him one and he kept it all of his life. My dad used to like one called ‘The Blackberry Blossom’. ‘The Money Musk’ — man, it was a fast tune when he played it. They’d play ‘The Sourwood Mountain’. Pluck that string, you know. Play that ‘Sally Goodin’. Called one ‘Bear Dog’. It was something like ‘Bonaparte’s’, more or less. I used to, when my dad fiddled, get me two sticks this a way and beat on the strings of the fiddle.”

I asked Jake if he ever heard a tune called “Pharaoh’s Dream” or “Getting Off the Raft” and he said, “I’ve heard of ‘Pharaoh’s Dream’ but never heard of ‘Getting Off the Raft’. Can you play that ‘Danced all night with a bottle in my hand. Swing around the corner with the other man?'”

I asked Jake if he knew anything about Ed’s father and he said, “His dad was a mean guy. My dad has told me many times that Ed had the measles when he was a kid and his daddy took him out up here on Rockhouse and stuck him in the creek and that’s what made old man Ed Haley blind. His daddy stuck him in the creek. His daddy was a bad character. They went on a rampage, him and Green McCoy. My daddy knowed them from the beginning. They shot old Aunt Hollene Brumfield with a .30/.30 Winchester and it come out in her mouth. Never killed her. These fellers went to Kentucky — Ed’s daddy and Green McCoy — and they went and got them somewhere and took them up to Green Shoal up in there and massacred them. Someone took them up on the West Fork and buried them kindly up on the side of the hill. They probably just dug a hole and put them in it.”

Jake remembered Hollena Brumfield well.

“She was an old lady that run a store,” he said. “She was bad to drink — fell down a stairway and broke both of her thighs. She couldn’t get around very good. She had a big garden right there where Taylor Brumfield’s wife’s home is and she’d get out there… She’d keep every bum that come along and work them. She was good to them — she’d feed them, you know — and put them out there in that garden. She’d have them take her a chair out there and she’d hobble out there and sit in that chair and watch them work that garden. Boy, I dreaded her. When she’d talk, the spit would work out that hole there.”

Just before we left Jake’s, I asked him if he knew anything about Ed’s death. He basically repeated what Stump had told us earlier.

“I don’t know what happened. They killed him on the Crawley Creek side of the mountain over there. They beat him to death over there in a beer joint called the Cow Shed Inn. Some drunks did it, you know.”

I was flabbergasted. I mean, how could those Dalton boys tell such an off-target story?

In Search of Ed Haley 261

09 Sunday Mar 2014

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Stump said Ed would sometimes talk to him and his brothers.

“Well, his fiddle playing of course was the number one thing he talked about but also his rendezvous, like playing on street corners and beer gardens, and the people he associated with playing music. That’s the type of conversations he would have. He’d tell about some fiddle player maybe dying or something happening to them, and he knew them all over the country. Now he’d been around, old Ed had, buddy. Ed stayed on the road practically.”

What about his children?

“I think he had two or three,” Stump said. “He had one boy come to our house one time and stayed three days with him. That’s the only one of his kids I ever seen. I forget his name. He was older than me. He was turned just like his daddy. You’d never know that the boy’d get into anything but I think he drank some.”

What about Ed’s father? Did he ever talk about his father?

“Yeah, he’s talked about his dad, but I don’t remember the things he said about him. Never heard him mention his mother.”

We tried to prod Stump’s memory by mentioning that Milt was killed at the mouth of Green Shoal.

“Yeah, Milt Haley. My dad knowed all about it. They got chopped up with an axe. Do you know that big two-story house? That’s where it’s supposed to’ve happened at — right along in there somewhere. They was him and one other guy killed — McCoy.”

So what do you know about Ed’s blindness?

“He told me he was blind from the time he was three years old,” Stump said. “His eyes wasn’t like our eyes. His eyeballs — instead of the pupils and stuff — was white. Just very faint, you could see the pupils.”

Ed was very good at compensating for his blindness and was able to use his fingers to identify certain types of fiddles.

“Dad bought me a little Jacob Stainer fiddle one time off of a man by the name of Ward Kinser,” Stump said, elaborating. “Ward was a distant relation of ours, lived up above Logan. He come riding a horse up through there with that fiddle and Dad bought that off of him for five dollars and give it to me. Ed come just not long after we’d bought that fiddle. When Dad went out to the road and got him, he said, ‘Come on Ed, I got a fiddle down here I want you to look at.’ And him blinder than a bat. We went down there and Ed took that fiddle and set it right on his belly and he started at the neck up here, just feeling around it at the keys. He felt all around that fiddle then he turned around to my dad and said, ‘My, my, Dood. That’s the first Jacob Stainer I’ve had in my hand in I don’t know how many years.'”

Stump laughed, “I never will forget that.”

We asked Stump about Ed playing at the old post office/store in Harts.

“Yeah, he played down there,” he confirmed. “He played for money down there. He put out a little old can, I believe it was. He used to play a lot up there at Logan at the courthouse. Now, he had more friends around here, like up on Crawley and up on Big Hart, than just our family. He may stay a month with us and stay sober but then he’d get with a bunch up on Crawley and up in the head of the creek here and you wouldn’t see him for a while. He’d stay up in there drinking. He got killed about half way up Crawley.”

What?

“Now, it was after I come out of the army, I know,” Stump said. “The first part of ’53. They was a beer garden up there, like a two story building — seemed to me like a bunch of Butchers owned that, I’m not sure — and they found him dead at that building up there. Somebody beat him to death. I’ve heard somebody robbed him. They was supposed to been three people done it, but it never did come out. I never heard no names.”

I had to stop Stump and say, “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Ed Haley was murdered on Harts Creek?”

“Yeah,” he said assuredly. “We knew where he was at. He’d been at our house. That’s where he said he was going. Well, he’d been gone awhile, ’cause he’d go up Big Hart, maybe, it might take him maybe a month to get on Crawley up there. They took Ed Haley, buddy, and shipped his body back out of here. He never come back to our house after that.”

Wow…

In Search of Ed Haley 254

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Sandy Valley, Ed Haley, Music

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John and Mary A. Spaulding were the parents of Josie Cline and Mont Spaulding, two fiddlers in Kermit, West Virginia, somehow affiliated with Ed Haley. In all, John and Mary had six children: Mont Spaulding (1860), Josephine Spaulding (c.1864), Virginia Spaulding (c.1867), Linsy Spaulding (1870), Nickiti Spaulding (c.1873) and Lizzie Spaulding (1878). In 1870, the Spauldings lived in the Lincoln District of Wayne County, West Virginia. In the late 1870s, they moved over to the Warfield area of Martin County, Kentucky. John died around 1878. In 1880, Mont was listed in census records as a blind person. In 1900, he and his mother Mary lived with his sister Lizzie Fitzpatrick in Martin County.

In 1910, according to census records, “Monterville Spaulding” lived in the Big Elk Precinct of Martin County where he was listed as a 48-year-old widowed traveling musician. Listed with him in that census were five children, including 20-year-old Dora Spaulding and 11-year-old James Spaulding. Based on this census, there was a solid (although not genealogical) connection between Ella Haley and the Spauldings. Between 1911-12, Ella received several postcards from a “Mont, Dora, and Jim Spaulding” from various places — Richmond, Virginia; Charleston, West Virginia; and Norton, Virginia. In light of the 1910 census, which gave Mont’s occupation as that of a traveling musician while listing him with two children named Dora and James, it seemed obvious that Ella knew Mont from her early years. Mont was gone from Martin County in 1920.

In Search of Ed Haley 226

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley

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Billy recommended that we visit Bob Dingess, a man of advanced age who was related to and personally remembered almost everyone in Ed’s story. His father was Dave Dingess, a younger brother to Hollena Brumfield, while his mother was a daughter to Anthony Adams. His first wife was a daughter to Charley Brumfield, while his current wife was Robert Martin’s niece. Bob was a close cousin to Bob Adkins and Joe Adams, as well as many of the Brumfields. He was a fine old man — a retired schoolteacher and elementary principal — who could probably tell us more about Harts Creek history than any one alive.

We drove to Bob’s small white house, which sat just below the mouth of Smoke House on Big Harts Creek, and knocked at his back door, where a nurse met us. She knew Billy and invited us inside, through the kitchen and into a dark stuffy living room. There, we met Bob and his wife. Bob was bundled up in a light black jacket, oblivious to the enormous August heat. A somewhat tall man, he had an alertness to his movements that was surprising and enviable. He was very friendly. We all sat down on couches to talk about Ed Haley. I was sure that Bob’s heater was running; in no time at all, my sinuses were ready to explode.

When Billy told him that we were interested in finding out about Ed Haley, he said, “You have to give me a little time on this. My memory jumps on me. I’m no spring chicken and I have to think.”

But it was obvious that his mind was sharp as a tack when he started telling about his memories of Ed.

“Now Ed Haley, he left here after so long,” Bob said. “He went to Kentucky and he married there. He had a blind woman and she played the mandolin and he played the violin and they had a lot of the meanest boys you ever saw. I first saw him in 1918, during the First World War. Well on Saturday I’d go to Ferrellsburg to haul groceries. That’s the only way to get them. No bridge at Hart. And bless your heart, here that man and them four children come off’n that train, and that old woman, and I got a wagon load of groceries and set them on it and them boys fought and that old man he just slapped and knocked and kicked among them. And the old man, he wouldn’t tell them nothing — he was blind — and she couldn’t tell them nothing, either. And I finally got them up here at the house, and when I got them there Mom made me unload the wagon and says, ‘Get ’em away from here.’ And we took them up yonder to old man John Adams’ then, and let them go. They stayed a month up there.”

I asked how Ed dressed.

“Well, he was all right now, boys,” Bob said. “Don’t worry about him. He took care of everything. He’d laugh and talk, too. You’d think he could see. After you’d get him located and get him in the house, you know, he could get up and walk about through the house.”

Bob didn’t think Ed was the best fiddler he ever heard.

“Nah,” he said. “He couldn’t play this fancy music like Bill Monroe and them played. The old-time fiddle, he was good…old-time music. ‘Comin’ Around the Mountain’. He had a dozen songs.”

Bob said Ed used to play at the old pie suppers on Harts Creek.

“See, I was born in ’04, and I went to these frolics where they had pie suppers and socials and all these gals gathered and these men,” he said. “About every weekend the girls’d go to one home and they’d kill chickens and bake cakes and bake pies and everything and they’d auctioneer them off. If you had a pretty girl, buddy you’d better have a little pocketbook because somebody’s gonna eat with her and knock you out. Mother always give me a little money and I’d just pick me out one and get her. Yeah, planned all week, the girls would. We did that once a week unless they was some special occasion. We’d start at Bill Brumfield’s down yonder. From Bill’s, we’d come to Andy Thompson’s, come from Andy Thompson we went to Rockhouse to Uncle Wash Farley’s. Uncle Sol over here, he wouldn’t let them have it but just once in a while. Mom would let them have it about every three or four months up here. But on up the hollow up yonder it was a regular thing. Them days is gone, though. You couldn’t have that now. No fighting, no quarreling, everybody got along happy.”

I wanted to know more about Ed.

“Ed Haley, here’s what they’d do,” Bob said. “They’d put him and her on a mule and he’d be in front and she’d ride astraddle behind and hold him. And somebody else’d have to carry their musical instruments, see? And when they got them up there then they had to lead them and get them in the house and get them located. And somebody’d slip around and give him a big shot of liquor and her and they’d say, ‘All right, old-man, let ‘er go.’ ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, boy here she’d go. He’d sing it. He was a good singer. And his old woman, she didn’t look like she was very much, but she was a singer. She was a little woman, blind. But she’d sing right with him. Yeah, ‘Turkey in the Straw’. Ah, that ‘Grapevine twist,’ man, ‘circle eight and all get straight.’ Ah man, them girls had them old rubber-heeled shoes and they’d pop that floor. It was an all-night affair. He’d play a while, then he’d rest a while, then he’d start again. Along about midnight, they’d drink that liquor in them half a gallon jugs. You know, I was a boy and I wasn’t allowed to drink too much but now them old-timers they would drink that liquor. ‘Bout one o’clock, she’d start again, and when the chickens was a crowing and daylight was coming still they were on the floor. They would lay all day and sleep.”

In Search of Ed Haley 214

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in Big Ugly Creek, Ed Haley

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A few days later, Brandon and I left the festival and headed toward Charleston and on to Harts via Corridor G and Boone County. We reached Harts around three in the morning and parked the bus at the local Fas Chek near a fire station and bridge. Brandon’s uncle Ron Lucas, the manager of the store, had given us permission to park there. The next morning, Billy Adkins met us at the bus and we decided to see Doska Adkins, a woman of advanced age and granddaughter of Bill Duty. Maybe Doska would know about Milt Haley living with her grandfather, who had settled on nearby Big Ugly Creek.

In no time at all, Brandon, Billy and I were charging over Green Shoal Mountain talking genealogy and well on our way to Big Ugly country.

About twenty minutes later, we turned off of the main road into Fawn Hollow and began climbing a rocky driveway toward Doska’s house. We soon spotted Doska cutting brush out near her yard. She was a small-framed woman crowned with a tuft of white hair, having every bit the appearance of “the helpless old widow” — barring the machete in her hand, of course. I could tell right away that things were about to get interesting.

We followed Doska into her home, stepping quickly past a barking dog tied up on her porch. Inside, on the living room wall we spotted a mass of more than forty bushy squirrel tales hanging together in a pattern, which she said were her hunting trophies for the season. Sensing our interest in such things, she showed us a stuffed squirrel that she herself had killed, stuffed and mounted onto a small log. Before we could really ask her anything about Milt Haley, she told us all about how to pickle squirrels for later eating, then opened a desk drawer full of snake rattlers…more trophies.

It took us a few minutes to sit down and actually focus on the reason for our visit. When I told Doska about my interest in Ed’s life, she said he used to stay with her father, Jeff Duty. It didn’t take him long to get familiar with a place, she said, and he couldn’t be fooled with paper money.

“How often would he come there to stay?” I asked.

She said, “Well, I don’t know how often. If I was around, I was real little. I don’t remember him but I’ve heard Daddy talk about him.”

Brandon asked Doska, “Did your dad and Ed play music together?” and she said, “Yeah.”

We wondered what songs Jeff Duty played.

“They was one he played on the fiddle that I thought was real pretty,” Doska said. “I think he called that the ’11th of January’ and he’d play a while and then he’d pick a piece in it. Yeah, man he used to sit on the porch of an evening down yonder where I was raised and play for us.”

Brandon asked, “Was your dad considered the best fiddler up around this part?”

Doska said, “He was pretty good and he could play a banjo, too.”

I asked if her grandfather Bill Duty ever talked about Milt Haley and she said, “No, all of my grandparents was dead before I was born. See, I was born in 1917 and I never seen nary one of my grandparents. Mommy used to have a picture of my grandpaw but I don’t know what happened to it.”

Billy asked her, “Was Ed Haley any relation to you at all?”

“No, he’d just come through here — I don’t know why — and he liked to stay at my daddy’s,” she answered. “Didn’t matter who come through this country. If they’d ask to stay all night somewhere they’d say, ‘You can go to old man Duty’s and stay all night.’”

Of course, knowing what we knew about Milt and the Dutys it seemed likely that Ed came around Jeff for reasons more than his hospitality. As Bill Duty’s son and a fiddler, he would’ve been an excellent source on Milt — the father Ed never really knew.

Doska said her grandfather Duty’s home was no longer standing on Broad Branch but I wanted to see the site anyway. (It was, after all, very possibly the place where Milt settled with the Duty family in the early 1880s.) We asked Doska to accompany us but she said she looked awful; she had been cutting brush all day, she said, and wasn’t dressed to go anywhere. After a while, though, we persuaded her to go with us.

On the way to Broad Branch, Billy suggested that we stop and see 89-year-old Eunice Ferrell. Eunice had settled on the creek years ago and married a son of the Tom Ferrell mentioned in “The Lincoln County Crew”. She was a very friendly Mormon, slumped over with age. I told her I was interested in “Blind Ed Haley,” an old fiddler from Harts Creek, and she said she didn’t know about him. Her father-in-law had been a fiddler, though. She knew something about Tom’s trouble with the Butchers.

“They said they was in a card game and this man was trying to run the horse over him,” she said. “And he killed him but he got out of it.”

We told Eunice that we were going to see the old Duty place on Broad Branch if she wanted to go and she was all for it. We helped her into the car and took off.

Along the way, I stopped the car so Doska could point out her father’s home — the place where Ed used to stay. Brandon said some “hippie-types” from a big city had moved into the place several years ago.

“Michael Tierney lives there now,” Eunice said. “He’s a lawyer. Catholic man. He’s a good neighbor.”

We were having a blast.

“I’m glad I come,” Eunice said.

In Search of Ed Haley 204

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Chapmanville, Ed Haley, Harts, Music

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A few days after visiting Earl Brumfield, Brandon dropped in on his good friends, Charley Davis and Dave Brumfield. Davis was an 88-year-old cousin to Bob and Bill Adkins. Brumfield was Davis’ son-in-law and neighbor. They lived just up Harts Creek near the high school and were familiar with Ed Haley and the story of his father, Milt. Charley said he once saw Ed in a fiddlers’ contest at the old Chapmanville High School around 1931-32. There were two other fiddlers in the contest — young men who were strangers to the area — but Ed easily won first place (a twenty-dollar gold piece). He was accompanied by his wife and a son, and there was a large crowd on hand.

Dave said Ed was mean as hell and laughed, as if it was just expected in those days. He said Ed spent most of his time drinking and playing music in all of the local dives. Sometimes, he would stop in and stay with his father, Cecil Brumfield, who lived in and later just down the road from the old Henderson Dingess place on Smoke House Fork. Dave remembered Ed playing at the Cow Shed Inn on Crawley Mountain, at Dick Thompson’s tavern on main Harts Creek and at Ellum’s Inn near Chapmanville. Supposedly, Ed wore a man out one time at a tavern on Trace Mountain.

Dave said he grew up hearing stories about Ed Haley from his mother’s people, the Adamses. Ed’s blindness was a source of fascination for locals. One time, he was sitting around with some cousins on Trace who were testing his ability to identify trees by their smell. They would put first one and then another type of limb under his nose. Dave said Ed identified oak and walnut. Then, one of his cousins stuck the hind-end of an old cat up under his nose. Ed smiled and said it was pussy willow.

Dave said he last saw Ed around 1945-46 when he came in to see his father, Cecil Brumfield. Ed had gotten drunk and broken his fiddle. Cecil loaned him his fiddle, which Ed never returned. Brumfield later learned that he had pawned it off in Logan for a few dollars to buy a train ticket to Ashland. Cecil bought his fiddle back from the shop and kept it for years.

Dave’s stories about Milt Haley were similar to what his Aunt Roxie Mullins had told me in 1991. Milt supposedly caused Ed’s blindness after getting angry and sticking him head-first into frozen water. Not long afterwards he and Green McCoy were hired by the Adamses to kill Al Brumfield over a timber dispute. After the assassination failed, the Brumfields captured Milt and Green in Kentucky. Charley said the two men were from Kentucky — “that’s why they went back there” to hide from the law after the botched ambush.

The vigilantes who captured Milt and Green planned to bring them back to Harts Creek by way of Trace Fork. But John Brumfield — Al’s brother and Dave’s grandfather — met them in the head of the branch and warned them to take another route because there was a rival mob waiting for them near the mouth of the hollow. Dave said it was later learned that Ben and Anthony Adams — two brothers who had ill feelings toward Al Brumfield — organized this mob.

The Brumfield gang, Dave and Charley agreed, quickly decided to avoid the Haley-McCoy rescue party. They crossed a mountain and came down Hoover Fork onto main Harts Creek, then went a short distance down the creek and turned up Buck Fork where they crossed the mountain to Henderson Dingess’ home on Smoke House Fork. From there, they went up Bill’s Branch, down Piney and over to Green Shoal, where Milt played “Brownlow’s Dream” — a tune Dave said (mistakenly) was the same as “Hell Up Coal Hollow”. Soon after, a mob beat Milt and Green to death and left them in the yard where chickens “picked at their brains.” After Milt and Green’s murder, Charley said locals were afraid to “give them land for their burial” because the Brumfields warned folks to leave their bodies alone.

Brandon asked about Cain Adkins, the father-in-law of Green McCoy. Charley said he had heard old-timers refer to the old “Cain Adkins place” on West Fork. In Charley’s time, it was known as the Fisher B. Adkins place. Fisher was a son-in-law to Hugh Dingess and one-time superintendent of Lincoln County Schools.

In the years following the Haley-McCoy murder, the Brumfields continued to rely on vigilante justice. Charley said they attempted to round up the Conleys after their murder of John Brumfield in 1900, but were unsuccessful.

In Search of Ed Haley 202

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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A few days later, Pat Haley called me from Ashland with news that Mona was visiting. This was a new development: Pat and Mona were apparently patching up some of their differences. Pat knew I would want to speak with Mona and, in spite of whatever hard feelings existed between them, she was willing to give me access to her.

When Mona took the telephone, I told her about getting the new copies of Ed’s recordings. She immediately began to talk about her father making them.

“I was only about fourteen, fifteen,” she said. “I didn’t pay much attention. My oldest brother made the records, him and his wife.”

The whole thing took place around the dining room table.

“You know, they were made on plastic,” Mona said. “And they would brush the plastic strips away as the thing would cut the records. It was kinda tedious, I do remember that.”

Mona said Ed sat about three feet across the table from the recording machine, while Ella was a little closer.

“It shows in the records, don’t it?” she said. I didn’t want to say anything but I totally agreed.

She remembered that Ed listened to each record after it was made and liked what he heard.

“He was talking mostly to my oldest brother,” she said.

I had other questions for Mona, mostly dealing with her general childhood memories. I asked, “Do you remember the house being dark when you were growing up, because obviously they didn’t have any need for light.”

“We had gas lights at home, and after that we had electric,” she said. “Not overly dark, no. We had plenty of light. Always except bedtime, and then my mother would get her big New York Point books out and read to us in the dark.”

“Could your dad see any light at all?” I asked.

“No,” Mona said. “They were both completely blind. My mother said the only thing she remembered was daylight. And I don’t know how old she was when she went blind, but it was infancy, toddler, something like that.”

Mona seemed to be in a particularly talkative mood, so I pressed her for clues about Ed’s music. I asked her how her father’s eyes appeared when he played and she said, “He looked straight out. He never slouched unless he was drinking and then he put one leg behind him and one in front of him.”

Mona said Ed was not a short bow fiddler.

“Long bow, except where it was needed. But he always played that bow to the end,” she insisted.

She didn’t remember her father “rotating” the fiddle at all, although Lawrence Haley (and others) had sure made a big deal out of it. She said Pop always rosined his bow up “real good” before playing but never had any caked on the fiddle. She thought he used Diamond steel strings, which he bought in a local music store named Wicks. He patted his foot in what I call two-four-time when fiddling but “it didn’t override the music.”

I asked Mona if Ed was a loud fiddler and she said, “Oh, yes. You know his voice was strong, too. I’ve been around places with Pop and Mom and people would hear him from far off and come to him. You know, like in the workplace. He always had a crowd around him — always. Always when he played on the street or at the court house square or when he played at the Catlettsburg Stock Market.”

I asked if she remembered Ed playing on trains and she said, “Yes, we’d get in the backseat longways the width of the train and he’d play.” People sometimes gave him money but he mainly played for himself. “Just to pass time,” Mona said.

I was very curious about Ed’s mode of travel, especially considering his blindness and the great distance of ground he covered in his lifetime. I asked Mona if her father hitchhiked a lot and she said, “I don’t think he did. I think he walked more than he hitchhiked.”

Did he sing or whistle while he walked?

“No,” she said. “My mother did that for our benefit, you know. To pacify us, I guess.”

Mona said Ed loved playing for dances because he “enjoyed hearing people dance” and preferred it to the street “a hundred percent.”

I told her that someone said Ella didn’t care a whole lot for playing on the street and she said, “I never heard Mom complain about nothing except Pop drinking.”

I wondered if Ed drank on general principles.

“Whenever he felt like it,” she said. “Whenever somebody brought him something and asked him to take a drink, he would. And there’s times he has gone out and got it, too. Aw he’d cuss real bad. He’d say, ‘god almighty goddamn,’ like he was disgusted with the whole world. We lived down on Greenup Avenue between Greenup and Front and trains went by. His bedroom was in the front, and he cussed one time. I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘Them god almighty goddamn trains just act like they put their damn whistles in the window and blow.'”

I said, “Let me ask you this. In their relationship, was your mother or your father the dominant one, would you say?”

Mona surprised me a little bit when she said, “I’d say my mother was the dominant one until Pop was drinking.”

Ella was also the disciplinarian.

“Mom, she’d pinch a piece out of you, buddy,” Mona said. “She wouldn’t make a scene in a store or anything but she’d just grab you and pinch you and say, ‘Quieten down.’ She did it to me.”

Just before I hung up with Mona, I told her some of the things I’d found out about Ed’s genealogy on my recent trip to Harts. She listened quietly, then said, “Well see, the story I got was that Green McCoy shot this lady. And that’s the story that Pop told me, that I understood. Now, it may be wrong. My memory might be wrong or maybe I didn’t want to believe it the other way.”

In Search of Ed Haley 171

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

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“So when Larry and I got there, my mother-in-law, she was the one opened the door. I fell in love with her right away. And I didn’t see Ed until the next day. He was in bed and he was also hard-of-hearing and he didn’t hear us come in. Mom led us inside and, of course, Jack’s wife Patsy had the house very clean.”

One of the first things they did after arriving was eat a meal.

“Mom asked Lawrence, she said, ‘’awrencey boy, are you hungry?’ He said, ‘We’re starving, Mom.’ Well, Mom called upstairs and told Pat and Jack that we was here and they came down and Mom told Patsy we were hungry and Pat said, ‘Well, we don’t have much ready to eat. Would you like sausage and eggs?’ Well, I thought that was fine. But when these little patties came up… There was an oilcloth on the table — everything was clean and nice but the silverware was in a Mason jar in the middle of the table. I was just amazed that nobody set the table like I had been used to. I’d never seen sausage fried black. After dinner, they told us they had the bedroom upstairs fixed up for us. My mother-in-law had bought a new bedspread and new doilies for the dresser and Patsy had bought a lamp and some doilies and a picture for the wall. She’d really tried to fix up the room and make it nice for us. Mom had bought a very nice wardrobe and a dresser. The bed was Mom’s. The other furniture had belonged to Patsy and Jack.”

The next morning, Pat first met Ed.

“He came into the dining room and I was in the dining room, me and Larry. Larry just said, ‘Pop, this is Patricia.’ He just, you know, said, ‘Howdy do.’ And I went up to him to shake his hand. Larry had told me that I would have to go to him. If you looked at Ed Haley, it looked as though he was looking right at you. When I got up to him, Larry put his hand on my head and told him I was as short as Mom. Larry had told me that Pop would put his hands on me and check my head and face and my arms to see what kind of woman I was. He took his fingers — that’s the way he checked your features. And he could tell how you was built. Then he patted me on the shoulder to see what sort of made woman I was. But he had the smoothest hands. They were not a bit rough. Larry took Pop’s hand and put it on my belly and said, ‘See here, Pop.'”

Pat said she met Mona later that day.

“Mona came over the next day after I got here — her and her husband and her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law. Sometime after that, Mona came over and was playing a mandolin and her and Mom was playing. Mom played me some English tunes. And I don’t know how come they played but they got Pop to play a tune or two and he wouldn’t play much because he had whittled on his fingers and made them raw. He always loved my salmon. Course he called them salmon cakes. I call them croquettes.”

In Search of Ed Haley 170

16 Monday Sep 2013

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Early in March 1995, I fired up the Cadillac and drove the familiar road toward Ashland, Kentucky. After several hours of travel, I entered Rowan County — the place of Ella’s birth — and took the Farmers exit off of I-64. I wanted to get a closer look at Farmers, it being a place where Ella had lived, where Ralph was supposedly conceived, and where Lawrence remembered Ed playing for a dance. At one time, Farmers was the county’s largest town with 1,000 people. At the time of my visit, it was a small settlement, easily eclipsed by nearby Morehead.

A little later, I made my way into Morehead, a small college town with a curvy downtown business district and with most of its historical buildings torn down. It was somewhat disappointing. Triplett Creek, the Trumbo section of town, was dull and uninspiring. Small modern apartments replaced Ella’s old home place. Scenes of the Martin-Tolliver feud were long gone, removed to make way for a new road. At the college library, I found some interesting local history but nothing really pertaining to Ed and Ella’s story.

That evening, I arrived at Pat Haley’s home in Ashland. Pat was really down about Lawrence’s death and the progression of her daughter’s cancer. It was sad to be there – especially in the kitchen where Lawrence and I had spent so much time hashing out Ed’s music. Pat’s grandchildren were around frequently – especially David’s three daughters – but there was a great void in the house. I imagine it was a hundred-fold for Pat.

“We met August 14th, 1948, and he came back to America on November 5th,” she said of Lawrence. “We wrote to each other and I never saw him again until he came back to England and we met on Valentine’s Day, 1949. We married ten days later. I was almost eighteen. He was 21. I was staying with my sister in Hertfordshire, which is just on the outskirts of London. Larry came back to America in May, when he got out of the service. That’s when he told his mother he was married. Although she was writing to me, she didn’t know we were married. And she told him, ‘I suppose there’s a baby on the way.’ And he told her yes.

“I left England September 28th, 1949 on a Danish ship with a Polish crew. I was seven and a half months pregnant. It was a terrible experience. I went into false labor on the way over. The doctor was Polish and I never did understand a word the man said except ‘Haley.’ Had Beverly been born on that ship she could have claimed nationality to any country because we were in international waters. I got in this country on October 6th after eight days of choppy water. Larry met me in New York. We come past Staten Island and Ellis Island. I couldn’t see Larry on the dock but bless his heart he didn’t know he had to get a docking pass. He was stuck up at the barrier and here were all these people getting off the ship. And there was Larry in civilian clothes. It was the first time I’d seen Larry in civilian clothes. And one of the immigration officers said, ‘Why, he’s just a little boy.’

“We spent ten days in New York. Part of my luggage was lost and we were having some problem with some papers Larry should have gotten done. I didn’t know his parents were blind until we were in New York. I asked Larry what his mother thought of the pictures that he had given her of him and I, and he said, ‘She hasn’t seen them.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘She can’t see them. She’s blind.’ And I said, ‘Well, what did your dad think of them?’ And he said, ‘He’s blind, too.’

“We stayed in New York till October 16th. Just before we left, we had enough to buy a Spam sandwich and two apples in the bus station. He gave me the sandwich. It took us 24 hours to get from New York to Ashland. I got deathly sick on that bus ride. It was twist and turn over those mountains. It was about midnight when we got into Ashland and we had three cents in our pocket. Jack thought we would be there in the afternoon so he and Jim Brown had gone to the bus station and looked for us. They were drinking. Well, when we didn’t show up — I think it was between six and eight o’clock — they went back to the house. The bus station was located at 13th Street between Winchester and Carter Avenue. His parents lived at 1040 Greenup Avenue. So we walked and carried our suitcases and I had high heels on. We walked about six blocks — three down and three across.”

In Search of Ed Haley 159

26 Monday Aug 2013

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In one of those “passing the torch moments,” Lawrence reached the telephone to his sister, Mona. I told her about Milt Haley being a fiddler, and she said, “Really? Well we didn’t never know that.”

I figured that Ed had kept all of the details about Milt hidden from his kids, but Mona said, “Well, he talked about it some, because I wouldn’t know what I know about it if he hadn’t. You did find out what I told you was true, didn’t you? It wasn’t my dad’s mother that was killed, the way I heard it. It was one of the Hatfield women. Got half her face shot away and it killed her. That’s why they retaliated against Green McCoy and my grandfather. That’s only hearsay, but it had to come from Pop. I do remember him saying that.”

Pat seemed pleased that Mona was visiting Lawrence.

“He asks for her a lot,” she said.

I wanted to know more about Lawrence’s condition.

“He sits with his eyes closed and he found a pair of sunglasses that look exactly like the ones his daddy wore,” Pat said. “These are a pair that one of the kids bought. They were laying on the dining room table and he picked them up and said, ‘There’s my glasses.’ He insists on wearing them and you would think it was Ed Haley back many years ago. He talks about horse and buggies a lot. He sits with your book constantly. He does not like to look at the picture of his mother’s tombstone. What keeps you in his mind a lot, he listens to the tapes and he knows he gave you the records. Beverly was here this past weekend. He knew who she was but he was still talking in riddles. But today he’s pretty much himself. He got up and got dressed about 5:30 and he’s been roaming ever since.”

In Search of Ed Haley 156

23 Friday Aug 2013

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I gave Pat a call to check on Lawrence, who was back at home in Ashland. Pat said Mona had been a frequent visitor since Lawrence’s heart attack and was starting to open up about her painful memories of Ed.

“Mona said her father was the cruelest, most horrible man to her,” Pat said. “Even her mother was not the mother to her that she was to Lawrence. And she said Lawrence was always the favorite. And I said to her, ‘I didn’t see any of the ugliness of your daddy or your mother,’ and Larry has never ever said anything about his father except he’ll tell you he got drunk or he’ll tell you he was mean to Mom once in a while. But he has told me he never did see his father strike his mother. Mona said she has heard them and said the things that her daddy has said to her mother were just too horrible for her to repeat. She used to put her head under the covers to keep from listening. But Larry has none of these memories. Memories he has of his dad were always good memories. But Mona will agree: there was two out of all that were the favorites: the oldest boy Ralph and Lawrence. Mona says she is very sorry that in the last years of her mother’s life she did not help me any more than she did. I was very young when his mother passed away and I had three small children.”

Pat said Lawrence was starting to act a great deal like his mother.

“There is so much that is coming back to me that was exactly like his mother,” she said. “For one thing, when I help him to the bathroom, he takes the same little steps. He goes with his eyes closed most of the time, just like he can’t see. And he’ll sit with his eyes closed. You know there is those little things, like he won’t ever eat with a fork anymore — he eats with a spoon. His mother always did. And he drinks a lot of water, just like she did. There’s just so many of his little mannerisms that remind me so much of his mother. He will call me ‘Mom’ a lot. I don’t know if I told you, but one night he was crying and I went in to him and I said, ‘Honey, what’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘Mommy, rock me. Rock me, Mommy.’ He was back in his childhood and it just breaks your heart John when that happens. He’d been talking, he wanted to go to Morehead.”

There was more bad news for Pat. Her daughter Beverly had recently been diagnosed with cancer.

In Search of Ed Haley 151

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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A few weeks later, I gave Lawrence another call. I wanted to update him on Bruce Nemerov’s work with Ed’s records. I’d heard some of the cleaned-up tracks and noticed that Ella’s mandolin was extremely loud at times. I asked Lawrence if it was because she was seated closest to the microphone.

“I’m pretty sure my brother did it all on one microphone,” he said. “But I guess it was placement of the microphone. She was just there to keep a good solid beat going. It wasn’t anybody trying to hog the music someway.”

I really bragged on Ed’s “Fifteen Days in Georgia” and “Over the Waves” — two of the “new” tunes from the Holbrook records. I played Ed’s recording of “Over the Waves” for Lawrence; it was an incredible, up-tempo version with Ella seconding him on the mandolin.

“Well you see, the record I’ve got of that tune she was playing the piano, so they had to be in a studio somewhere for that,” he said, after the recording ended.

“It’s amazing how fast he played back then,” I said.

Lawrence agreed, “Yeah, yeah, it sure was. That was a waltz, and you’d have to waltz the hall if you waltzed that one.”

Lawrence stressed that I had “a lifetime of stuff to study in there.”

I asked him if his father ever listened to the home recordings much and he said, “No, I think Mom put them up and left them up until Pop was dead and then she started dividing them out. You know, letting the kids come in and get pieces that they enjoyed. I had 45 or 50 records that I know of. One or two of them kind of got lost. I think I know who lost them for me. That’s the way things go, I guess. You can’t hold onto every little scrap of treasure all the time. It eventually goes. My mom used to have a whole library — I mean it took up quite a bit of space — ’cause these blind books, the letters had to be big enough to finger them, and they was pretty good size books. When I went into the service, they all left, and her mandolin left, and I guess her accordion went up to Aunt Minnie’s and got burnt up, and some of Pop’s stuff left. They just got rid of it, I guess, just stuff that was in the way for my brother Jack and his wife Patsy. Things like the mandolin and his fiddle I woulda kept.”

I got the impression that Lawrence was satisfied that he had told me all he could about his father, and that his father’s music would have to speak for itself. He was more in the mood to talk about his mother.

“I’m not sure, but I think they put her in school when she’s about four,” he said of Ella. “I think she come out of school when she was nineteen or 20 years old. They must’ve kept them segregated or something. You know, she was in with mostly girls. She had quite a few friends she made while she was at school. I guess they was times when she had bad times, too. Missed her family and missed her friends back at Morehead, Kentucky. She was pretty well-educated. She would read old Chaucer’s English. She’d come out with that on us every now and then when she wanted to really stress something to us. To let us know that she didn’t approve of what we was doing. I don’t know, she was just a wonderful woman to me. She’d sit down and read. You know we’d be laying in a bed in a room pitch black and she’d be a reading that story to us. It didn’t take long to put us to sleep like that. She read the whole Robin Hood stories and Jungle Boy. Stories like that she’d read to us. That was all we had for entertainment. It was a different life for the whole Haley bunch I guess from what most people would realize.”

“I know she had a bunch of friends,” Lawrence continued. “They was one — all I knew her name was was Bridget — and she come right out of school and went to a home-type thing that they had in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Mt. Healthy is just more or less an outlying suburb of Cincinnati. When Mom would be down in Cincinnati visiting her sister or running her newsstand or something, she’d always go to Mt. Healthy to see Bridget. I think we’d ride a trolley bus or something out there. We’d spend the day out there with Bridget. It was a nice home — great big mansion-type home — plenty of grounds and things. And I’d get out in the grounds the biggest part of the time. I’d be out checking things out on the grounds — fishes in the ponds — and I’d check on Mom every now and then and find out when she wanted to leave or something. But we’d spend that day up there just about every time she went up there till I guess Bridget died.”

In Search of Ed Haley 143

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

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After talking with Ugee, I called Lawrence Haley, who’d been “laid up” since my trip to Ashland. He and I talked more about finding the photograph of Ed and Ella getting ready to play music on the street. In no time at all, he was revealing new details about his father’s “street life,” first telling how he’d get a crowd together.

“He might just bow the fiddle a little bit and get a few sweet notes out of it. Stop. And if it looked too dead to him, he’d just get up and leave. ‘There’s no use of staying here.’ Pop wouldn’t play if it wasn’t something that he knew he could make money at. He wouldn’t get out and work for nickel and dime stuff all day long. Maybe ten, twelve cents an hour, just sitting there playing music, and taking requests or something and sitting on the street. But my mother did. She’d get out… I’ve seen her go in times so cold she’d cut the fingers out of gloves so she could play the mandolin, and have a harp and I know that thing’d almost freeze to her lips in weather like that. But Pop, he wouldn’t do that. Of course, I don’t guess a violin player could do too well outside. His fingers’d get stiff as they could be.”

When Ed wasn’t playing on the street in the winter, he would go inside public buildings.

“Well, I’ve seen them inside the courthouse main lobby some,” Lawrence said of his parents. “They played in theaters. Concourses of train stations, and places like that. Anywhere where they’s a lobby big enough to they didn’t interfere… You know, they could get over out of the way of main traffic flow, of pedestrian traffic. Sometimes they’d let them play and sometimes they wouldn’t. He was pretty well known in some places, and they tolerated him — if they didn’t outright appreciate it. They tolerated it anyway, because they knew that that’s how they had to make their living.”

Lawrence gave me more information on Bake and Lula Lee, the “other” blind husband-wife team working on the streets of Ashland.

“Lula Lee was blind and Bake Lee was blind,” he said. “They lived in Catlettsburg, Lula and Bake did, as long as I can remember. They raised two or three kids. Bake Lee was the flower huckster that Pop got accused of being when he died. ‘The Flower Huckster of Winchester Avenue.’ Lula Lee went to school with my mother at the School for the Blind. She played the mandolin and the harp. She had a harmonica rack. My mother played one like that, too. She did a lot of street work like that on her own, too. Pop might be in Logan, she might be in Gallipolis, Ohio, or Ironton or Portsmouth. And Pop might be off somewhere with a bunch of his cronies learning new music up in West Virginia or Kentucky. If the need for money come up, somebody had to bring it in. We didn’t eat quite as good for a day or two or something, but none of us would ever starve.”