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In Search of Ed Haley 51

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Catlettsburg, Kentucky — the place where Ed Haley lived from the mid-twenties until the early thirties — was a booming timber town in its hey-day. Located at the mouth of the Big Sandy River and across the Ohio River from Kenova, West Virginia, it was laid out in 1849 and incorporated in 1858.

Catlettsburg is a blue-collar town. As of 1990, its population was 2231 with 98% registering as white. Downtown Catlettsburg extends from the courthouse area on Louisa Street between 30th and 28th streets to the vicinity of the Elks Building on 26th street, with evidence of old structures just beyond. The courthouse, which was erected in 1930, is neat and surrounded by a spacious yard. It is flanked by annexes, a few small new buildings, and an old red brick two-story building on 28th that offers apartments to the public. On a moist day, the smell of wet garbage or a strong musty odor pervades the central part of town. Down Louisa Street from the courthouse exist a few churches and a couple of old buildings now occupied by an antique store and pizzeria. Across the street, toward the river, sits a string of more old buildings, but mostly newer stuff. Continuing toward the Elks Building is Center Street. The floodwall — a hideous but necessary structure — is positioned to the right, with a few old storefronts and a bingo place where Pat Haley runs a kitchen business. On its Center Street side, the Elks Building has a carving that reads: “Gunnel Block 1906.” Toward its back is a tall slender addition called “The Yates Building 1911.” Across Center Street, evidence of a business district extends one more block to 25th Street. The town continues on but the old downtown seems to end there. Near the floodwall, just back of the old district are the backs of little houses and a few narrow two-story frame houses facing the river — or wall. On 26th Street up past the Elks Building is City Hall and a beautiful little church. The street ends at four sets of railroad tracks. Turning left onto Chestnut Street, which runs east to the back of the courthouse are nice two-story white or red brick residences with a funeral home and law office. Across the tracks, which are elevated slightly above the old part of town, is Route 23 and beyond are larger homes on the hill.

While Ed Haley spent countless days walking on most of these streets, especially in the vicinity of the courthouse, he actually lived at the western edge of town on Horse Branch. Today, Horse Branch offers a flood-prone playground, a Freewill Baptist church and old single story frame shacks crowded together against a narrow paved road. The only thing new on the creek seems to be trailers. Lawrence Haley said the old family home there was long-gone.

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 48

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

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I asked Lawrence if he’d heard from any of his brothers or sister and he said, “I’ve got one that lives in town now. He moved back from Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in town. Noah was a little bit… You might want to talk to him, I don’t know. But Noah, he went away, I guess, in 1939. He went in the service. He was at Scoffield Barracks in Hawaii when the Japanese… He was in all that Pacific Theater. I think he was wounded a couple of times. The Japanese bayoneted him one time in a bonsai attack or something. It left Noah a little bit shell-shocked or something. He gets a pension from it. He’s not together all there, I guess. You know, in a way, if you talked to him you’d never notice it. He was married to a woman of Hungarian descent and raised a family — a boy and a girl. He had a problem with the girl, too. She was having a problem with a boyfriend or something and her boyfriend was there at the house. Well, the boy had a pistol or some sort of a gun and she went and got that pistol and said, ‘If you don’t love me,’ or something and she shot herself. She committed suicide. I think it was non-intentional. It was just a bluff.”

I said to Lawrence, “Well now, aren’t your other brothers, they’re all kind of hard to get along with, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, a little bit odd,” he answered. “Clyde just moved out and took off and went his way, I guess. Followed the sun, I call it. We’d hear from him in Louisiana one year and the next year he might be in Montana or Upper State New York. He did hobo. Noah went to see him about ten years ago out in California and they started back and Noah was going to stop and get some gasoline. Clyde said, ‘No, don’t stop here and get gas. I’ll get your gasoline.’ He went over to this big church and told them he was on the road back to Ohio and didn’t have money to get there. I guess they give them a tank of gas and they come all the way back from California like that. Clyde was good at that. He did work and we’d get his W-2 forms. He never did turn in his income tax, I don’t think. He’d send his W-2 forms home. Some years he was out on an oil rig in Louisiana. Apparently during the time he was working for them they had rigs off the coast of Alaska.”

Hearing Lawrence speak of his brothers caused me to ask if maybe any of Milt Haley’s “stuff” — which I now presumed to be sort of bad — might’ve come down in their genetics.

“I don’t know, John,” he said. “I couldn’t say. They never met their granddad. I don’t think… My dad, if he’d been a sighted man, he’d probably been as gentle as a lamb. But he had frustrations in his own life.”

“Sometimes in a situation like that, sometimes a gene will come and it won’t get everybody,” I said, pressing Lawrence a little further. “Like it’ll skip your dad, and like skip you, but pick out a brother there and one over there.”

Lawrence totally disagreed.

“Well, I don’t think any of them… And I really don’t think my grandfather, from what I’ve heard of that tale… It was caused by hard times. I’m not trying to defend my grandpa because, hell, it don’t make any difference to me now.”

Milt in so many ways seemed like a critical character in the story: an ambiguous rogue — a key player in causing Ed’s blindness and inspiring his music, whose very genetic attributes or deficiencies might still live on strongly in his grandchildren.

I wondered if Lawrence knew where Milt came from before his settlement on Harts Creek.

“I think maybe over in Old Virginia or over in Pike County,” he said. “I understand there’s some Haleys in Pike County. I’d ask Aunt Liza, ‘Where’d Milt Haley come from?’ ‘Well, he come from over the mountain.’ Now, that’s as far as I could get from her.”

Lawrence thought his father had resolved his hard feelings toward the Brumfields in later years.

“Pop was supposed to have made the remark that if he’d had his eyesight he’d hunted down the people that killed his dad,” Lawrence said. “But afterwards, him and one of the Brumfield sons, they settled their trouble.”

I said, “Well obviously if your grandmother was at the Brumfields’ house the night she got shot, there was no animosity between her and the Brumfields.”

I was starting to understand how the tragedies of Ed’s early life, as well as the legacy of his father, had manifested itself into the pain, rage, and lonesomeness I’d been so drawn to in his music. I kept telling Lawrence, “We’re gonna have to go back up Harts Creek,” but it would be a year before we actually did so.

Parkersburg Landing 47

06 Sunday Jan 2013

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     Later that summer, I met Lawrence Haley at the home of his oldest son, Steve Haley, in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Steve was a music enthusiast and computer expert. Lawrence graciously loaned me the four Junius Martin records, which contained his father’s signature tune, “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”. I asked him about “Poplar Bluff,” one of the tunes on the records, and wondered if it was connected to the small Missouri town by that name. Lawrence said he didn’t know but that it sounded like Pop was mad when he was playing it on the record.

     “Well, he was either mad or they had taken some strong drink with them and Pop had got into that pretty heavy,” he said.

     I said, “What about a tune like ‘Stonewall Jackson’?”

     “No, he was playing fine music there,” he said. “I don’t think when these records was made at home he had a drop to drink. But I’ll tell you John, he done an exceptional job then because before I went into the service he would shake his left hand trying to get some of the numbness out and I guess that was from a heart problem right there. If he had any decay in his muscle reaction, it didn’t show too much. Of course, he had to go downhill at that age from what he used to be when he was a young man.”

     I played a tune for Lawrence that was unnamed on the records, then said, “This guy I know, Bruce Greene, he collected a lot of stuff, and I played it for him over the telephone and he said, ‘Oh, that’s ‘Indian Squaw’. But then it could have had another name. Like that ‘Yellow Barber’ tune that your dad plays, they call that ‘Arthur Berry’.”

     Lawrence said, “I don’t think he called that ‘Indian Squaw’. I never heard anybody request it. Pop played a piece of music called ‘Indian Nation’.”

     I’d been listening to Ed’s recordings a lot in the last few months and was focused on how he got a “real swing” in his music.

     Lawrence agreed, “That’s what I say. That’s what I was trying to tell you. When Pop was playing and enjoying it, he put a lot of drive in his music. You could see it. You could watch him and just see that he was enjoying it.”

     I asked if Ed played with his whole body and Lawrence said, “Well, yeah he’d do a little, maybe, dance on his chair.”

     Would he ever come up off his chair?

     “No, no, not like that. But you could tell that when he was playing with somebody that fit in with his style or if his accompaniment was doing their job right then he always enjoyed it.”

     Now what would his feet be doing?

     “Well, he’d just be patting his foot or his heel one or the other, most of the time. Not too loud. It was a subdued type of enjoyment, but you could see the drive that he was putting into it. I mean, he could slur a bow and pull a bow and put different pressures on the strings and you’d know that he was enjoying it, or I felt that he was.”

     I played a lot of Ed’s tunes for Lawrence, hoping to jar some of his memories. When I played “Ida Red”, he said his father used to sing, “Ida Red, Ida Red. I’m in love with Ida Red.”

     I told him I loved “Half Past Four”.

     “That’s one of my favorite tunes of all time,” I said. “I get to playing that and I can’t stop playing that tune. Now, that’s one he wrote, isn’t it?”

     Lawrence said, “Yeah, it seems to me like my mother told us that one time. That one of us, I’m not for sure which one it was, but we were delivered at about that time in the morning and Pop had been up all night, I guess. He just sat down and started playing because he was happy he had another boy, I guess. Or it might have been the girl, I don’t know.”

Parkersburg Landing 39

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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     The next thing I knew, Ugee was up at the stove cooking a big meal and singing “Maggie and Albert” — Haley’s version of “Frankie and Johnny”. When she was finished, she said, “Now that’s some old songs. Ed played them and when he played them, you’d be glad to sit and listen to them, too. And he patted his foot.”

     During dinner, Ugee told me about her own musical experience.

     “I started off on the five-string banjo then graduated myself to the guitar,” she said. “The first guitar that I ever seen, Howard Alexander brought it in the country. He’d been over to his mother-in-law’s around Rosedale and when he come back he brought a guitar. Howard didn’t play the guitar or banjo either. He come down and said, ‘Ugee, I brought you something. A guitar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I never tuned one of them things.’ I suppose I’d been playing the banjo about three or four years. Dad said, ‘Well, you tune the banjo. Go ahead and tune it up there.’ Howard said, ‘Aw, just keep it as long as you want to. I’m in no hurry fer it.’ He’d traded something for it. I forget what it was. I went to fooling with that guitar, you know, picking around with it, this that and another, running a knife down it. Well, I tuned it up like a banjo. First thing you know I found me a chord, and then Dad come in with a mandolin.”

     “We went to play music around at the schoolhouse and places like that for pie suppers and cake walks,” Ugee said of herself and her father. “My dad thought there wasn’t nobody in the world like me. Nobody could do like I could. We went to a place and played for a schoolhouse and the teacher down there… He was a Glenville graduate — you know, went to college and everything — thought he knew it all. He said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. So Dad played it for him. Just as soon as he got done playing it, he said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. Dad played it for him again. I think he played it about five times. By that time, Dad was getting tired of it. And he come there and said, ‘Mr. Hicks would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’? Dad said, ‘Hell, I’ve played it for you five times and you didn’t know it when you heard it.’ Made Dad mad. Every once in a while, me and Dad’d be a sitting playing, practicing, you know, and I’d look over, I’d say, ‘Dad, would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’?’ He said, ‘I’ll mash you in the mouth.'”

     Ugee said, “One time, a teacher taught at our school and he made me mad the way he treated me in school. He was having a doing going on at his school and Dad said, ‘I’m supposed to play at the White Oak School.’ And I went to the White Oak School. Well, me and Dad went over and I decided I wasn’t gonna play any music. When I sat down, the teacher said, ‘Oh, I’m so proud you come to play, Ugee,’ and just going on. I just reached down with my finger on that guitar and I broke that string. Dad reached down in his pocket and pulled out another one and said, ‘Now put that on and don’t you do that again, either.’ I never will forget it as long as I live. Jasper McCune was playing the five-string banjo. He was Dad’s first cousin. He said, ‘Why don’t you do that again, Ugee? Laury’ll slap your ears, too.'”

     After supper, I asked Ugee what she knew about Ed’s blindness.

     “They said Ed went blind when he was three or four years old. He had the measles. Well, he was sick and had a high fever. I don’t know whether you ever knowed it or not but the gypsies used to come around in the country and he had a high fever and they told his dad and them to take him down to the creek and throw him in the cold water and that would break the fever on him and he’d never have a fever again. And that’s what he done and it put him blind. But you know measles will put you blind because I almost went blind too when I had the measles. I was about twelve years old. And that’s what Ed said that put him blind. I asked him, I said, ‘Was you born blind?’ He wasn’t.”

     Ugee said Ed occasionally talked about his father — a growing source of interest for me — although she didn’t remember much about it.

     “I think his dad was a pretty mean man, the way he talked. And the way I understood him to say his mother got killed by some of them Hatfields and McCoys or some of them when that feud was going on. But I believe he said his dad was a pretty mean man. I don’t know what he meant by that. I never did hear what happened to his dad. I never heard him say about that. I believe he said he was raised by a aunt.”

     I told Ugee about Lawrence and I going to Harts Creek and she said, “Lawrence, he was little all the way around. He thought an awful lot of his dad and mother. Larry’s the only one that turned out real good. Noah, he gambles and I don’t know what all. And Clyde, he’s been in a little bit of everything. Mona’s been the same way. Poor old Larry, he’s looked after all of them. He don’t care whether he hears from them or not because every time he hears from them it’s money or have to help them out or get them out of something. Jack died. Jack was a nice looking man, too. He was taller than Lawrence. He was a nice boy like Larry.”

     I asked Ugee if she thought maybe some of Ed’s kids took after his father Milt, who she called “a pretty bad feller.” She said, “I have an idea they did. And I heard Ed say one time that Ella had some awful mean people on her side. He said Noah was turned just exactly like his mother’s people. They was a lot of mean people down there in Kentucky. Lot of murdering and lot of killing.”

In Search of Ed Haley 28

13 Thursday Dec 2012

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Roxie seemed very interested in Ed Haley’s kids, saying, “I know now they was Mona and Clyde and Ralph and Jack.”

Lawrence said he was the “baby boy” and Roxie realized for the first time that he was Ed’s son…not me. She got real tickled and said, “I believe you was about four or five years old when you was at my house.”

He told her, “May have been, ’cause I came up here until I was about nine years old. Just about every summer, it seemed like, we come up here.”

Roxie wanted to know about the others.

Lawrence said, “Clyde is still living. He lives in California. When he quit running the country, he settled down in California.”

As for the other boys: “Jack worked as a millwright at a steel mill in Cleveland.  Noah’s in Cleveland, too. They both went up there after they come out of the service. Had a depressed time just after the war. Jack worked for a while here but that little factory closed up so about a year and a half later he went to Cleveland and got on at a steel mill up there as an electrician and worked his way up as a millwright. They say he went into work that day and he punched his card, then he had to walk to his workplace — which was a pretty good ways away — and he hadn’t even got out of the time-clock building, and he just fell over dead. Massive coronary or something.”

Roxie thought Ralph had hung himself, but Lawrence said, “No, he was out picnicking and was kinda grandstanding. You know he could take a run-a-go and do a flip-flop and land on his feet — that kind of stuff. Well, somebody was gonna take a picture of him, and he got up on this tree limb and hooked his toes over it and he was hanging straight down from his toes and he was gonna let go and flip over and land on his feet before he hit the ground. But he didn’t make it: he hit the back of his head and broke his neck. He thought he was still a young man, you know.”

Roxie’s memories of Ed went pretty far back into his life — even before his marriage. She tried to describe him for me.

“He dressed nice. Man, Ed was as clean as a pin — wore nice, clean clothes. To be a blind man, he kept hisself just as clean as a pin. I never did see him dirty. Kept his hair combed pretty and neat. Ed’s eyes looked awful bad — he wore glasses over them. We never did talk much with him. He was kindly strange to us. You see, us girls was kindly shy. We weren’t used to him. He always had a big bunch of men around him. We just listened. He wasn’t no crazy fellow, I wanna tell you that. He was smart in the Bible. He told us all about the wars, Armageddon and stuff, and about these bombs.”

I asked Roxie if she remembered the first time she saw Haley play the fiddle. She said, “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was about eighteen years old when Ed and Uncle John played at our house. Then they left here and went off, you know, to stay awhile. They’d come back every now and then. Uncle John played a banjo and Ed played the fiddle. Boy, they could really play.”

I asked if Ed sang back then.

“Yeah, he sung,” she said. “Now, he asked Cecil… He said, ‘Cecil, I’d like to ask you something, but I don’t want you to get mad.’ He said, ‘I would like to know if you know the song about John Brumfield?’ And Cecil said, ‘Yes. I’d like to hear you.’ And Ed said, ‘All right.’ Ed played it for him. And Cecil’s daddy was the one they killed, but Cecil liked Ed. He knowed they’s just all drunk, you know, just like people now a getting dope and a killing each other.”

Roxie’s mind rolled back through the years, leaving Lawrence and I to just sit there listening to her stories. Each passing moment sent chills up the back of my neck. It was apparent that she’d known Ed very well.

“He stayed with us a whole lot, Ed did. Off and on, he stayed with Grandma and Uncle Peter and them. Grandma lived down there where Turley lives now. And they had a sheep in that field, you know? Ed kept going from Grandma’s house up to Uncle Peter’s and Aunt Liza’s house. They told him, they said, ‘Ed, that ram’s a going to kill you.’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of that ram.’ One day he started up through there and that ram went to bellering, you know, and run at him and butted him and he catched him by the head and slung him. He said, ‘If you don’t stay away from there, I’ll get my knife out and cut your head off.'”

Roxie laughed remembering the stories.

“Lord, he told all kinds of tales on hisself,” she said. “You woulda laughed till you woulda died if you’d heard him telling tales on hisself. He told about being at Uncle Peter’s and they was having a dance up at Jeff Baisden’s and he said he took a notion to go along in the night. He’d slept till about 9 or 10 o’clock in the night. Uncle Peter had a garden and a barn and had a lot of cattle laying out around that barn. And he went out there, he said, to that barn and aimed to climb up over a big high fence and jump out when he jumped out right astraddle of a steer. And said that thing jumped up and him on it backwards and took up that holler a flying, and said he hung right on to him till he got to the waterfall and said when he got to the waterfall, he fell off. Said he was drowning when he went on up there, and said they said, ‘Ed, what are you doing so wet?’ He said he said, ‘Well,’ said he’s riding and got in the water and couldn’t see it. He would’t tell them about the steer.”

Roxie implied that Ed took any mishaps or practical jokes in stride.

“Lord, he told all kind of tales on hisself, honey. They cut trees and put him in logs and would start him at the top of the hill and roll him into the bottom and bump to bump to bump to bump, you know, and man just skinned him all over. They played all kinds of tricks on him. Why, he’d just laughed till he died about it. He didn’t care.”

In Search of Ed Haley 25

10 Monday Dec 2012

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

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After visiting with Turley and Joe’s girls, Bum guided Lawrence and I up a nearby hollow to see his uncle Enslow Baisden. Enslow lived in a newly built single story log cabin. He said he’d gone blind recently due to sugar and cataracts. At Enslow’s, we met “Shermie”, who Lawrence indicated was the “funny boy” that chased the Haley women off of Aunt Liza’s porch in 1951.

“A lot of times I wouldn’t have no company if it wasn’t for him,” Enslow said of Shermie, who was epileptic. Shermie wasted little time in pulling out a few cards from the pocket of his overalls and sputtering toward me, even reaching for my fiddle case. I knew right then I was surrounded by “good people”: they had kept Shermie under their care all of these years as a valued member of the family in lieu of institutionalization.

When I mentioned Ed Haley’s name, Enslow said, “I was young but I can remember him all the time a coming. They was some Martins lived on top of a mountain out here — Robert Martin and John — and they fiddled all the time, and he’d go out there and fiddle with them. I don’t know how he walked from up this creek and out on that mountain and him blind, for I can’t find my way through the house.”

Enslow said he didn’t know much about Ed because he left Harts during the early years of the Depression.

“See, I lost all time, about everything nearly. I left here in ’35 and went up to the northern part of the state here and then went out in Las Vegas, Nevada, a while. Then, when I come out, I went in the Army in April of ’41. I stayed in there four and a half years and got married out in Oklahoma and we never did come back but just on visits. And Ed, he died in ’51.”

Enslow’s recounting of his travels was sort of an interesting revelation since it reminded me that these folks on Harts Creek — like many mountain people — were not as isolated as some may think. Ed Haley himself left the creek and traveled widely with his music just after the turn of the century, while Lawrence and his siblings had lived in Ashland and Cleveland and served overseas in the armed forces. Several of the people I had met on Harts Creek had been to faraway places and lived in big cities but chose at some point to return to the grounds of their ancestors.

I asked Enslow how old he was the first time he saw Haley and he said, “Oh man I was about nine or ten years old. He all the time played that fiddle. He used to come down here to old man Peter Mullins’ and Liza Mullins’. I guess they was real close kin to him. And Ed’s daddy’s name was Milt Haley. I don’t know whether Lawrence knowed that or not.”

Lawrence said, “Yeah, I knew that. But I understood from the way Aunt Liza told me, he came from over the mountain and I think that she was talking about from up around Williamson or over in that area. My dad, he was born right down here below Uncle Peter’s, where Turley’s at now, in the old house.”

Lawrence’s mentioning of “the old house” really got Enslow going. He remembered it well.

“There used to be an old log house there he was born in and they had a chimney outside on that old house down there — just an old rock chimney. Dad all the time talked about it. He said Ed got him one of them little old homemade sleds, you know, and he got him a ladder and put it on top of that house. And he got right up by that chimney and then when he come off’n there on that sled he knocked the rocks off with him.”

What? Why would he have done such a thing?

“I’ve always heard my dad tell it,” Enslow said. “Said that rock just barely did miss him.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of such a story but before I could really ask anything about it Enslow was off on another tale.

“Dad said one time they sent Ed down there to get some milk or butter or something. When Ed got out there on his way back he got in a briar patch. Dad took a notion to have some fun out of Ed. They had an old horse they called Fred. Dad got to stomping and snickering like that old horse and Ed said, ‘Old Fred, don’t you come here, now. Don’t you come here, Fred.’ Dad said he kept stomping and Ed throwed that stuff at him and tore hisself all to pieces in them briars.”

I asked Enslow to describe Haley and he said, “Well, he just always dressed pretty nice. He was a big man, too. They used to buy him these plugs of tobacco and these guys would get this beech bark and whittle it out about the size of a plug of tobacco and let Ed have that bark and they’d take his tobacco. If he ever got a hold of you, though, he’d eat you up, see. They said you couldn’t get loose from him.”

Apparently, Ed and his wife were so self-sufficient that locals sometimes forgot they were blind. Enslow told a great story about Ella and Aunt Liza, who were sitting by a lamp together one night. “Well, Mrs. Haley, I’m going to bed,” Liza said. “Well, just blow out the light,” Ella answered. “I’m going to read a while.” Liza said, “How’re you going to read in the dark?” Ella said, “Well, I can’t see no way.”

Enslow’s mentioning of Aunt Liza conjured up a great memory from Lawrence.

“Uncle Peter liked to wore me to death one time. Me and my brother Jack went with him up there behind his house and he had a old team of oxen we was snaking logs out of a hollow with. These oxen got hot. One of them got in the creek trying to cool off. Well, Uncle Peter couldn’t get him to move, so he went over underneath a tree and sat down. Well, me and my brother Jack was a cutting up, you know. He was teasing me. I was younger than he was. And I picked up a big rock and throwed it at him and hit Uncle Peter right where it hurts. And he got up. I knowed I could outrun him. My brother — I looked at him — he took off. And I was afraid to move. Uncle Peter come up there. I thought, ‘Well, I’m dead meat.’ It looked like he pulled down a half a tree and got a hold of me and he didn’t let go until he wore that limb out.”

I asked Enslow about Ed Haley’s music.

“I used to hear him play all them old tunes,” he said. “He’d sit and play for hours and hours at a time, him and her.”

Enslow motioned toward Lawrence, saying, “His mother played a mandolin and had a thing on that sat on her shoulders there and had a harp and played them both at the same time.”

He leaned back a little, reflecting, “Yeah, he played all the old music. He’d make up songs. Be sitting around and just directly he’d write a song. Like ‘Hell Up Coal Hollow’ and two or three more he made up that way. You’d come up and say, ‘What was that Ed?’ He’d just tell them what it was.”

Enslow and Bum said Haley made “Hell Up Coal Holler” and named it for Cole Branch, a tributary of Harts Creek. I didn’t know if Ed was the source of that story but I later learned that “Hell Up Coal Hollow” (at least the title) actually predated Haley’s lifetime. As I was gradually learning, Ed wasn’t preoccupied with historical accuracy and was good at creating temporary titles and weaving stories based on coincidence.

Enslow said, “Ed had some kind of saying he always said when he played on the radio down there about ‘carbide acid and acifidity gum’ or something.”

Lawrence said he’d never heard anything about his father playing on the radio but Enslow seemed sure of it.

“He played on the radio down there at Ashland or Huntington or somewheres way back there. I’m pretty sure they said he did.”

I wondered what acifidity gum was and no one knew, although Lawrence had heard Ed talk about it. (We later learned it was an old folk remedy for treating asthma.) Enslow said Uncle Peter asked Ed about it one time and he said, “Well, you have to get a little comedy with the music.”

Wow — so Ed told jokes?

Enslow said, “I guess to draw their attention or something.”

I asked Enslow if he’d ever heard Ed play for a dance and he said, “Well, I used to go to lots of things he played for, but I can’t remember now. They’d go out there on that mountain and play all night at Robert and John Martin’s. They’d be maybe two hundred people out there. Robert Martin all the time played the fiddle and I don’t know whether John played or not.”

Enslow thought Ed and Robert played their fiddles “together,” but Bum added, “Bob played a little different than Ed did. He played newer stuff.”

Enslow thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, my dad, he used to play the banjo all the time, him and his nephew. They used to play for dances way back years ago.”

What was his name?

“Jeff Baisden.”

Bum said, “I was telling him about Grandpaw taking them two little sticks and beating on the fiddle for Ed.”

Someone said, “He’s the one had the big old feet and he’d get up and dance and play the banjo.”

Enslow said, “They called him ‘Jig-Toe’ Baisden. He wore a twelve or thirteen shoe and he’d get up on his toes and dance. And Noah Mullins, Uncle Peter’s son, he could flat dance. He’d get on his heels and dance all over. He called their square dance about all the time.”

In Search of Ed Haley 23

09 Sunday Dec 2012

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Connie suggested we go see her neighbor Turley Adams, who lived just down the creek near the mouth of a branch. She pointed toward a man working in his yard a few hundred yards away at his one-story white home. That’s Turley? We took off right away. As we approached the place, Lawrence mentioned that Turley lived at the same approximate location of Milt Haley’s old cabin. While the cabin was long gone, I noticed the front yard still had the same beautiful roll to it I had seen in an old picture at Lawrence’s house. I tried to imagine how the cabin would have looked in Ed Haley’s day.

Turley met us near the porch, where Lawrence introduced us and told our reason for visiting him. Turley was immediately friendly and, in his gruff voice, invited us inside. At first, our conversation went pretty slow. Then Lawrence said, “I never did get much about my granddad, Milton Haley. Joe said he’s buried down here somewhere in a graveyard and I thought maybe he was talking about down at the mouth of Trace somewhere.”

Turley’s wife Violet said there was an old cemetery just back of their house, although it had been in terrible condition for many years.

“Well now, they was some graves out there. Turley’s mom told me that some of them were Mullinses and some of them were Haleys. They was some babies and then they was some older people. All unmarked. They was sort of in a row and they was rocks up to them but by the time I married Turley they’d rolled down the hill so you couldn’t tell where the graves really were.”

Oh god. I could just imagine someone finding a Milt Haley tombstone (probably no more than a rock with “MH” carved on it) lying at the foot of the hill and just tossing it in the creek.

“Well one grave we could tell pretty well where it was at, the others we couldn’t,” Violet said. “It had all growed up so we started cutting the bushes and keeping it mowed and cleaned up but we still don’t know where the graves are.”

We walked outside briefly to survey the site.

“They’s eleven graves,” Turley said. “I used to help Uncle Jack Mullins keep them cleaned up a little bit.”

Was this little embankment with a sunken spot the final resting place of Ed Haley’s parents?

Back inside, Turley said he remembered Ed, which seemed to please Lawrence somewhat. He told this story about a local girl who danced to Ed’s music.

“When I was in high school, Ed was around my house and he said, ‘I’d like to fiddle for somebody to dance.’ And I asked this girl, Adeline Adkins from around here on Buck Fork, if she could dance and she said, ‘I can dance to anything.’ She danced three or four tunes and my dad come in. Ed said, ‘By god, John, she’s just like Yellow Leg Spaulding. She can hit ever thing I do on this fiddle. And Dad said that they was a guy that used to go with them and dance that he called Yellow Leg Spaulding.”

“Well I didn’t know whether we’d even find anybody up here now, except Joe,” Lawrence said. “I thought I’d come up and see if I could find him, maybe introduce John to somebody that could give us some information on my dad. I know they couldn’t be very many people old enough to probably appreciate his music.”

“He come to my mom and dad’s house one time and played music all night,” Violet said. “Robert Martin was with him. I guess they’d been drinking or whatever because they was gonna take him out to the toilet and instead of taking him to the toilet they took him into the chicken house. They didn’t pay no attention to what they was doing. But they played all night. I never will forget.”

I had never really considered the possibility that Ed’s cousins and neighbors played jokes on him. I saw him as this great musician — an elevated status that may not have been shared by many of his contemporaries. All of a sudden, I was flooded with images of this little blind orphan — alone in the world — victimized mercilessly throughout his childhood. How did he take it? And how would Lawrence react to hearing these kind of stories? In quick time, I had this latter question answered. Lawrence immediately countered Violet’s story about the outhouse with a tale that cast his father in a more triumphant light.

“Joe said when Pop was just a little kid he got to the point to where he could travel from this house over to Uncle Peter’s,” Lawrence said. “Uncle Peter kept cattle in the field out here or something — a bull or two. Well, the boys teased him. You know, he’d get about half way across that field and then they’d go to snorting like a bull — scare him — and then stand way back and laugh at him. Pop took that for a while and finally found a pistol over here at the old house and he went across the field and they started doing that to him. Well, he just pulled that pistol and, where that sound was coming from, he started shooting that pistol. I guess that broke that little game up.”

Lawrence was obviously determined to guard his father’s legacy, which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Violet got out a few albums filled with old photographs of Ed’s kinfolk from up and down the creek, which stirred Lawrence’s memories.

“Seemed to me like we walked down here to Trace to go up the hill there and there was a store down there,” he said.

Violet said, “Turley’s dad run a store around on Hart at one time and Ewell Mullins had a store up here.”

Lawrence remembered Ewell’s store. “Yeah, he had a store up here, I know that. And then they was one on up and over the hill there where you could go and buy a nickel’s worth of brown sugar. We’d get one of them little penny-paper pokes full of brown sugar and we thought we was having a big time.”

Lawrence’s mind was starting to click in high gear. “I heard Pop talk about how he’d ride a horse up the hollow going up through there,” he said.

Lawrence asked Turley if he knew anything about a George Adams. Turley said his grandfather was named George Washington Adams but he went by the nickname of “Ticky George” to distinguish him from a cousin, “Greasy George.” Ticky George spent most of his life in the woods hunting for ginseng where he apparently acquired a great number of ticks.

“He didn’t have good mind,” Violet said later. “He just knowed enough to get by.”

Turley said his grandmother Adams was a sister to Ed’s friend, Johnny Hager.

“Well, there’s how Johnny Hager came into this,” Lawrence said.

Turley didn’t know much about his genealogy but said his aunt Roxie Mullins could tell us the “whole history” of the Hagers.

“She lives around there above Louie on Harts Creek there,” he said.

Louie Mullins was a grandson to Uncle Peter, making him a third cousin to Lawrence (at least by our count).

This was sort of a confusing moment. Names of people I’d never heard of were popping into the conversation and converging upon one another in seemingly irrelevant connections.

It was great.

There was an unmatchable poetry in it: Turley, Yellow Leg Spaulding, Ticky George… I mean nobody could make this kind of stuff up.

In Search of Ed Haley 20

07 Friday Dec 2012

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Later that evening, Lawrence and I went to see J.P. Fraley. On the way, he told me more about his father’s recordings.

“Well, he depended on my brother Ralph to tap him on the shoulder when he wanted him to start, and when he was getting near the end of the disc he’d tap him again, see? And Pop, sometimes he’d stop right then, cut it off real short, and then sometimes he’d go to the end of that run and hit that shave and a haircut at the end of it. Sometimes it sounded like he was gonna quit, see? Ralph hadn’t give him the signal that they was close to the end of the recording, so you can hear a little bit of hesitation at times. I thought Mom was getting ready to stop, too.”

Lawrence figured the records were made in the daytime but wasn’t sure of the time of year. “I guess the good part of maybe one spring or something because I was in the service and I wasn’t home.”

At the time of the recordings, Ed was no longer playing professionally. “He’d go out, like I say, a few times. Somebody’d come and get him, take him somewhere. He thought, ‘Well, if they’re gonna have a good time, I’ll go up and play for them and have a good time with them.’ As time went on, the older he got, the harder it was to get him to go. I guess he was having more trouble with his circulatory system.”

At J.P.’s, we met Virgil Alfrey and Chillson Leach, two old-time fiddlers from around Ashland. Virgil began playing the fiddle as a boy of twelve in the early thirties, around the time he used to see Ed in Williamson, West Virginia. The last time he saw him there he reached Ed a dollar and requested “Fisher’s Hornpipe”. Haley recognized his voice, played the tune then tried to give his dollar back because he liked him.

Chillson Leach, an 83-year-old retired rigger from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, had been playing the fiddle since he was nine years old.

“Uncle Ed was one of the best fiddlers in this country,” he said. “He would get an audience in front of him and he kinda knowed that they was a lot of people by the sound of the money they throwed in his cup. And he’d say, ‘People, they’s a mental strain and a physical strain on playing the violin.’ Now that’s what he would tell them. He wanted them to know that he was earning his money when he was a playing that violin. And lord, when he would pull that bow across that fiddle he’d get some of the prettiest notes that ever you heard in your life. His fingers was long and slim and as nimble right up I reckon till he died.”

Lawrence, who was taking all of this in, said, “Pretty close. He slowed down the last five or six years.”

Chillson said, “Yeah but when I knowed him, my goodness, he’d get way down on that neck. Any position you wanted him to play. He was wonderful. It’s a shame that a person has to die. I’d give him a quarter and I’d say, ‘Play that ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and he played that for me and man he could just make your hair stand on your head. And then he played a lot of reels, you know. He could play anything you’d ask him: ‘Turkey in the Straw’, ‘Arkansas Traveler’.”

Chillson was obviously a fan.

“I just thought the world of him because he entertained everybody in Ashland,” he said. “He had a blind fellow that played the guitar with him and this blind fellow would sit there and man they’d make some pretty music.”

On the way home, Lawrence told me that his father hated to play “Turkey in the Straw”.

In Search of Ed Haley 19

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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On the way home in the car, Lawrence told a story about his father getting drunk and trying to find his way home one winter night.

“We lived on Halbert Street,” he said. “The Prices down the street took Pop off somewhere or brought him back to their house and turned him loose after he got real good and drunk. Well, he was coming home by himself. It might have been two or three city blocks. He was walking on this blacktop street but he was so drunk and it was pretty cold weather, too, and he just fell over in the ditch and went to sleep. They found him the next day at daylight. They said if he hadn’t been drunk he would’ve froze to death. That was way back I guess when I was a baby.”

A hard picture began to emerge: alcohol, music, meanness and the desolation it produces. Lawrence, however, emphasized that his father was actually a happy person who lived an eventful life.

“These people that put these jackets on these albums and things, they take a tune like ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ and make it out like my dad should play a piece of music like that because that was his place in life: being a poor old down-and-out blind man — that he lived the life of ‘constant sorrow,'” he said. “That’s the way they make these tunes seem: that should be maybe my dad’s signature tune or something, playing a dirge like that. When really he enjoyed life and had a good time whenever it could be had. If he had somebody to carouse with, he’d carouse as long as they would and probably wear three or four people out.”

I said, “I get the feeling that as well as he played the dirges, that his favorite stuff was like ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Ida Red’.”

Lawrence agreed, “Yeah, and he enjoyed people dancing. My brother Clyde, I guess he stayed around Pop a lot and he could call any of those ‘birdie in the cage’-type clogging square dance. The old hoedown square dance. He lives in California. He’s in Stockton somewhere out there, or was the last time I heard.”

I wondered if it would be okay to call him.

“Yeah,” Lawrence said, “if Pat has his number at the house.”

In Search of Ed Haley 18

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Lawrence and I drove to an Ashland restaurant where I asked more about Haley’s background between bites of seafood. I was desperate for clues about his early musical experience.

Just where did he learn to play?

Lawrence said his dad was like other mountain folks: music “absolutely come freely to these people.” He said, “A lot of people think old-time music is a simple art form because so many people that play it have a poor educational background. These people think, ‘If they can learn to play it, it has to be a simple thing to do.’ But it’s actually a complicated business.”

A little later, I asked him about Clark Kessinger and Charleston, West Virginia.

“I been to Charleston with Pop a few times, but if Clark Kessinger was around he never let Pop know,” he said. “He’d probably request a tune from him. Of course, Pop was pretty sharp on voices, too. He recognized a lot of people just by their voice. If Clark come up and requested a piece of music from him, Dad probably knew it. He never said anything to me about it. We were just kids.”

I said, “Well, Clark Kessinger studied your dad close. Of course, he knew what good fiddling was.”

“You have to give him credit for that,” Lawrence said, taking a bite of fish.

In Search of Ed Haley 16

03 Monday Dec 2012

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Hoping to stir Lawrence’s memory further, I got my fiddle out and played some tunes. He said Ed played something like my version of “Dry and Dusty”. He whistled a tune his dad played that resembled “Goin’ Up the River”. I asked him how many of Pop’s tunes he could name from memory and he called out several titles (many of them not among the records): “Mississippi Sawyer”, “Arkansas Traveler”, “Soldier’s Joy”, “Down Yonder”, “Midnight Serenade”, “Beautiful Ohio”, “Sally Will You Marry Me”, “Battle of New Orleans”, “Flop-Eared Mule”, “Wagner”, “Fire on the Mountain”, “Birdie” and “Whispering Hope”.

At some point, I asked him if there was anything in my fiddling that reminded him of his father and he said rather dryly that I sounded pretty good but, if I really wanted the truth, I didn’t play at all like him. Not even a little bit. My bowing was all wrong, he said, and I played way too many notes.

I really wanted to pick his brain about Ed’s technique, so I spent an hour just playing and asking, “Well, did he do this?” or “How about this?” He’d just shake his head no and tell me the difference between what I was doing and what Ed did. At times, I tried to triangulate the answer by asking the same questions in many different ways. It was somewhat frustrating for Lawrence. He kept pointing out that he had never been a musician and would never really be able to describe how his dad played.

I disagreed, though, based on my belief in what I call “genetic memory” — that we inherit our ancestors’ memories in our DNA or in our body’s chemicals somehow. Little commonplace clues and reminders can jar this knowledge loose or make it pop out like deja-vu. It made perfect sense to me that in addition to all of Lawrence’s conscious memory of Ed playing the fiddle, he might also have a genetic memory of it. I told him how I thought he had a lot of secrets locked away back in his mind that he didn’t even know he had and that with the right signals and clues maybe we could access that information. He had an “okay, whatever” attitude about the whole thing.

Lawrence and I mostly discussed Ed’s bowing. He said Pop held the bow at its very end and sometimes used so much of it (“one end to the other”) that it appeared as if he might “draw it right off and shove the tip end of it under the strings.” He “used every bit of that bow,” except when he wanted to “put a little force or drive into it or a slur” — then he “might work the bow.” Lawrence said, “Not many people can get that kind of music and do it at the speed and the purity that my dad played. I don’t think he was trying to make a big show of it. He was just trying to play the music and get it done.” Lawrence figured that his dad had to use his imagination in developing his style of bowing, since he “couldn’t see anybody else’s bow.”

Parkersburg Landing 14

01 Saturday Dec 2012

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     Lawrence seemed to think of his parents as traveling musicians leading exciting lives — always on the go meeting new people and covering a rather large geographical area. I wondered what affect such a lifestyle had on the Haley children.

     “You’ve got to remember, we didn’t start going with them — or I didn’t — until I was about seven years old, and that had to be in the summertime,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes I’d go with my mother, sometimes I’d go with my dad and my mother, sometimes my dad would take off somewhere on his own. If some of his old friends or something come around and said, ‘Ed, I want you to go with me,’ he’d be gone a week maybe somewhere. And they’d go off and play here or there.”

     I asked if Ella ever got aggravated when Ed took off and Lawrence said, “I don’t think so. You know, two blind people like that trying to raise kids, I guess Mom felt that she could just stay home with her children and be a housewife. She done her own cooking and sometimes Rosie’d be around. I call her Aunt Rosie, but she was no kin to me, see? She was a big old strong stout woman — just raw-boned. Rosie married Bill Day. I guess she met Bill Day by being down here with Mom and Pop.”

     Bill Day, I knew from talking with Annadeene Fraley, was Jean Thomas’ second choice to role-play Jilson Setters — after Haley. He once lived a house away from the Haleys on Halbert Avenue (now Blackburn Avenue). I wanted to get Lawrence’s spin on the Ed Haley-Bill Day relationship.

     “He was a left-handed fiddler and he was a ‘Mississippi sawyer,’ I guess,” Lawrence said. “Well, at one time they lived about a quarter a mile of us, I guess. But he was the one that Jean Thomas picked for Jilson Setters. See, this Jean Thomas was supposed to take Bill Day over and play before the Queen of England or something. I don’t think that ever happened.”

     Pat said, “I know I’ve heard Larry’s mother tell that Bill Day was supposed to have gone to England and played for the king and queen. And my mother-in-law said, ‘That’s impossible for them to have gone there and back in that short of time.’ When I came over in 1949, it was eight and a half days on the ocean, so it would have taken seventeen back when he went.” Lawrence laughed, “He seemed to think he went there but I think she took him out on a trip down the river somewhere and back.”

     That was a really funny image but I told Lawrence that Bill’s trip overseas was pretty well documented.

     “Really, Pop didn’t have much for Bill Day,” he said flatly.

     As I suspicioned, Haley didn’t think much of Thomas, either, and didn’t tell her “no” politely when she offered him the part of Jilson Setters. Pat told me about meeting her years later, long after Pop’s death.

     “Larry and I went out there to see if we could bring the cub scouts through her McGuffey School. She was very nice to start with and then when Larry told her who he was and who his father was she didn’t want any part of him and she told him in no uncertain terms that Pop was a drunk and a blasphemer. She was very rude to Larry and Larry was very upset about it. He stormed out and told her to go to hell. He was deeply hurt by that. I was embarrassed.”

     Lawrence said he had few memories of his father toward the end of his life because he enlisted in the Air Force in 1946 and was stationed away from the family for about three years. At that time, Ed was almost completely bald and “stretched back” a lot and shook his hands, probably due to heart problems.

     “Every time I’d come home on leave or something, I’d get a fifth of whisky and me and him would sit there and drink whiskey and he’d play the fiddle for us,” Lawrence said. “I’d get him to cross-tune down that bass string and he’d play such pieces as ‘Old Sledge’ and ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ and ‘Lost Indian’ for me. And a lot of other pieces.”

     So Ed would take a drink?

     “Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Of course, my mother didn’t like Pop to drink, but I always tried to see that he didn’t drink too much — if I didn’t drink too much myself.”

     “Uh oh,” I thought, well aware that drinking is one of the chief occupational hazards of a fiddler.

     Between swigs of Jim Beam, Ed told Lawrence that music never stopped, that it went on forever into outer space. He even talked about Armageddon and had “visions of the hereafter.”

     Lawrence said he was stationed in England when he met Pat. By the fall of 1949, Lawrence and Pat were married and renting a two-story home at 1040 Greenup Avenue in Ashland. Lawrence’s older brother Jack lived upstairs with his wife Patsy and paying a rent of forty-five dollars per month, while Ed and Ella lived downstairs with a grandson, Ralph Mullins, paying fifty dollars a month rent.

     “Downstairs was a very small bedroom on the left as you went through the front door,” Pat said. “That was Pop’s. He had a little table in there where he kept his Prince Albert tobacco and he kept a Prince Albert tobacco can for a spittoon and his bed was like an Army cot. Mom and Ralph’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. And on the right, there was the living room and then there was the dining room. The bathroom was off of the dining room and then from the dining room you went straight into the kitchen. They were large rooms with high ceilings. Linoleum on the floor. Mom and Pop were big on radios. The Victrola was in the living room. Pop used to listen to the radio in the living room. He would run that dial up and down and cup his ear up to it when he couldn’t get what he wanted on it and cuss like the devil. But Mom had one in the dining room and she had a little one in her room. You could go to the upstairs through the kitchen or you could go upstairs through the hall. Jack and Patsy had a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom upstairs and Larry and I had a bedroom. It’s a used car lot now.”

     Not long after Lawrence and Pat moved in at 1040 Greenup, Jack and Patsy moved to a little cottage on a farm outside of town. “When they moved from 1040 Greenup, Mom could not afford the rent for upstairs and down,” Pat said, so the family soon moved to 2144 Greenup. At that time Ed received sixteen dollars a month for a blind pension, while Ella received nine. Lawrence drew twenty dollars a week from the Air Force and was attending watch-making school.

     “Mom was also going to Cincinnati to sell newspapers and pencils,” Pat said. “She’d ride the bus on Thursday and stay till Saturday with her brother Allie. If they had a falling out, she’d stay with Sissy. I can’t ever remember her taking an instrument with her. Larry would pick her up at the bus depot on Saturday night. Sometimes we would drive to Cincinnati and get her. If we picked her up, she always gave us money for gas. If we went to Uncle Allie’s in Cincinnati and they fixed us supper, Mom always paid them for it. But when they got back to the house, Mom and Larry would always go to her room and there he would count the money. And that was always their secret.”

     At 2144 Greenup — today the site of a mental health center — the Haleys rented the downstairs of a place.

     “When we moved up the street to 2144 the rent was forty-five dollars a month for the downstairs,” Pat said. “There was the front room, then we had the middle room, the dining room, Mom’s room was off of the dining room, and then through the dining room you went into the kitchen and Pop’s room was off the left from the kitchen. Mom had it fixed pretty nice. She didn’t have end tables with lamps — anything like that. They didn’t need anything they would stumble over. Their furnishings were very plain. I remember the winter of 1950 was very bad and Patsy was pregnant, so Jack and Pat came in from the farm and moved in with us. They turned the front room into a bedroom for Pat and Jack.”