Tag Archives: Dood Dalton

In Search of Ed Haley 347

01 Friday Aug 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would he play it for fifteen minutes?

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

I wondered if Ed ever played “Down Yonder”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Naugatuck’s gone dry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It sounded a lot like my early days back home.

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 326

24 Tuesday Jun 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From Harts proper, we headed up Harts Creek to the home of Luster Dalton, a son of Ed’s friend, Dood Dalton. Luster was born in 1924 and used to play the fiddle on weekends for free drinks at local “dives” with his brother Stump and two cousins. I asked him if he learned much from Ed and he said, “Yeah, I learned a lot from the old man Ed. He was a real fiddle player, son.”

I wondered if anybody around Harts played like Ed.

“Not as good as he could, no,” Luster said. “I’d have to say no to that. That old man really knew how to handle that job, buddy.”

Luster tried to remember some of Ed’s tunes.

“Way back in them days, they had one they called ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ and ‘Wild Horse’ and such as that on down the line,” he said.

I got my fiddle out and pointed it toward Luster, who said, “They ain’t a bit of use in me to try that. I’ve had too many bones broke.”

I tried to get him to just show me anything — but he refused.

He chose instead to talk, starting with how Ed came to visit his father on Big Branch.

“He came about onest a year and would maybe stay a month,” Luster said. “He’d maybe stay a week at Dad’s and go to some other family and stay a week and go up Logan and stay a week or so with somebody. Him and his old woman both would come and a couple three of his kids. Mona was one of them’s name. About all of them I guess has been to my dad’s. I don’t see how they raised a bunch of kids — neither one of them could see. That’s something we got to think about. They was good people. And a fella by the name of Bernie Adams used to come with them — he was a guitar picker — and they’d sit up there and sing and pick up at my dad’s till twelve o’clock and go to bed and go to sleep, get up the next morning, go into ‘er again. I went in the army in 1940, I believe it was, and I know I’ve not heard from them since then.”

Luster didn’t know if Milt Haley was a fiddler but had heard the old-timers talk about how either him or Green McCoy had shot Hollena Brumfield through the jaw at the mouth of the Rockhouse Fork on Harts Creek.

“They were murdered in a little log house,” Luster said. “They took a pole axe and beat them to death and then chopped them up.”

In Search of Ed Haley 325

21 Saturday Jun 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

That night, Brandon and I congregated at Billy Adkins’ house in Harts Bottom.  In ensuing conversation, Billy told us about Marshall Kelley, an old-timer in the community who remembered Ed. He dialed Marshall up, then put me on the telephone. Marshall said he was seventy-three years old, had been born and raised about three miles up Harts Creek and was the son of a Baptist preacher. He was great: I didn’t have to prod him with questions. He just took off, beginning with a story about seeing Ed walking up toward Dood Dalton’s.

“I was about two or three blocks away from him,” Marshall said. “I lived in a house about 100 yards from the road and I could see the people going and coming up and down the road. And I saw a man — a little bit short — going, walking. It looked like he was carrying a guitar — might have been a mandolin — in one hand and his fiddle in the other hand. Somebody said they believed that was Ed Haley and he was being led by a young man that was just a little taller than him. In other words, this man was holding onto his arm. They were walking side by side. And he went down there and went up a hollow then about half a mile — maybe three quarters of a mile — to the home of Dood Dalton. They were acquainted with each other. Ed played the fiddle the biggest part of the afternoon.”

I asked Marshall if he remembered anything specific about Ed’s fiddling.

“I heard him play the ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ on the fiddle and made her cackle,” he said. “Buddy, he could make that sound just almost exactly like a chicken cackling. And I noticed the sound of that fiddle. And down in those little grooves — places where you could look down in the head of his fiddle — I could see some letters down in there, like a little sticker, that said, ‘Made in Germany.’ And his fiddle looked old cause it didn’t have much varnish on it. Dood made mention about putting new varnish on it and he said he didn’t want to. He said they played better — had a better sound — without any varnish on it. None of them sounded just like his fiddle and he wouldn’t change.”

Marshall said he saw Ed play at Logan and Huntington, too.

Then I heard him two or three times in Logan up around the courthouse singing and playing. One time they was a woman with him somebody said was his wife and she was also blind. I believe she was playing a mandolin. Then the next thing, I grew up a little bit and I went to Huntington. And I was a going down one of the streets and I heard a fiddle a playing. It was far enough away that I couldn’t tell what direction it was in. I stopped once and listened. And after a while, I went on down there and here was a gang of people ganged up and there was him and his wife again a playing. And I thought as I went walking down that way, ‘That sounds just like Ed Haley.’ And sure enough it was.”

Just before Marshall and I hung up, he told me what he knew about the Haley children.

“I only got acquainted with the one named Clyde,” he said. “And I saw him there at Dood Dalton’s house. Just talked with him a little bit. Me and him was approximately the same age. He got to sparking Dood’s girl and I was trying to take her away from him and whenever I seen I couldn’t make no headway I just walked away and left and then she quit him.”

In Search of Ed Haley 317

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In that same time frame, Brandon re-visited Tootsie Tomblin, a daughter of Ed Haley’s friend Dood Dalton. She presented him with a reel-to-reel recording of Dood playing the fiddle around 1971. He knew this was an amazing find, somewhat comparable to finding a recording of Laury Hicks, Ed’s fiddling friend in Calhoun County.

Tootsie warned Brandon that the recording wasn’t great because her father had been very old and somewhat crippled in his left hand.

“He was playing with three fingers on his left hand ’cause his fourth finger wouldn’t bend where he’d got it mashed in the mines,” she said.

Brandon sent me a copy of the Dalton recording and when I played it I found that Dood was just what Tootsie said — a man of advanced years whose fingers were tough, stiff and scarred from years of working in the mines — using what sounded like a bow with three hairs and no rosin and a fiddle that had been refinished with floor varnish and strung up with barbed wire and with an action so high you could probably put your shoe under the strings. Still, there he was playing “Wild Horse”, “Cacklin’ Hen”, “Calhoun County Blues”, and “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”…and doing it so slowly, as if he were trying to communicate to me through the years that he’d been one hell of a fiddler earlier in his life. His final number was an unaccompanied vocal rendition of an old gospel tune. I came away from the recording thinking that yes, by god, Dood Dalton had been a good fiddler in his day.

In Search of Ed Haley 310

26 Monday May 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 265

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We later drove to see Tootsie Tomblin, a younger sister to Jake and a neighbor on Big Branch. Tootsie greeted us at the door, flanked by her tall husband Clabe, and a small nut-cracking housedog that barked at our every movement — even after we’d sat down at a large eating table in the dining room.

Tootsie referred to Ed Haley as “Uncle Ed” and said her whole family loved him. She said he was “a great person…so understanding.” Ed was particularly close to her mother, Nary Dalton.

“Ed thought the world of my mother. He thought my mother was the finest woman he had ever laid his eyes on. And he’d tell her, he’d say, ‘Come over here Nary and set down beside me. I want to talk to you a little bit.’ And he’d tell her everything about hisself, and about his wife, his children and everything. He loved her cooking.”

Tootsie laughed.

“Daddy had a whole litter of kids and we all had nicknames but Mommy insisted on calling us by our real names. And Ed, being blind, couldn’t figure out why there were so many kids in the home. He called for Mom. ‘Hey Nary, come in here and set down beside of me.’ Mom went to him and said, ‘What are you a wanting, Ed?’ He said, ‘I’ve listened for three or four days and I’m kind of buffaloed.’ She said, ‘What are you buffaloed on?’ Ed said, ‘You got too many kids. All of these names don’t add up. What are we a doing with all these names?’ Mom laughed and then explained it to him.”

Before we could ask Tootsie any more questions, she showed us several small boxes of old family photographs while feeding us donuts, pie and milk. I asked her if she remembered much about Ed coming to her father’s house.

“They was a funny family of people,” she said. “I mean, they had peculiar ways. They was different. Them people went clean as pins. You never seen them dirty. Ed could take care of them good as I could mine and me with eyes. When Ed spoke, he spoke with authority. They knew he meant what he was saying. He’d say, ‘Now, that’s enough,’ and that was it. He never had to whip his kids.”

Tootsie said Ed mostly visited Dood at his first home (“Jake’s place”) and never brought his wife with him. Later, after her father built his new house in 1951 (her current home), Ed only came a time or two. On his last trip, he had a Jacob Stainer or a Stradivarius violin with him.

“He was here in the fall and died the next summer or maybe that winter,” she said. “One of his boys brought him here.”

When Ed was in Harts, he traveled a lot with Jeff Mullins, a simple-minded man and brother to Aunt Liza who stayed with the Adams family. In Logan, he played with his wife or a colored man.

I asked Tootsie if she remembered a lot about how her father played the fiddle. She said she was sure that he played with the fiddle under his chin. Some of his tunes were “Cacklin’ Hen”, “Wednesday Night Waltz”, and “Bear Dog” — basically what Ed played. He could also play a little on the guitar and sing. Tootsie really bragged on Ed’s singing — like his “Coming Around the Mountain” — and kind of caught us off guard when she said, “Buddy, Ed Haley could dance. He was a chubby fellow but he could move. That old man could move.”

In Search of Ed Haley 264

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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 263

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Along the way, we stopped and picked up Billy Adkins, who guided us to Jake’s home on Big Branch. Jake, we found, was a little skinny fellow, somewhat quiet, and — I was told — a decorated World War II veteran.

I asked Jake if he remembered the first time he ever saw Ed.

“I don’t remember that,” he said right away. “I was born in 1916 but I didn’t stay at home like the rest of my family. I’d slip off from home here when I was a little bitty fella and maybe stay a week or two before I come back or they’d come get me or something another. Then after I got up in years, I joined the Army and I stayed over four years in the Army. I was in there nineteen months before they bombed Pearl Harbor. So I didn’t stay home like the rest of the kids.”

A little later in the conversation, Jake made it clear that he remembered more about Ed and his family than he realized.

“He stayed with Mother and Dad a lot, Ed did, and them young’ns,” he said. “She was a music teacher, the old woman was. She was from out of Kentucky and he was off’n Harts Creek. They had about five, six children.”

I asked Jake how long Ed usually stayed with his father and he said, “Aw, he might stay a week. They’d go up there at the courthouse at Logan and play music, him and her, and she had this little boy tied to the rope so she could draw him in you know out on the sidewalk. And somebody give him some pennies and he had them pennies you know and he dropped them and she started drawing them in. He ripped out a big oath, ‘Wait till I get my money!’ You know, they couldn’t see what they done or nothing.”

Sometimes, Ed left his kids with Dood when he was playing in Logan.

“Now them kids, they was pretty mean, but people most of the time helped him correct them,” Jake said. “They raised one girl, Mona. That girl, she was a bad one. She’d run up and down the road with them boys if Dad didn’t get after her. She was just a young gal, you know. Ed, he didn’t care if you corrected them kids. If you busted the hide on one that was all right.”

Jake didn’t remember much about Ed’s appearance other than that his eyes were “milky-looking.”

When Brandon asked him what it was like to hang around with Ed, Jake said, “He talked to Dad a whole lot. He said to my dad one time, ‘Dood, where do you think hell’s gonna be at?’ Dad said, ‘I never thought about where it’s gonna be, Ed.’ He said, ‘I have an idea where it’s gonna be. I believe it’ll be on the outside of this world.’ He was a good ole man in a way, but he was bad to drink in a way.”

Oh…so Jake remembered Ed drinking.

I asked him if Ed drank a lot and he said, “No, I never did see him come to Dad’s drunk. Dad didn’t allow no bad stuff around his house, even when he wasn’t a Christian.”

Jake thought for a second, then said, “Ed was a healthy eater. He’d come in there — get up for breakfast — he’d say to my mother, ‘Nary, have you got ary onion?’ And she’d get him an onion. He’d eat an onion head for breakfast. My mother was a person that would feed anybody that came along. It didn’t make no difference whether he was a drunk, a hobo, or what he mighta been, Mom would feed him. We had a big long table with a bench on one side and about ten people to eat off of it besides who come in. We kept Bernie Adams half the time. He was the puniest feller that ever you saw — a plumb weakling he was — and he’d stay with Dad for maybe two or three weeks.”

Jake tried to describe his memories of Ed and Dood playing around the house.

“We just had an old log house,” he said. “A door over there and one here and one room and Dad had a lot of trees around here. They’d sit out there in the yard. They’d start in on Saturday evening and they’d be a sitting right there when Monday morning come with a half a gallon of moonshine playing music. They’d fiddle that long.”

In Search of Ed Haley 262

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Timber

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just before we left, Stump let us borrow a cassette containing a 1976 interview with his father. Surely, we thought, Dood would speak a lot about fiddling and of his friendship to Ed. Instead, he told about his life in Harts. His voice was very melancholy and he spoke loudly and in spurts. Some of his earliest memories were of the timber industry in Harts and of the Cole and Crane Company, which timbered extensively in the LoganCounty area from about 1893-1908. In 1900, he said, Cole and Crane used splash dams to float logs down to the mouth of the creek “where Al Brumfield had a boom in.” The boom was located at the present-day site of the West Fork Bridge.

“And this boom caught them logs all,” Dood said. “Them logs was piled on top of one another from that boom…to the mouth of Big Branch. At that time, if you owned across the creek, you owned the creek. Al Brumfield owned the other side there and he put this boom in there and bought the Cole and Crane Company and when he bought them he kept that timber there and they gave him a contract on rafting it and running it down to Guyandotte.”

Cole and Crane Company once paid Brumfield $2800 to cut his boom loose and let timber out of the creek, he said.

Dood said he went to work cutting timber for Cole and Crane Company when he was seventeen years old. He also drove oxen and cattle and loved to hunt foxes and raccoons.

After marrying, he supported his family by farming and raising cattle, sheep and hogs at his 300-acre farm on Big Branch.

In subsequent years, he worked as a blacksmith, bricklayer and coal miner.

In 1964, he took a three-month visit to Chicago and hated it about as much as an earlier visit to Michigan. He said, “My days is short. I’ve spent 84 years here and I’m figuring on spending the rest of my life here.”

And that was basically it.

Not one reference to fiddling from a guy who had played all of his life.

Well, in spite of the tape, we were pretty sure that Haley’s good friendship to Dood Dalton was authentic and was perhaps as important as his friendship with Laury Hicks in Calhoun County. We wanted to visit more of Dood’s children, so Stump directed us to the home of his oldest brother, Jake Dalton, an old fiddler on the Big Branch of Harts Creek. Jake lived in his father’s old home — the place where Ed had visited so frequently during the last twenty years of his life.

In Search of Ed Haley 260

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Brandon asked if Ella ever played with Ed at Dood’s and Stump said, “The only time I ever seen her play was when Ed asked her. I’ve seen her come there and not play. Now, she didn’t play a mandolin like I played or say like Bill Monroe or somebody like that. All she done was just chord the thing. Play the second on the guitar you know and strummed it. She was a quiet person and she was a heavy-built woman. She never had much to say to nobody. She sorta give you the impression that she ‘would rather be somewhere else than where I am now,’ you know.”

Thinking of Ed’s accompaniment, Stump said to me, “You ever hear the name Bernie Adams?”

I had, but didn’t know much about him.

“Bernie Adams was a cousin of mine,” Stump said. “Bernie was born and raised up on Hoover and he was one of the best second guitar players I ever heard pick up a guitar. And all he did was drink. He’d been to Nashville maybe twice, I think. Now when Ed Haley come to our house, the first thing he’d ask Dad, he’d say, ‘Dood, where’s Bernie Adams at?’ Back then, you didn’t have no telephone. Big Hart Road was dirt. We’d take a timber truck and hunt Bernie Adams up and bring him down there. If we found him drunk, we’d bring him down there and he’d sober up. Ed told me, he said, ‘I never played with a man that had the timing that Bernie Adams had with that guitar.’ He was one of the best.”

I asked Stump if Bernie played runs and he said, “He could, but he played a follow-up for their music. And you talk about time.”

Stump didn’t know that Bernie ever played over the radio, but we later heard that he played on Logan radio in the mid-40s with a group called Uncle Harmon and his Fiddlin’ Fools.

Bernie died in 1962.

“They found him dead right at the mouth of Hoover when they went down over that little hill next to the creek,” Stump said. “He’d sat down next to a log and they found him laying beside that log. He drank himself to death. He’d left Earl Tomblin’s beer garden up on Big Hart. Somebody probably picked him up and drove him down there and they found him dead the next morning.”

I asked Stump to describe Ed and he said, “Ed was a pretty big man. I’d say Ed Haley woulda weighed 180-185 pounds and I’d say Ed Haley was 5’11” or 6′, too. I particularly noticed his hands. He had long fingers. And he was a fast walker. Ed Haley was the type of feller that would eat anything you put on the table. He liked to cut his onions up in his beans, buttermilk, cornbread, then rub some bacon in it.”

Did Ed do any kind of chores to help out around the house when he was there?

“No, he was just a guest and that was it. We never asked him to do anything, he never done anything. When he come to our house, other than sleep, 75-percent of our time was playing music.”

I asked Stump if Ed ever came around his father’s home drunk and he said no — Ed was always “very mannerly” at the Dalton home.

“Ed Haley was a fine man, buddy,” he said. “He was my idol. Ed Haley was a pretty smart man. He was good when it come to the Bible — he knowed what to do, you know, and they’d sit there and discuss the Bible, but Ed never would accept the Lord as far as being saved. If anybody could’ve ever got Ed to quit drinking, it woulda been Dad.”

Dood Dalton was a moonshiner in his younger days but gave it up just after Stump’s birth.

“Dad was one of the most well thought of men in this country really, if you want to know the truth about it. Dad made a study of the Bible for 62-and-a-half years.”

In Search of Ed Haley 259

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in Culture of Honor, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I got my fiddle out and played for Stump, hoping to generate some detailed memories of what he’d seen Ed and his father do. He watched me play for a while, then said, “You play exactly like the old-time fiddlers played, and I’m gonna tell you why. You’ve got the smoothest bow of anybody I’ve heard in a long time. Now that’s what they strived for, Ed Haley and Dad — them old-time fiddle players. This herky-jerky stuff, they didn’t go for that.”

Brandon asked, “What about Bill Adkins down at Harts? Did he play that style, too?”

Stump said, “He was pretty good. Bill had a little jerk to his. Bill had what I call a stiff wrist. All these players taught themselves. Dad, all of them.”

Dood Dalton, Stump said, started playing the fiddle when he was about six years old. A little later, he played for dances in the town of Dingess and on Mud Fork near Logan.

Brandon asked Stump if he knew the names of any more old fiddlers around Harts.

“My grandpaw, Wog Dalton, he was a fiddle player. One of the best, they said.”

Did Ed Haley know him?

“Ed said there wasn’t a fiddle player in this country could play with Wog Dalton,” Stump said. “Now, I barely can remember him. He was the spitting image of Devil Anse Hatfield.”

Wog was apparently a pretty rough character, too.

“My granddad was playing for a square dance and he and this guy had been into it,” Stump said. “Somebody came in there and told old man Wog, said, ‘Whatcha call it’s out there and he’s gonna cut you with a knife.’ He just kept playing that fiddle and here come this guy through there. He grabbed Granddad Wog and Granddad Wog just pulled his knife out and they just took each other by the hand, son, and started cutting each other.”

Stump laughed and said, “I think Granddad Wog was laid up about two months over that.”

I wanted to know more about Stump’s memories of Ed’s technique and repertoire, so I asked him the same kind of questions I’d asked Lawrence Haley in previous years.

Did Ed hold the fiddle up under his chin or down on his chest?

“He laid his chin right on it, like he was listening to it,” Stump said.

Did you ever see him play standing up, like at a contest?

“No. Now, old man Ed did play in fiddle contests. I know of two. One of them was in Ohio, ’cause he come in our house right after he done it.”

I wondered if Ed sang much.

“I never heard him sing a song in my life. Maybe a verse — just stop along there and sing a verse. Now, him and Dad both would do that. But to put the poetry to it, I never heard him really do that.”

Did he pat his foot a lot when he played?

“He patted both feet,” Stump said. “He’d switch off, and sometimes he’d pat both of them together. He just got himself into it.”

Did Ed ever play tunes in cross key?

“Now that there one I give you, ‘The Lost Indian’, was a cross key,” Stump said. “I remember that real well. That was one of the prettiest fiddle tunes. I asked Dad, ‘How are you tuning that fiddle?’ and he was tuning it in a banjo tuning.”

I asked if Ed traded fiddles much and Stump said, “No, he didn’t do much trading, I don’t think. And a lot of times he’d come without a fiddle. He knowed Dad had fiddles.”

I wondered if Ed brought a different fiddle every time he came to Dood’s and Stump said, “No, he had one fiddle he’d really like. But now, he’d bring an extra one once in a while.”

Stump thought for a second then said, “Now Ed would bring all his bows to Dad, after he’d broke up the hairs in them. Dad had horses, you know, and Dad would re-string that bow.”

How many bows did Ed carry around?

“Well, he’d just have maybe two in his case.”

Did he always have a case?

“No, a lot of times he’d just have a bare fiddle.”

Did you ever see him play anything besides the fiddle?

“I never seen him pick up anything besides a fiddle.”

Brandon asked Stump if he remembered the first time Ed came to see his father.

“I was born in 1929 but he was coming there, I know, in the thirties,” he said.

There were big musical gatherings at the Dalton home in those days.

“I’ve seen people all over the place,” Stump said. “My mother, she had a long table and she would have any kind of meat on that table you wanted to eat, any kind of bread on that table you wanted to eat. We raised all this stuff now. And sometimes you’d feed two tables full of people just through the week. Instead of cooking one pot of beans, she’d cook two. And we raised our own meat. We’d have sheep meat — what they call mutton — and pork and beef. We ground our own meal. The only thing we went to the store for was sugar, salt, and things like that. And I’ve seen people there lined up to eat — just country people gathering to enjoy themselves and that was it.”

Was there any drinking going on?

“Had one incident: this guy, he thought he was mean. My dad had my sister in his lap and we had music a going. This guy shot down in the floor there near my sister. He didn’t last long. Just somebody a drinking.”

In Search of Ed Haley 258

06 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Late one October night, I rolled into Harts on the bus. I was full of excitement, having just read an article from Smithsonian magazine about Doug Owsley, one of the top forensic anthropologists in the country. According to the article, Doug had worked with the mass graves in Bosnia, identified some of David Koresh’s charred cult members at Waco, and helped to break the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Wisconsin. He was very interested in historical graves, having exhumed western outlaws, Indians, Civil War soldiers and no telling what else. He was known in some circles as “the Sherlock Holmes of Bones.”

The next morning, I told Brandon I had this idea of contacting Owsley to see if he would exhume the Haley-McCoy grave. He thought for a few seconds, then said it was risky. While he was as curious as I in wanting to know what was “down there,” he wasn’t really sure what we would gain by it. Besides, he said, people might think we were taking things a little too far. He could picture us sitting down to interview someone and all of a sudden they say, “Oh, you’re the guys going around digging people up.” He had a point: I wasn’t even sure what we might gain by exhuming the grave. We tabled the notion until later.

Turning our minds to more pressing thoughts, we decided to visit Stump Dalton at Ferrellsburg. Stump had popped onto my bus during my last trip to Harts and, looking very much like a thin-haired George Jones, said, “My family and Ed Haley was close. If he was in Ohio or somewhere and he come here the first place he come was our house. I knowed of Ed to stay as high as two months around there. We had him a bed all the time.”

Stump was a son of Dood Dalton, Ed’s fiddler-friend on the Big Branch of Harts Creek, as well as a former mandolin player for the Starlight Rambers, a local group featured on Logan radio many years ago. He was 66 years old.

“I’ve actually played with Ed Haley,” Stump had told me.

Brandon and I made the short drive to Ferrellsburg where we pulled the car into a wide spot near the railroad tracks. We walked across Route 10 to Stump’s turquoise-colored house. “Come on in, boys,” Stump said at the door. “I’ll tell you what I can about Ed Haley.” Immediately, as we sat down on couches inside, I asked Stump about his father, who was reportedly a great old-time fiddler and a good friend to Ed Haley.

“They called him Dood Dalton,” Stump said. “His real name was Moses. My dad used to play for a lot of them old-time square dances. Music follows the Daltons. Dad could play anything that had strings on it. He was a number one harp player. He could play anything on the French harp.”

Brandon asked Stump if he remembered any of his father’s tunes and he said, “‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’, ‘Sally Goodin’, ‘Old Joe Clark’, and all that. See, when they would first start playing, Ed would say, ‘Now Dood, I want you to tune that fiddle up and play that ‘Lost Indian’.’ Now they used to take and clamp a little knife on the bridge. It softens that down. Then they would take two little sticks — about the size of straws, you know — and play that ‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’ and beat on that and man you talk about a tune. Dad would either beat or play it or vice-versa, him or Ed would. That was a favorite tune for them two — that and the ‘Blackberry Blossom’. You know, they revised that ‘Blackberry Blossom’.”

Right away, it sounded a lot like the kind of relationship Ed shared with Laury Hicks, the fiddling veterinarian in Calhoun County.

I told Stump I thought Ed Haley was a master of improvisation and he agreed, saying, “They would play a tune and they’d put their own thing into it, you know. I’ve seen Ed Haley sit down and say, ‘Now Dood, what do you think of this?’ and vice-versa. And they’d sit there all day, all night. They could do about anything they wanted to do with a fiddle, both of them. When they was into fiddle playing, they was into fiddle playing. You didn’t come in there and start a conversation with them.”

I asked Stump if Ed and Dood played at the same time, as he had supposedly done with Hicks, and he said, “Not too much.”

In Search of Ed Haley 255

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, Harts, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Meanwhile, Brandon and Billy were back at the bedside of Bill Adkins. Bill said Ed used to visit his father Fed Adkins for two or three days at a time when he was a boy. Fed and his family lived in Harts with Black John Adkins, a mulatto cousin who had neen present at the Haley-McCoy executions in 1889. When Haley came by, he usually traveled with Dood Dalton, a fiddler from Big Branch who played with a similar style. Ed and Dood played for all night dances at Fed’s but never sang anything. Bill said Ed played fast and smooth and was a “long bow” fiddler. He tapped his feet while playing.

Fed and Black John were both fiddlers, Bill said, but they never played with Ed and Dood. Instead, they tried to copy them after they left.

Bill said Ed didn’t drink at his father’s home and was a very serious person, never carrying on much. People led him around. When he stayed overnight, he slept in the same bed as Bill and the other Adkins boys.

In Search of Ed Haley 195

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Early the next day, Brandon and I met Billy at his home, with plans to go see the site of the “murder house” at Green Shoal. We found his father, Bill, Sr., seated in a wooden rocking chair very much “in his own world.” He’d been born in 1906, making him one of the oldest citizens living in Harts. Curious, I got my fiddle out and played a few tunes for him. The old gentleman just stared at me like I was crazy. He never said a word. Billy told him we were interested in Ed Haley’s life and he surprised us all when he said Ed used to stay with his father for two or three days at a time. Oh yeah, he said…Ed even slept in the same bed with him and his brothers, who were children at the time. Wow! Bill said Haley was a very serious guy (“not carrying on much”) and had a reputation for being “bad to fight.” He often got with a local fiddler named Dood Dalton and played all night for a house full of people at the Adkins home. Bill also remembered him playing in front of the old Adkins Store/Harts Post Office around 1916 when it faced the railroad tracks. All he could recall about Ed’s technique was that he tapped his feet and pulled a long, smooth bow.

After talking with Bill, Billy, Brandon, and I drove out of Harts Bottom onto Route 10 past the old Adkins store and on up the road to Green Shoal. At that location, standing in a little drizzle, we surveyed the possible sites of the murder house. Suddenly, an older man Brandon and Billy recognized as Doran Lambert came walking down to where we stood on the railroad tracks. A descendant of Paris Brumfield, he lived where the Tucker Fry home stood in 1889. Doran said the murders didn’t happen at Tucker’s place, as Billy thought, but at the present-day location of his father’s garage just up the river between the Guyan River and the C&O Railroad.

We asked Doran more about the Haley-McCoy killings. He said his aunt Ida Taylor, who lived just up Green Shoal, could tell us all about it. A niece to Al Brumfield, her father Jim was Paris’ youngest son. We decided right away to try and see her.