Tag Archives: Ed Haley

In Search of Ed Haley 110

14 Tuesday May 2013

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One morning, in one of those unexpected surprise moments, I received in the mail from John Harrod, the Kentucky folklorist and musician, two cassette interviews regarding Ed Haley. One tape featured John Lozier, the harmonica master from South Portsmouth, speaking at a 1992 workshop in Berea, Kentucky. His memories were much more detailed on the tape than when I’d talked with him a few months ago and went a long way in helping me to understand more about Ed Haley’s Portsmouth experience.

“I started playing when I was three and a half, or so they tell me,” he said. “Well I had an uncle Walter Lozier that played a little harp. We lived in an old log house in Lewis County and he and I was sitting in this old door facing the railroad and he was playing and he handed me the harp and, so they tell me, I played ‘Red Wing’. I learned to play fiddle tunes on a harmonica from my granddad.”

John told about some of the better musicians around Portsmouth during the Depression era.

“At one time in Portsmouth, Ohio, during the thirties, there was no work,” he said. “You couldn’t get a job. And at that time, there was more good musicians in Portsmouth. They just sat around and drank a little moonshine and got good, but nobody ever made anything out of it. We had a group of fiddlers up home by the name of Keibler. They came from Germany. The old father brought the old Stradivarius fiddle and they have still got that in the family. They used to play one they called ‘Headwaters of Tygart’ and then they played one they called ‘Windin’ Down the Sheets’, then they played one they called ‘Nigger Hill’, played one they called ‘Rye Straw’, ‘Gettin’ Upstairs’, ‘Old Coon Dog’. And I learned to play fiddle tunes from the Kieblers, Ed Haley, Clark Kessinger, Harry Fry, the Mershons…”

John told about his experience with Ed.

“I met Ed Haley about 1929 or ’30,” he said. “He was a little old winked up fella with a little ol’ plug hat on. His wife sitting over here. Both blind. She played a banjo-mandolin. And he was sitting on Market Street in the lower end of Portsmouth, Ohio, playing for nickels and dimes in a hat box or whatever he had thrown down there. He had one of the boys with him. He was a fella that had little slim fingers like a woman and he played real soft and low. He wasn’t a loud fiddler. But he played so smooth and so soft you had to listen when he played. In other words, if he didn’t kindle your fire your wood was wet. I played several concerts with him and his wife. We had a fella by the name of Dinky Coffman that was on the entertaining committee at the Portsmouth N&W YMCA where people come in off the trains and slept and bought their meals. You could buy a meal for fifty cents, you could stay all night for fifty cents, and then they’d go back to Columbus or either to Williamson, West Virginia — and I’d worked there with him. I’d worked at Russell yards, one of the biggest railroad yards in the world.”

One of the tunes John said he’d learned from Ed was ‘Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom’, which he played almost note for note on the tape (minus the little ornaments and some of the “deeper” stuff that would be hard to get on a harp). He also played “Portsmouth Airs”, which he said was a Haley tune.

At that point in the tape, someone asked John about putting a lot of notes in a tune.

“Clark Kessinger could put more notes in a fiddle tune than any man I ever heard in my life and he played fast,” he said. “He was a big, tall, slim, skinny fella. Lived in Three Maples, West Virginia — right this side of Charleston, just off of I-64. I met him one time at a fiddlers’ contest back in the thirties at Portsmouth, Ohio.”

In Search of Ed Haley 109

12 Sunday May 2013

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               Portsmouth, Ohio — the fiddler-rich city where Ed Haley frequently played during the Depression — is now a fiddlers’ graveyard. Historically, it was settled some two hundred years ago and has been the seat of government for Scioto County since 1808. For most of its existence, Portsmouth has been an industrial town comparable to Huntington or Ashland in that section of Ohio River country, although in recent years it has focused on tourism. It is accessed by Route 52 in Ohio or, more commonly, by Route 23 from Ashland. This latter route, also known as Country Music Highway (a real “speed trap”), runs northwest across the Boyd County line past the Flatwoods exit (hometown of Billy Ray Cyrus) and to Greenup, home of the late Jesse Stuart, Eastern Kentucky’s most famous writer. At Greenup’s 124 Front Street, the former home of Doc Holbrook still stands facing the mighty Ohio River. Beyond there, for a short distance, exists a stretch of rolling hills with the mighty Ohio flowing just out of view and almost no economic development in sight. Eventually, if traveling west on Route 23, South Portsmouth presents itself. South Portsmouth is connected to its mother city of Portsmouth by a bridge over the Ohio. Portsmouth is a beautiful river town. Its Boneyfiddle district, which basically includes Front and Second Streets between Market Street and the campus of Shawnee State University, showcases Victorian era buildings with a few antique stores and cafes and a series of well-painted city historical murals on a nearby floodwall. It is depressed economically but has a strong river heritage, which seems to be nearly forgotten in Ashland and Huntington.

     Traditionally, Portsmouth has been a major stopping point for folks traveling in the Ohio Valley west to Cincinnati — whether it was loggers in Milt Haley’s day or musicians in Ed Haley’s day. Portsmouth was home to Asa Neal, a fiddler I ranked as second only to Ed Haley. Ed was very familiar with Portsmouth, as well as the nearby town of New Boston, where he played on sidewalks and in contests. Portsmouth had also been important in the life of his wife Ella, who had lived there at least twice before her marriage: at 913 10th Street and later at 1124 Gay Street (each address being in close proximity of each other).

     Traveling west from Portsmouth, after a considerable distance through the northeastern Kentucky countryside, is Maysville, a former tobacco center and home of the late Rosemary Clooney, famous actress and singer. Beyond there is Augusta, the hometown of actor George Clooney, and beyond there still is the well-known metro area of Cincinnati, including Covington.

In Search of Ed Haley 107

10 Friday May 2013

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I called Lawrence Haley a little later after working more on Ed’s music to brag on the phrasing and intonation in his father’s playing.

“Well,” Lawrence said, “that’s one thing with the bow I’d never be able to learn anyway. What pressure to put to emphasize a note or to quiet a note down. Pop did that from one end of the bow to the other. If he was holding it up and he was plumb out at the end of the bow, I know he had to put more pressure with his hand downward toward them strings to really emphasize the note. And when he got to the other end, he had to slack off a little bit I know to get the same emphasis. I guess running from one end of the bow he was all the time changing the pressure of the bow on the strings to get what he wanted. Now, that’s about all I know about bowing anyway. You gotta have room on your bow. When he knew he couldn’t make a certain note when he’s down at the short end of it, then he would reverse it but he did it in a way that you couldn’t tell which way he was going with the bow hardly. He skipped the bow on some tunes you know as he was playing it. I’ve seen him get out there, as it started down towards the handle end, he’d skip it maybe to get some notes and the way he wanted to play that piece of music. Like the ‘Cacklin’ Hen’, when he’d get down to where that hen let out that squall dropping that egg, it sounded just like an old hen just jumping right off a nest. And that ‘Flop-Eared Mule’, you can hear that mule bray if you want to listen to it.”

I told Lawrence one of the things I was trying to figure out was how Ed could hold the fiddle down from his neck and still get up into the higher positions. Lawrence remembered his father doing it.

“I’ve seen his hands run up and down the neck of the fiddle. He always did that. He’d go way down on the neck of the fiddle.”

Beyond that, Lawrence said he couldn’t get into the specifics.

“I really couldn’t say anything more about that, John. But right in there about the armpit is where he laid the fiddle. I don’t know whether he used chest muscles to kinda control it too, and shoulder and arm muscles, I really don’t know. That would take a real master to sit around and watch that and know exactly what you’re looking for. A lot of times when Pop and Mom was a playing, I’d be off somewhere else. However he mastered that fiddle, I couldn’t tell you. The guys that watched him, they mighta knowed partly what they was looking for. I guess the only one that come close to his style of playing was Clark Kessinger and he watched Pop a lot. Pop would say, ‘Yeah, I knew he was there, but he never would play for me.’ Pop was liable to criticize him or he might try to help him, but Clark wouldn’t let him. He was just there after the knowledge that he could garner from Pop’s style by watching him.”

In Search of Ed Haley 106

09 Thursday May 2013

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Wilson well remembered Ed “rocking” the fiddle as he played.

“His violin rocked continuously on his chest,” he said. “I mean it rocked like a rocking chair. That’s the only fiddler I ever seen do that. He told me one time, he said, ‘Wilson, I don’t play the ‘Mockingbird’. It’s a hard matter to play the ‘Mockingbird’ unless the violin is placed under your chin.’ He really commended Arthur Smith on the ‘Mockingbird’ and Clark Kessinger, but he didn’t play the ‘Mockingbird’ at all. I’m sure he could’ve. He could play anything. I’ll put it this way, sir. I know a lot of great fiddle players. Well, I’ve seen French Carpenter — he was good — and Clark Kessinger was good but I think Haley was one of the greatest as far as I’m concerned. He was a legend in this country and in any country that knew about him.”

I asked Wilson about Ed’s fingers, like whether they came up off the fingerboard very high when he was fiddling.

“John, I’m gonna tell you like it is,” he said. “You could hardly tell the man was changing notes. His fingers practically stayed on the fingerboard and they moved like worms. Now that’s it in a nutshell. And his fingers was about as big around as a writing pencil. He had fingers more like some lady typist, you know what I mean. But I could understand: he never did any work to build his hands up other than play that fiddle. And he told me once — somebody had made the remark about not being able to note with your little finger, you know — Ed said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you gotta do to play the fiddle. You got to use all four of them and use your thumb, too, if you can.’ He had a sense of humor in a way, you know. And he said, ‘Son, get some soul out of your fiddle. Don’t play it to just hear the wind blow.'”

I asked Wilson if he remembered the names of Ed’s tunes.

“He played a tune he called ‘Harry in the Wildwood’,” he said. “Carpenter played it and I used to play it, but danged if I ain’t forgot it. It was a good tune. And then he played a tune he called the ‘Silver Lake’. It was on the bass. It was a four-string tune. God, he pulled a note on that bass that was out of this world. The more bass, the better he liked it.”

Wilson didn’t remember Ed singing much.

The only song he sung was “Frankie and Johnny”, which I had heard from Ugee Postalwait some time earlier. “Oh yeah,” Wilson added. “He called it ‘Old Billy Lyons’.” Unlike Ugee, who stressed Ed’s singing, Wilson emphasized Ed’s fiddling. “He had a beautiful voice,” Wilson said, “but he liked to concentrate on them hoedowns. He and Clark Kessinger would play that ‘Dunbar’ and he said, ‘Now, I’ll tell you Wilson. Clark plays that well, but they’s a little bit of bow work in there that he never did get, but I never would mention it to him.’ But he commended Clark constantly. I heard him say several times, ‘They’s very few men, maybe three out of a hundred, can play that fast and get clear notes.’ He liked Clark. He also liked Arthur Smith — some of Arthur’s tunes.”

I told Wilson that Haley supposedly hated Arthur Smith and he said, “Well, he said he didn’t know all that many tunes, but what he knew he was real unique at it, you know.”

I tried to jar more of Wilson’s memories of Ed’s repertoire by naming off some of the titles from Haley’s home recordings. He had some great comments.

“Oh God, that ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’, he was good on that. But now that ‘Three Forks of Sandy’, they’s another tune related to that. I used to play it a little bit. He called it the ‘Three Forks of Reedy’. That’s a creek over here in Calhoun County. It empties into the Little Kanawha River. That tune is as old as the hills.”

When I mentioned “Hell Among the Yearlings”, Wilson said, “Oh God, he had the world beat on that.”

As for “Blackberry Blossom”:

“Well, he was awful good on the ‘Blackberry’. Well, to tell you the truth, they wasn’t nothing he was bad on. That’s the whole bottom line. Everything he played was good.”

I asked Wilson if he remembered what key Ed played a lot of his tunes in and he said, “Well, he played a lot of tunes in the key of C, like ‘West Virginia Birdie’ and the ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and ‘Callahan’. And he didn’t play much in the key of E. Very little in the key of E. Ed’s main key was G, C and D and A. However he could play in E-minor or he could play in A-sharp, or any of the sharps that he wanted to, but he stuck pretty close to the regular standard mountain music key.”

How about B-flat?

“Oh god, yeah. Like ‘Hey Old Man’ and the ‘Lost Indian’. Stuff like that. Oh yeah, he played a tune in B-flat, he called it ‘Boot Hill’. And he said the tune came from out West back in the old days. Somewhere back in the 18 and 80s.”

Wilson said he couldn’t play those tunes anymore.

“It’s been so long. I can remember a few tunes, but yet I can’t get them together anymore. I quit for about seventeen years.”

In Search of Ed Haley 105

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Taking Bobby Taylor’s advice, I decided to call Wilson Douglas and ask him more about Ed Haley.

“You know, he’d come to Calhoun County, West Virginia, which borders Clay County,” Wilson said. “And there was an old gentleman over there by the name of Laury Hicks. He played the banjo for him a lot and also the fiddle. Now, he was a hell of a fiddler. Ed said the first time he went over there, Hicks was setting on the porch playing the ‘Arkansas Traveler’ — him and Cheneth on the banjo. And he said, ‘Wilson, I thought I was up against it right there. That old Hicks was a powerful hoedown fiddler.’ I knew it when I was a boy.”

I asked Wilson how Ed looked back in those early days, hoping to glean more personal and less-musical memories this time around.

“He would weigh about 185 pounds and he had a large-like stomach on him and he had little tiny feet,” he said. “When he went to a strange place, he would have me to lead him one time to the kitchen, one time to the living room, one time to the outhouse and that was all after that. He didn’t ask you to go no place with him and he walked like a cat, you know — very quick, very active man. He moved like a mountain lion. I’d say, ‘Now slow down a little bit Ed, and I’ll let you get the feel.’ But he picked his feet up fast, you know what I mean? And he could tell if you was a tidy housekeeper or a messy housekeeper. When he wasn’t playing the fiddle, he was continually moving his fingers — just like he did it so much that he did it unconsciously. He was an oddball. He didn’t fool with very many people — very withdrawn. Now when he got with a gang of mountain people playing music, he was very talkative then.”

Wilson said, “I was sixteen or seventeen years old and he saw I was interested in the fiddle and he sorta took a liking to me and he talked to me quite a bit. He treated me nice but he was a very obnoxious, sarcastic man if he didn’t like you. If he liked you, fine, and if he didn’t, he’d do his thing and that was it. And I’m gonna tell you something about Ed Haley. In as much as he was blind, especially if he’d had a drink or two, he was a dangerous man. He was a mean man. But he had an awful sense of feel. He had this sense of knowing when anything was close. He knew when he wasn’t in danger. He said, ‘Wilson, I went to a place one time,’ and he said, ‘it was rough, the people was rough.’ And said, ‘This man took me to the outhouse. I come back and I thought I could go myself.’ And said, ‘I must’ve got a little bit out of the path. I was fixing to make a step and something told me not to do it and I pulled back.’ And said, ‘I turned around and went back,’ and said, ‘I just liked one step of falling in that big, dug well.’ Now, that was the kind of good sense of feeling he had, you see?”

 

In Search of Ed Haley 104

07 Tuesday May 2013

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After talking with Mrs. Rutland, I called Bobby Taylor, a fiddling acquaintance and all-around nice guy in Dunbar, West Virginia. Bobby was a protégé of Clark Kessinger, the famous Charleston fiddler who regarded Haley as the best fiddler he ever heard. I told him about spending months trying to unlock the secrets behind Ed’s bowing before concluding that he played a long bow using the Scotch snap to get smoothness and note separation. Bobby agreed, telling how Clark Kessinger did the same kind of thing in “Sweet Sixteen” — “real fast and almost no bow. He would shuffle with his fingers.”

Bobby didn’t think that Ed used that one bow style for every tune, though.

“From what I could hear of Ed Haley’s fiddling, he done almost any type of style with the bow,” he said. “And I could hear his styles changing from one tune to the next and the way he would phrase. Like when I fiddle, it just depends on what mood I’m in and what style I want to play in. But Haley had to be what Kessinger would call a ‘down-bower,’ because Kessinger hated a ‘bow pusher.’ In other words, the accent’s on the up-bow. What little bit I can hear through all the scratches and everything, I hear Haley being a little more smoother, a little more fluid than Kessinger, but I still see the same bow. But Kessinger’s fast as greased lightning.”

I told Bobby how I’d really gotten into writing out Haley’s tunes note for note lately — every little slide — because I wanted to see what was going on.

“Of course, the deeper I get into it, the less I realize I know about it,” I said.

Bobby wasn’t surprised.

“Kessinger and Haley were both very complicated fiddlers, as any fiddler is,” he said. “But Kessinger was a master with the bow. I kid you not. I mean, that man could bow. Kessinger, if you listen at him fiddle, listen especially at his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’. Man, could he fiddle that. Very few people realize how well he could fiddle it until you start really listening to what he’s doing with that bow and note correlation. It’s a masterpiece, his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’ is. Just as Ed Haley, when I heard Ed Haley play it, I could hear where Kessinger got his idea. I could hear it all coming together. Now my style, when you get a real good guitar player that I like playing with, I have a tendency to throw Mike Humphreys into my mesh — a little bit of Kessinger — and I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I sound a great deal like Ed Haley when I do that because I play a little bigger note in a way — not quite as fast as Kessinger — and try to smooth it up a bit.”

“Lawrence has told me repeatedly about how his dad held the fiddle,” I said to Bobby, “that he didn’t stick it up under his chin but he sat it kinda there at his shoulder.”

Bobby chuckled and said, “That’s the way I hold it when I’m jamming.”

I asked Bobby if he rotated the fiddle slightly with it at that position and he said, “I don’t, but my father does. My father, I don’t think, ever met Ed Haley, but is certainly old enough to have known him. My father’s 82. But he’d always heard of him. His favorite fiddler was Sam Jarvis. He was a very prominent person — well educated. He sold insurance. He was my dad’s schoolteacher way out in a little one-room school. My father just says one word for Sam Jarvis, and he says he was ‘perfect.’ I remember when I was a small kid, my father pointed him out and talked to him for a little while and he introduced me. I’ll remember it as long as I live, he said, ‘Here is the greatest fiddler that ever lived, and someday you will learn to appreciate what I have said now.’ And to this day, if you ask me who the smoothest fiddler was I ever heard, it’s Sam Jarvis. Jarvis’ note was not of this world. He was the same age as Clark. He died in 1967.”

That was the first time I’d heard of Sam Jarvis, so — figuring that Ed likely knew him — I pressed Bobby for more information.

“Oh man, he could fiddle. Very little did he play professionally. He would just show up and terrorize the contest world occasionally. I never have heard about Sam Jarvis playing against Ed Haley, but Sam Jarvis only lost one contest in his life — and he was disqualified. You won’t catch anybody in the Charleston area that knew both the fiddlers — Kessinger and Jarvis — that will tell you Kessinger was better. The two greatest fiddlers, when you hear people talk, one’ll say Sam Jarvis and the other will say Ed Haley and most people say they wouldn’t turn their hand over for the difference.”

I asked Bobby who he thought Ed and Jarvis patterned their fiddling after and he said, “That is what is very interesting. They learned from old Edison records, somewhat. I know Jarvis did. They said that his dad wouldn’t hardly let him have a hold of the fiddle, he was so little. And he said that his feet wouldn’t even hit the floor, and he wrapped his toes around the rungs of the chair, and put the record on, and his dad said, ‘You can play the fiddle today if you’re careful with it.’ And he sat down with that record, and they said when they come home that evening, not only had he mastered the record — he had snowed the guy on the record. And he was not even six years old. So he was just automatic.”

Bobby said Wilson Douglas had been talking a lot about Ed Haley lately. Apparently, my telephone call to him had stirred some of memories.

“You will find that if you ask him off the top of his head something, he’ll say, ‘I don’t know,’ but you ask him two or three days later and he has the Brittanica version,” Bobby said.

In Search of Ed Haley 102

03 Friday May 2013

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     Back in Nashville, with Lawrence’s encouragement, I made contact by telephone with Paul Holbrook, a retired general practitioner living in Ashland. Paul’s father, Dr. H.H. Holbrook, had been a good friend to Ed, who once gave him a fiddle and a silver trophy cup for delivering Mona. In talking with Paul, I could tell right away that he was well-educated. He also seemed to be advanced in years; his memory was a little foggy.

     “Well, I think Dad was a friend of his,” he said. “I think he delivered maybe one of his children. Dad fiddled a little bit and he always was interested in hearing Ed play. The fact Dad liked to fiddle and learned to when he was a young boy was the attraction. Other than that, I really can’t tell you a whole lot.”

     I asked Paul if he remembered the names of any of Doc’s tunes and he said, “No, not really. If I heard them I would, but I was never interested much in it.”

     Paul told me as much as he could remember about his father’s fiddling.

     “Dad just played some for his own amusement,” he said. “He must have done most of his playing when he was a young boy or young man maybe playing at some of the country dances. He was from Lawrence County. My grandfather’s farm was between Blaine and Martha.”

     Paul said his father moved a lot after becoming a doctor.

     “Well, he was at Burdine, Kentucky, and Jenkins, Kentucky, many years ago and as far as I know that’s where he first saw Ed Haley. That was up in the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky. And he was in Louisa for a couple of years. And then we moved to Ashland here back in 1922. As far as I know, Ed was down here at that time. I remember seeing him when he and his wife used to play on the street corners back in the twenties. Dad was here for ten years and then moved to Greenup. I believe Ed was down in Greenup once and played some for Dad at home. Now, Dad had made a little recording of Ed in Greenup, Kentucky playing the fiddle on a little old machine and I think I still have the record around someplace. I don’t know what kind of shape it’s in and I’m not even sure I can find it. I can try to find it if you might be interested in it.”

     Lord have mercy.

     What about him giving your dad a silver cup or trophy?

     “I don’t ever remember seeing a cup and I don’t remember ever hearing of it,” Holbrook said.

     What about him giving your dad a fiddle?

     “Yes, Dad had one of his fiddles and my son now has it,” he said. “J.P. Fraley borrowed the old fiddle and I think he used it to make some recordings for the National Archives or someplace in Washington. He had it for a while and brought it back and my son had a friend who had a child who was taking fiddle lessons and he used it some. But I don’t really know what shape it’s in, but the last time I heard my son say anything about it he said it needed some repair.”

     Just before hanging up, Paul gave me his son’s telephone number in Lexington, Kentucky.

     “He teaches some in Lexington at the university and also at Midway College and he comes home up here about every two or three weeks,” he said.

     I asked if he was a doctor, too, and Paul said, “He’s a Ph.D. doctor. He’s not an MD.”

     This was too much: new recordings, one of Ed’s fiddles…

     I called up Paul, Jr. to ask about the fiddle. His speech reminded me a lot of his father, although his mind was quicker, not having been clouded with age. When I mentioned the fiddle, he said, “J.P. Fraley had used it for a while and gotten some blue ribbons with it, but it is in Lexington with me at the moment. It has a very low bridge — a fiddle player’s bridge. I don’t know if it came from Ed Haley in this particular case or not. It is in the case that Grandfather kept it in. It’s difficult for us to say what Grandfather might have done to it. Since Grandfather’s death, nothing has ever changed about it. Grandfather died in 1961. His fiddle playing, I would describe as casual. I don’t think Grandfather was a terribly good fiddler, but he liked to play around.”

In Search of Ed Haley 96

27 Saturday Apr 2013

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Nestled in Nashville, I worked obsessively on Ed Haley’s music. First, I made a real effort to transcribe it note for note and break it down “under the microscope.” Initially, I had tried to play it generally the way he did while keeping its spirit — with my own twists, of course, which is nearly impossible not to do. This time, though, I wanted to study it as you might a fabulous book — break it down, look at it mechanically… I made a huge discovery regarding Ed’s bowing during that time. With Lawrence’s help via telephone conversations, I deduced that Ed used what Scotch fiddlers call “snap bowing,” which is when you separate notes by applying pressure (“little stops”) with the bow — not by changing its direction. Of course, Ed didn’t use those patterns exclusively and mixed them with more conventional strokes.

I also spent a lot of time listening to Ed’s recordings and playing my versions of his songs into a tape recorder. One of the first things I figured out was that he used what fiddler Kevin Burke calls the “Irish lilt” to give his music a “dotted note feel.” It would be like playing a tune in triplets with the middle note taken out.

I also discovered that Lawrence was right about Ed not playing so many notes; instead, he created the illusion of doing so by phrasing his tunes in a way that gave them a nice “crooked” flavor.

Throughout these discoveries, Lawrence continued his role as my brutally honest fiddle teacher. His comments were surprisingly musical for someone who kept reminding me that he didn’t even play anything. When I played “Yellow Barber” for him over the telephone, he said, “That sounded right except when you get down to that low end, you’re doing a little skipping in there and it seemed to me like Pop played that a little bit smoother. Like he had a roll to his… And I noticed you had a few jumping notes in there that really I don’t remember hearing. Maybe you can hear them. Other than that, it sounded great to me.”

Lawrence seemed pleased with my playing of Ed’s “Catlettsburg”.

“That was good, John,” he said. “That was really good.”

I told him I didn’t know how Ed was able to get up into second position on that tune with the fiddle sitting at his shoulder.

“I always thought that he kinda controlled the violin with his thumb and the meaty part of his hand between his finger and thumb,” Lawrence said. “He could relax that up and down the neck of the violin or he could tighten that and he could still have the flexibility of his fingers, plus that give him the ability to rock that violin body underneath the bow, too.”

I was trying that and eventually got to where I could will my fingers into third position still holding the fiddle at my shoulder, which if you have to play for a long time is sure easier on the neck of the player.

I told Lawrence about talking with Clyde, especially about his memories of Ed mistreating him as a child.

“I don’t know, maybe my dad was mean to him when he was a young’n,” Lawrence said. “But I can’t remember my dad ever laying a hand on me to hurt me. I musta been a rowdy little kid ’cause it seemed like whenever Pop’d pick me up he’d call me ‘muddy duck’ because I was always dirty, I reckon, whenever he’d get a hold of me. He’d just rub my head or something like that and call me his ‘muddy duck.’ I don’t know where Clyde got his story from.”

Lawrence agreed that his dad sometimes abused his mother, although he placed a lot of blame for their marital problems on her.

“Well, he could be temperamental with my mother at times, but I think she was temperamental, too. I think my mother’s people had higher tempers than Dad’s people did. They seemed to be kinda quiet people. Noah Mullins was supposed to killed a revenuer up there at Harts. They waylaid a revenuer and they laid it on Noah, but Noah Mullins always seemed to me like just as quiet and as calm a fella as could be. But I had some of my uncles on my mother’s side, they were a little bit of a temperamental type of people. So I’d put some of the blame on my mother for her treatment of my dad. You know, a woman can upset a man and whip him quicker with words than he can whip her with his fists.”

I totally agreed, then asked Lawrence if he knew anything about the Muncys from Patsy’s genealogy.

“We’d ride the Norfork and Western train up from Kenova and stop at Kermit and stay there with Muncy people,” he said. “They lived in an apartment up over their store and filling station-type thing and they had one of them small monkeys. I went up there one day and got right at the top of the steps and was playing with that monkey and I musta made it mad and it made a rush at me and I musta jumped back and I went to the bottom of them steps. That made me remember it more than anything else. I can’t even remember that Pop played music while he was there for them. They mighta just talked. We used to stop there maybe and stay all night and Pop and Mom and me would go on to Williamson and they’d play at courthouse days or something there. Pop musta had people up in there, but he never said anything to me about it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 94

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Ed Haley, Music

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Not too long after talking with Patsy, her son Scott sent me a copy of Ed’s genealogy, most of which came directly from Ed and Ella. “James Edward Haley was born in August and was the son of Milt and Imogene (Mullins) Haley,” the notes began. “He died February 4, 1951 in Ashland, KY. He married Martha Ella Trumbo, a daughter of William A. and Laura Belle (Whitt) Payne Trumbo. She was born July 14, 1888 and died November 26, 1954 in Cleveland, OH. At the time of their marriage, Ella had one child from a previous relationship: Ralph A. Payne who married Margaret Ryan and who died on May 22, 1947.”

Patsy listed Milt Haley’s parents as Benjamin Haley and Nellie Muncy, and Emma Jean (Imogene) Haley’s parents as Andrew Jackson Mullins and Chloe Ann Gore.

There was detailed information on Ed and Ella’s children.

“Sherman Luther Haley, the oldest, died as an infant. Clyde Frederick Haley was born on June 13, 1921 and never married. Noah Earl Haley was born on October 26, 1922 and married Janet J. Fried in September of 1951. Allie Jackson Haley was born on April 6, 1924. He married Patsy J. Cox on October 25, 1946 and died on March 23, 1982. Lawrence Alfred Haley was born on January 8, 1928. He married Patricia M. Hulse in February of 1949. Monnie May Haley was born on May 5, 1930 and married in 1945 to Wilson Mullins.”

In Search of Ed Haley 88

12 Friday Apr 2013

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Clyde paused, then asked, “Did Lawrence show you them pictures of my dad? Did you ever see him in that big coat?”

Before I could answer, he took off again, “He wore that long as I remember about him, and he’d go to the bootlegger and get him a pint of moonshine — one in each pocket in that overcoat — and he’d go over to Portsmouth. I’ve seen him have an old clay pipe in his coat pocket and he smoked that when he was out playing anywhere. He smoked Strader’s Natural Leaf Tobacco. He’d take out his pocketknife and chop it up real fine and put it in his pipe. He also chewed Brown Mule tobacco and he carried a tobacco can in his pocket to spit in. He always had a cane with him. Always. He’d feel with it. That was his ‘seeing eye-dog.’ And if anybody’d look him in the eyes, his eyeballs were real messed up from the measles. That’s exactly what put him blind. My mother had a accident with her daddy’s wagon. He had a carnival wagon. I think she started out in her life teaching kids, but then she had so many kids herself she got away from that. She could’ve been a music teacher.”

Clyde said, “I wish you could’ve known him personally. He could pin you down somewhere and tell you stories that you wouldn’t believe could happen. And I’ve thought a lot of times about things he told, and it had to be true ’cause how else could they happen without somebody really knowing it?”

I kept hearing these references to Ed’s story-telling abilities and was becoming somewhat fascinated. “What kind of stories did he tell?” I asked Clyde.

“Well, just like a hillbilly mountaineer, you’d get him started on a story and he wouldn’t quit,” Clyde said. “He was a storyteller’s storyteller. I tell you, he could tell some big ones. My dad could walk you down talking the Bible and he wasn’t a religious man. Well, my mother would read that Ziegler Magazine, you know, and that was a lot like blind people’s Reader’s Digest. My mother would read to him. They’d sit for hours and hours at a time and he’d drink and she’d read the magazine to him. Used to be so much of it, it would get monotonous.”

Right away, I thought Clyde’s memory of Ella reading to Ed for hours as he drank was one of the best lines I’d heard up to that point. I mean, it really told an incredible amount about their life at home. As I thought about that image, Clyde told about his father playing music on the streets.

“My dad done most of his street playing over there in Ironton,” he said. “And he didn’t like to go out on the street and play with my mother. He didn’t like to go anywhere with her. It made him feel lower than he was. My mother played a mandolin. She had an old five-string Gibson banjo, too. One of them short ones. Banjo-mandolin, they called it.”

Clyde said Ed sometimes put out a hat for money when he was playing on the street, but never a tin cup. Ella did that.

“She had a Army drinking cup — one of those old-time tin cups,” he said. “My mother would put it out because my mother played an accordion, too. Things like ‘Stackolee’, ‘Black and Jet’… My mother and my father sang that. They had a duo, you know. Did you ever hear ‘The Lightning Express’? About the conductor on the railroad and he got run over by that train in the end of it?”

I hadn’t, so I asked Clyde to name more of his father’s tunes.

“‘Forked Deer’, and all the old-timers,” he said. “He was real well-versed in most of them.”

What about “Indian Squaw”?

“‘Indian Squaw’?” he said. “Yeah, yeah. He knew ‘The Lost Indian’ and all the old tunes like ‘Paddy on the Turnpike’ and ‘Pigeon on the Gate’. And he even made one tune for my brother Lawrence called ‘8th of January’ and that was one of the best tunes I ever heard him play.”

Of course, “8th of January” was an old fiddle tune commemorating Andrew Jackson’s victory against the British at the Battle of New Orleans — not Lawrence Haley’s birthday — but it sure was interesting that Clyde made the correlation.

How about waltzes? I asked.

“Well, he knew quite a few of them, you know,” Clyde said. “He was a fiddler’s fiddler. Most of his tunes that he played, my mother played with him on piano or an accordion. And my dad, you could call the name of a tune, and he knew it by heart. He didn’t have to study about it, he just played it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 87

11 Thursday Apr 2013

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In January of 1994, Lawrence put me in touch with his brother Clyde Haley, an old bachelor who had spent most of his life roaming the country, working here and there and always managing to get into some kind of trouble. Lawrence called Clyde “the black sheep of the family,” while Mona laughingly dubbed him as a “rogue.” He was Ed Haley’s oldest son and some seven years older than Lawrence. Each time I went to Harts Creek, people had asked about Clyde. Apparently, he made quite an impression.

When I first called Clyde, he lived in a minimum-security nursing home in Stockton, California. Our conversation started like this:

“Hello, John!”

     Hey, Clyde.  How’re you doing?

“Well, I’m still in the hospital.”

     Well, all right. I been wanting to talk to you for two years now.

“Who is this?”

     This is John Hartford in Nashville.

“Well, I don’t know whether I know you personally, do I?”

     Well, you may not. I’m a real good friend of Lawrence and Pat’s. And I play the fiddle myself and I’m on television. I wear a little derby hat and I dance while I play the fiddle.

Clyde laughed.

     But the reason I want to talk to you is I think your father was the greatest old-time fiddler that ever lived.

“I do, too,” he said.

Apparently, Clyde spent a lot of time bragging on Ed’s music at the nursing home. I told him I would send him copies of his father’s music and he got really excited.

“Okay,” he said. “We do a lot of little dancing here in our recreation periods. I think I’ll be outta here in March. It’s not a jail or anything — it’s a hospital.”

I told him I would be touring California in June and he said, “Well, you’ve got my address. Drop by and see me. I’m in Stockton.”

In the meantime, there were a lot of things we could talk about over the telephone. I could tell early in our conversation that Clyde was sometimes right on with his stories, while at other times he was completely out to lunch. His memories were sporadic — in no particular order — like bits of broken glass in a huge pile of garbage that you have to sort through and put back together.

I knew Clyde was Lawrence’s oldest living brother, but wasn’t exactly sure of his age.

“I was born in 1921,” he said. “That’d make me about 73.”

Clyde said he went with his father on trips more than any of the other Haley children.

“When my dad wanted to leave Mom and get away from her for a change, he’d always take me as his crutch,” he said. “I was his favorite son outside of Ralph. He called me ‘Reecko’. That was his nickname for me. I used to carry the fiddle case for him. And I went with him when he’d go to Logan County and go up on Harts Creek and up in Dingess and up that way. And he’d go over around Wayne County. He knew people up there.”

I asked Clyde to describe his father and he said, “My dad, he was about 6’2″ and he had real small feet. He had feet like a dancer would have and he wore a size six shoe. I remember that because I used to wear his shoes. I never saw him with a suit on in my life.”

In Search of Ed Haley 85

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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

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I returned to Nashville talking not so much about new musical developments but rambling on to my wife about murders and the people I’d met in Harts. I spent a lot of time studying over Joe’s photographs, especially the faded family group shot. One of the boys in the picture was propped inside a young woman’s arms and appeared very much to be blind. Was it Ed and his mother? Unfortunately, since the woman was almost completely faded away I couldn’t make a positive identification of her, even when I compared it to the photo of Emma Jean found by Lawrence and I on our first trip to Harts.

There was another interesting development: when I removed the picture of Bill and Peter Mullins from its frame, another equally large picture of the “old couple” kind of popped out from behind it. That made three pictures of those folks and it sure seemed logical to me that Joe Mullins would’ve had three pictures of his grandparents — meaning Ed’s grandparents — and not of an uncle and an aunt.

I sent copies of Joe’s old pictures to Turley and Violet Adams to see if they could show them around for identification. A few weeks later, we spoke over the telephone and they said Liza McKenzie had fingered Ed as the child to the right in the faded group picture. She also said the old folks in the back row were Jackson Mullins and his wife, Chloe.

In Search of Ed Haley 83

28 Thursday Mar 2013

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

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We found Bum on our way up the hollow and went to sit on his porch with his aunt, Liza McKenzie, two of his sisters, Alice and Dicy — and of course Shermie. As soon as Liza figured out who we were she looked at Lawrence and said he was just a small boy the last time she’d seen him.

“Yeah, I guess around 1940 or ’41 was the last time I come to this area,” Lawrence said.

Liza said, “Well, I lived in Kentucky about sixty years. Perry County, up in Hazard.”

I said to her, “Is that where Milt Haley was from?” and she said, “I don’t know but now Ed Haley was borned and raised right around here. When he was a boy, he got up on top of that house down there where Aunt Mag used to live — in that old two-story house — and rolled off in a box. Mother said, ‘Lord, Ed, are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, God no. It’s give me eyesight.’ He said he jarred his eyesight back.”

I liked Liza right away.

I asked her if she had any pictures and she said, “Loretta’s mother had all the pictures of Ed Haley I ever did know. They used to have a picture down there at Loretta’s of Ed’s mother. She was a pretty woman.”

She looked at Clifton and said, “Clif, I believe your mother had a picture of Ed Haley that was made down there at the old home where he was born and raised. Down there where Aunt Mag used to live. I know they had them.”

Clifton remembered it.

“Yeah, they was sitting out in the yard,” he said. “They was together. She was in the chair and he was standing. He didn’t have no pants on.”

Clifton said, “Yeah, you’re right. They was a picture down there. But I looked; they was so many pictures in that box.”

     Box of pictures? I thought.

Before I could ask about them, Clifton said, “There’s one down there faded out. It’s in a big frame. I got it in another building.”

He told me, “I can show them to ya.”

About that time, Cas Baisden came up to the porch. Bum said he was Liza’s 83-year-old twin brother. I asked Cas if he remembered Ed and he said, “I knowed him, yeah. He was raised up here. Old man Peter lived down at the mouth of the holler and his boy lived up the road here and old man Ed’d go up there and he’d come down that road a running and jumping just like he could see and cut the awfulest shine that ever was.”

Lawrence joked, “That’s probably how Clyde got to be the way he was.”

Cas said, “Yeah, I guess Clyde took after him. Clyde went out here and got down in a well once and they had the awfulest time that ever was getting him out. Way back in top of a mountain.”

I asked Cas about the first time he ever saw Ed and he said, “It’s been many a year ago. He stayed down here, him and his wife and them. They’d play music and drink and fight and scratch with one another and them boys was so mean… He’d get so drunk he couldn’t walk.”

Bum knew that Ed was real “easy to get mad about music,” but said he could get him to play nearly anything he wanted because Ed liked him. He’d ask Ed to play something like “John Henry” and he’d say, “Are you sure that’s what you want me to play? You know, I was just thinking about playing that.” If Ed didn’t like someone Bum said he’d “goof around” and not play for them.

Things kinda tapered off after that. Nobody knew anything about Ed having any brothers. Cas had heard about Ed’s father, who he thought was named Green.

“You know, he got killed when I was a little fella, I guess,” Cas said. “His name was Green. They took him over yonder on Green Shoal, they said, and killed him. Walked him down here and up Smoke House and over and down Piney and across the river.”

I asked if Lawrence looked like Ed and Liza said, “Yes, he does. Ed was a bigger man than he is. Ed was a big man.”

But Lawrence looks like Ed in the face?

“Yeah, he looks like him all over.”

Cas said, “Ed was a taller man. I guess he takes after his mother. She’s a little short woman.”

Lawrence agreed: “Yeah, she was about five feet tall — not much bigger than Aunt Liza.”

In Search of Ed Haley 82

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

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I told Turley that Lawrence and I needed to visit Joe Mullins, who had been gone during our last trip to Harts Creek. Turley completely deflated us: Joe, he said, had recently suffered a stroke. He now lived with his daughter Connie Mullins in a trailer just up the creek. Turley pointed the way. Driving a short distance, Lawrence and I parked our car by the creek and walked over a little narrow bridge where an army of barking dogs greeted us. At the porch, Connie introduced us to her brother, Clifton. We stepped on inside and found Joe seated in a wheelchair, surrounded by more dogs. His mind — or at least his ability to communicate a great deal — was all but gone due to the lingering effects of his stroke. Lawrence sat next to him with his hand on his arm. Almost in tears over Joe’s condition, he tried to rekindle Joe’s memories by saying, “I’m Ed Haley’s boy.”

I hung out with Joe’s kids — Connie, Clifton and Loretta. While all were reasonably young, Clifton and Connie had Parkinson’s Disease.

“They’s four of us got it,” Clifton said. “They said it runs through the family some way another. Musta come down the tree somewhere.”

I asked him how old he was.

“38,” he said.

Clifton had just moved back to Harts.

“I got hurt in Michigan and Daddy was sick so I said, ‘Well, it’s a good chance for me to go help my daddy and my sisters.'”

Clifton’s sisters said he was the one who found Ed’s smashed fiddle years ago in the rafters of Uncle Peter’s old smokehouse.

“I was up in there — we was playing around one day — and it fell out on me,” he said. “And I just looked at it and I said, ‘Well, I’ll try to glue it together.’ I started gluing it and it wouldn’t glue so I dumped it into the creek. I didn’t know whose it was. I was about eight but all the pieces wasn’t there to it. When it hit that guy it just splintered everywhere.”

Clifton suggested that we visit Bum and his family just up the hollow. Two years earlier, Bum had told originally Lawrence and I how he had witnessed Ed smash the fiddle over a man’s head while at a tavern on Crawley Mountain. Bum lived only a short distance from Joe’s trailer, up the hollow past Uncle Peter’s old homeplace, in a house situated near Enslow Baisden’s log cabin.

In Search of Ed Haley 81

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

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

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Satisfied with our stop on West Fork, Lawrence and I said our farewells to the Kirks and went to see Turley and Violet Adams on Trace Fork. After some small talk about new developments, Turley told us about his uncle Johnny Hager and father Johnny C. Adams traveling with Ed in the early days. He said Uncle Johnny was the one who got Haley to take his music on the road, while his father just traveled around with them.

“They left here playing music together,” Turley said. “My father just helped them take care of their musical instruments — carried it around and stuff — but they done the music. He would sing with somebody but he never did sing by hisself. And Ed Belcher, I think, played with them then. He could play anything but played a guitar mostly.”

So where all did they travel to?

“They played up at Logan on the radio at one time,” Turley said. “They had a program on up there, Ed Belcher did. Oh man, that’s been back in the thirties. Maybe ’36, ’35. I was just a little bitty boy. I just heard these tales — I don’t know them for sure.”

I asked about Johnny Hager.

“I was just a great old big boy the last time I seen Johnny Hager,” Turley said. “He came to our house, stayed around a little while and left. He was kindly a small fella. My dad was, too. Ed would make two of ary one of them. He was a great big feller, Ed was. Now Ewell Mullins, they was all buddies. Now Johnny Hager and Ed could play music. I heard an old guy on television one day talking about how him and Ed used to play in front of a church somewhere together. Yeah, he called him ‘Blind Fiddling Ed Haley.’ Said he’s just a real good friend to him. But he lives in Inez, Kentucky, that feller does.”

I said, “Well, isn’t Inez where Milt is supposed to be from?”

Turley said, “Milt, now my dad just could remember him. He said he was a hard-working fellow and when he’d come in home he’d just tell them boys, ‘Right now, we got to have a fight and get everything settled and we’ll be all right.’ They liked to fight. I guess that was Ed and he had how many more — two more?”

I said, “You mean Ed had brothers?” and Turley said, “I think he did. I believe my dad said he had a brother and one of them got in a fight one time and he bit Milt’s ear off right in the yard right down there. Now, they was Milt’s boys. I guess Ed is Milt’s boy, ain’t he?”

Lawrence said he’d never heard of his father ever having any brothers or sisters, but it sure was a strange coincidence that we heard a story about “Milt’s ear” right after hearing Bob Adkins’ account of Green and “the nick.” Maybe Milt had the nick — which would’ve reversed their roles in Bob’s story of their final days.

So Ed had brothers?

“Far as I know, they was two or three more of them from the tales they told, you know,” Turley said. “Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza used to tell it. Said every time they come home — Milt and them boys — said he’d just fight with all of them at one time. Have a good time. Say, ‘Now we’re friends.’ Back then, that’s what they believed in.”

This was a major development.

“I just heard these tales,” Turley said. “I don’t know how true they are. About Milt coming home and say, ‘Now, we’ll straighten ‘er out right now and we won’t have no more problems while I’m here.’ That’s the way he run his family, you know. That old woman said, ‘I’ll agree to that. That’s the way it ought to be done.’ I don’t guess she could do anything with them boys.”

Hoping for clues about Ed’s “brothers,” I asked if any of the old gravestones in the cemetery behind Turley’s had any writing on them. Unfortunately, Violet said all the markers had rolled down the hill in recent years and the land had leveled out to where it didn’t even resemble a cemetery. All she knew about the cemetery was that there was a “big grave” in it at one time that belonged to a woman with the last name of Priest (she was the only person buried there who her mother-in-law had actually known).

Turley said he last heard Ed play the fiddle at Clifford Belcher’s tavern on Harts Creek where he played for money and drinks. Violet remembered him playing music all night at her father’s home on Hoover Fork with Robert Martin (her great-uncle) and Bernie Adams. She described Bernie as a “real skinny” bachelor who sang “a little bit but not much” and who “was a real good guitar player, but he never would hardly play.”

“He’d get to drinking and he’d play but if he wasn’t drinking he wouldn’t play,” she said.

Turley said Bernie could also play the banjo, harmonica, fiddle and accordion.

In Search of Ed Haley 77

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

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After Ed’s death, Ella lived with Lawrence and his family in Ashland. Every Thursday, she went to Cincinnati where she sold newspapers until Saturday. On Saturday nights, Lawrence would meet her at the bus station in Ashland and bring her home. She and Lawrence would then go into her bedroom where she would empty out her bounty from special slips Aunt Minnie had sewn into her bodice and count her money. It was somewhat of a humbling job for Ella; her own brother Allie Trumbo would call her “Penny Elly” and tease her for taking in pennies and nickels at Cincinnati. The whole experience came to a humiliating end when she “wet” on herself at the bus depot one afternoon. Apparently, no one would help her to a bathroom.

Pat said Ella took to her bed shortly afterwards and didn’t live much longer.

The day after Thanksgiving in 1954, Ella died of a stroke while staying with Jack and Patsy in Cleveland. Lawrence showed me her obituary from a Huntington newspaper:

HALEY – Funeral services for Mrs. Martha Haley, 66, 4916 Bath Avenue, who died Friday night at the home of a son, Allen Haley, at Cleveland, O., will be held today at 3:30 P.M., at the Lezear Funeral Home by the Very Rev. Francis M. Cooper, rector of the Calvary Episcopal Church.  Burial will be in Ashland Cemetery. The body is at the funeral home.

Mrs. Haley suffered a stroke while visiting her son. She was born July 14, 1888, at Morehead, Ky., a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Trumbo. 

Surviving are three other sons, Lawrence Haley, Ashland, Noah E. Haley, Cleveland, and Clyde F. Haley, Michigan; one daughter, Mrs. Mona Mae Smith, South Point, O.; a brother, Allie Trumbo, Cincinnati; and nine grandchildren.

Sensing that Ella’s death might be a sensitive subject, I just kind of left it at that.

In Search of Ed Haley 76

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

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That evening, back at Lawrence’s, I was full of questions about Mona. She had made a real impression. As I spoke about her, I could sense a little hostility from Pat, as if there were years of family trouble between them, barely hidden away.

“Mona was married to Wilson Mullins,” Pat said. “He was from Harts. Mona was fourteen, I guess, when she married and he was 23 years older than her. She had one boy by Wilson Mullins — Ralph Andrew, who was named after Ralph Andrew Haley. When I came over here in 1949, Mona was divorced from Wilson and she was married to a Kenny Smith. She had two boys by Kenny Smith. Freddie lives in Michigan and Kenny Jr. lives in Ohio. Kenny Sr. is dead. Had a heart attack in Cleveland.”

After a brief marriage to Raymond Willis, a railroad engineer in Ashland, Mona married James Hager.

Pat said, “We met him once. I think they lived in Ohio.”

Mona had a daughter by Mr. Hager named Mona Lisa.

Pat seemed to think the most of Lawrence’s brother, Jack.

“Jack was a very devoted husband and father and had a beautiful home,” she said. “He worked very hard. Larry and Jack were very, very close. Jack was five years older than Lawrence.”

Jack’s wife Patsy had done a lot of family research “but found nothing beyond Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza.”

I asked if Patsy had any pictures of Ed and Pat said, “No more than what we have, because when Rounder Records came to Larry and we was getting pictures for them we went up to Pat’s and Larry got records from them. Jack had four or five records left and their son Scott brought those to Washington and whatever pictures they had.”

Pat promised to ask Patsy if she had anything.

Later that night, Lawrence told me more about his mother. He said Ella was a very small person, only about five feet tall. As a young woman, she attended the Kentucky School for the Blind at Louisville and earned a piano teaching certificate at the Morehead Normal School (now Morehead University).

“Mom was very refined,” Pat said. “No matter where she went, you could always tell she was an educated lady. Mom had very good manners. She was very good at speaking. And when you saw her and Pop together, and listening to both of them, you could tell there was a vast difference in the way they were raised.”

“Mom would read Dickens to us,” Lawrence said. “Robin Hood, Great Expectations — all them classical stories that came out of England and places at that time.”

When young, Ella was proficient at playing the piano and organ. After marrying Ed, she learned to play the mandolin and banjo-mandolin so that she could play “his type of music.”

“She used to sing more of the old English-type music,” Lawrence said. “Little nonsense stuff. We’d ask for it a lot of times ’cause we didn’t have anything else but the radio. I remember her singing one that had to do with a sea captain and it went something like this:

There was a noble boatsman.

Noble he did well.

He had a lovin’ wife

But she loved the tailor well.

And then it went on to state that the sea captain had to take his boat and go on a trip and he left his house and kissed his wife and started out. And the local tailor came in. And it just so happened the captain had forgot his sea chest so he came back and when he knocked on the door the wife was trying to find a place for him to hide. Guess where he hid? In the sea chest. And what happened to the tailor, he got chucked into the sea sometime or another on that cruise.”