Tag Archives: Ed Haley

In Search of Ed Haley 204

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 202

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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

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

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

The whole thing took place around the dining room table.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mona said Ed was not a short bow fiddler.

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

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

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

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

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

Did he sing or whistle while he walked?

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

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

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

I wondered if Ed drank on general principles.

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

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

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

Ella was also the disciplinarian.

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 201

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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When I got back to Nashville, I had this boxed package in the mail from Mark Wilson, the folklorist who co-produced Parkersburg Landing. Inside the box was a pile of wire recordings, looking very much like a gossamer bird’s nest, which Mark said were Lynn Davis’ recordings of Ed Haley from the forties. I had no idea why Mark had these wires, or really why he had sent them to me. Some years before, I had called him about Ed and received a cool reception, sort of like, “Why don’t you leave all of this to the real folklorists?”

I took the wire recordings to Lee Hazen, a studio engineer and friend whose life-long hobby was wire recordings, and he told me right away that they were way beyond hope. “Even if you took pieces of them and run them through and taped them and then assembled the tape?” I asked.

Nope.

He said it would require someone with enough patience to spend the rest of their life untangling them. I decided to keep them safe though and maybe someday, who knows? But wouldn’t it be awful to get them all together and discover that they were not even of Ed?

Later that spring, Bruce Nemerov notified me that he’d completed his work on Ed Haley’s recordings. I got a hold of the new copies, which included an audio log. There were several records that Bruce didn’t copy.

In Search of Ed Haley 198

16 Saturday Nov 2013

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After visiting with Ida, Billy directed us to Maude Duty, who lived on Big Ugly Creek. Born in 1905, Maude was a daughter of John E. Fry, a longtime justice-of-the-peace in the district, and a niece to Tucker Fry, one-time occupant of the “murder house.” At the time of our visit, Maude was bed-fast, physically feeble, and near death. She hadn’t seen Billy for a few years but soon remembered him and began to whisper answers to his questions concerning the murder house and her husband’s family, the Dutys. She agreed with Billy that the murder of Milt and Green had taken place at her Uncle Tucker’s house at the mouth of Green Shoal. She didn’t know anything about Milt living with Bill Duty but remembered that Ed Haley visited him fairly often on Broad Branch. She said she used to dance to his fiddling when he came to her father’s home.

It was a small but crucial bit of information indicating a strong connection between Ed, Milt, and the Duty family that went beyond the 1870 census.

In Search of Ed Haley 195

11 Monday Nov 2013

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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.

In Search of Ed Haley 191

02 Saturday Nov 2013

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After talking with Lola, we walked down the street with Billy Adkins and spent a few hours filtering through genealogy books at his kitchen table. Billy, I discovered, had two large bookcases filled with categorized three-ring binders dedicated to Harts families. One of the first things we dug out were notes pertaining to Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley. Years earlier, Lawrence Haley had told me that someone shot her in the doorway of what I later learned to be Al Brumfield’s house. In his notes, Billy recorded her as re-marrying James Benton Mullins, a son of Peter and Jane Mullins, which we ruled out immediately: James B. was her uncle. The Emma who had actually had married this fellow was born in 1876 (about eight years after Emma Haley) and was listed in other sources with the maiden name of Johnson.

“I don’t know where I found that out but somebody told me that that woman right there was Milt Haley’s widow,” Billy said. “But that date’s totally wrong, see.”

Whether or not Ed’s mother had ever remarried anyone, based on census information, Brandon was convinced that she had died in the 1890s. In the 1900 Logan County Census, her mother Chloe Mullins listed seven of her nine children as being alive. The seven accounted for were Joseph Adams, John Adams, Ticky George Adams, Peter Mullins, and Weddie Mullins. The two who were not listed in the 1900 census were Dicy (Adams) Thomas, whose husband was listed as a widower in the census, and Ed’s mother.

We found out from Billy’s notes that Emma Haley descended from a notorious counterfeiter named Solomon Mullins.

“Money Makin’ Sol,” as he was called, was born to John and Jane Mullins on the Broad River in North Carolina in 1782. Around 1806, he married Sarah Cathey; he settled in Kentucky by 1810.

“Solomon was always ready for action,” according to photocopied papers at Billy’s house. “He served in the War of 1812 in Cpt. David Gooding’s Company of Kentucky Volunteer Militia. After the war, Solomon, evidently ready for more action, began counterfeiting coins. Family tradition has it that Solomon found one of John Swift’s ‘Lost Silver Mines’ in the hills of eastern Kentucky and ‘South of the Mountain’ in Southwestern Virginia. Thus he became known as ‘Money Making Sol’, and I might add always the ‘genius’, stayed one step ahead of his trouble. In 1837 Solomon decided to join his father and his two brothers in Russell County. He bought a farm and built a shop just a little ways from his house where he began making money again. He melted the silver down and didn’t seem to care who saw him.”

“I was born August 29, 1840, at my father’s home below Clintwood,” according to a 1926 interview with one Nancy Mullins. “The Mullins mixed with the Indians. I have heard it said that Grandpa John Mullins was about one-fourth Indian. Grandpa John had at least two brothers. One was named Sol and he owned a lot of slaves. He was a moneymaking man. He lived on the other side of the branch in a bottom near my father’s home. He had a crowd of slave wenches. He made money on Holly Creek back of Press Harris’ home. He had his work place under a cliff. Pa and Uncle John used to help him work at this business. They would ‘strike’ for Sol. While they lived there, his slave women would take guns and go hunting. They would kill deer and pack them in on their backs. The government got after Sol and he went to West Virginia where he died.”

“Solomon Mullins moved to the waters of Holly Creek, about two miles northeast of Clintwood, [Virginia,] where he lived for several years,” according to Sutherland’s The Mullins Family in Dickenson County (1967). “He owned several slaves, mostly women, who worked in the fields and hunted in the woods. He made counterfeit money for several years under a cliff near Holly Creek. The cliff is still pointed out by neighbors as ‘Sol’s Cliff.’ He was caught at work once by a detective and when he saw he was caught, he ordered the detective to help him work, saying: ‘Grab that hammer and strike this.’ He hoped this would make the detective afraid to tell on him, but it didn’t do any good. He managed to get pure silver and mixed other metal with it to make the counterfeit money. He would pay $2 of his counterfeit money for $1 of the government money. At last, he took a scare and left this country.”

In 1837, Sol and his son Peter were involved in making counterfeit coins in Russell County, Virginia. As a result, according to Boone County, West Virginia, History (1990), they moved to Marion County, Tennessee, where they renewed their counterfeiting activity. In the winter of 1841-42, after pressure from government authorities in Tennessee, Sol and Peter moved with their families and slaves to the North Fork of Big Creek in Logan (now Boone) County, (West) Virginia.

“They rode mules and walked all the way,” according to Boone County. “He died in 1858 and Sarah died about 1872.”

As Brandon flipped through the Sol Mullins notes, I could see his brain working, making connections. Suddenly, he said, “Sol was a great-grandfather to both Emma Haley and Hollena Brumfield…making them third cousins.”

Oh my.

In Search of Ed Haley 188

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

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Brandon asked Mae what else she’d heard from the family about Al’s trouble with Milt and Green.

“All I’ve ever heard them talk about is going and getting them fellers that shot him and her, over in Kentucky,” she said. “They was just a posse went — I don’t know who they were — they rode horses and went to Kentucky and hunted these men. They caught them and they brought them back I guess and put them on their horses. I think that’s the way Granny told it to me. The river was up, and they tied them to horses and had somebody on the other side to catch them when they come across. Run them horses across that river with them to the other side. That’s how they got them and brought them up here to Fry.”

Now how did they get possession of them?

“Wasn’t some of the law men with them?” Mae asked. “I think now they was some law had them, and they claimed they took them away from the law. They never did discuss it too much to me. I’ve just heard outsiders talk about it.”

Mae said the Brumfields and Dingesses made life hard on Ben Adams after hearing that he’d been the one who hired Haley and McCoy. One night, they set his house on fire and tried to flush him out into the yard so they could shoot him. His wife, hoping they wouldn’t hurt her, ran outside repeatedly and extinguished the blaze. She begged the Brumfields and Dingesses to leave them alone for her sake and that of her children, and promised to take the family away the next morning if they were spared. The attackers were apparently satisfied because they left Ben Adams alone afterwards.

I asked Mae if she knew French Bryant and she said, “Yeah, I knew French Bryant. He was one of the gang, they said, I don’t know. I wasn’t acquainted with him — seen him pass here.”

Brandon asked Mae what it was like at Hollena’s house in her time there.

“Well, the family just practically came in and out all the time,” she said. “Tom’s mother lived here in a little old three-room house, and she stayed down there. Ward was a manager — that was her husband — Tom’s daddy. He managed her till he got killed. They all just practically lived at home. Hendricks lived up in the bottom over in Harts. At daylight, him and his family come down here — every day, they never missed a day. The family helped cook. Just always a big crowd there.”

Brandon asked if Hollena ever did any cooking.

“Oh, no,” Mae said. “She couldn’t work. She was crippled up too bad. She hired people to stay with her, and then Tom’s mother stayed there and done the work a lot. I never seen her cook none but one Sunday. Everyone had gone somewhere and me and Tom had come over there. And me and her and Wesley — her husband — and Tom was the only ones there. And she said, ‘Me and Mae’s gonna cook dinner. Tom go out there and kill me one of them big fat hens. Gonna make me some homemade dumplings.’ I’d never made no dumplings. That’s just right after we’d got married. I said, ‘Granny, I don’t know how to make dumplings.’ ‘I’ll teach you. I know how.’ Buddy, she did. She made the finest pot of dumplings you ever ate. She’d tell you how to cook. She knew all about it.”

I wondered if Hollena liked to have music in her home.

“I never did see no music,” Mae said. “I don’t know whether she liked it or not. She didn’t even have records probably. Had an old organ. I guess some of her girls mighta played it, you know. They was married and gone when I come into the family.”

Two local fiddlers, Bob and John Martin, sometimes came around and played for Hollena’s boarders. At these gatherings, there was moonshine for everyone (including Hollena, who liked to nip).

Mae heard that Milt Haley’s son — a blind fiddler — once had dinner there.

“His son, Ed Haley, come down there at Granny’s,” she said, catching me totally by surprise. “He played music, and he’d been around here playing music. He was down there around the mouth of the creek somewhere around her home, and she made them bring him in and feed him dinner. She didn’t hold no grudge. I’ve heard them tell it. I think maybe he stayed around in the community here. They used to have — I’ve heard them talk about it — them old dances around on Saturday nights. See all I know I’m telling you is just hearsay, something that somebody told me.”

Brandon asked Mae about Hollena Brumfield’s death. Mae wasn’t sure exactly what killed her.

“Supposed to been old age,” she said. “I don’t know whether she had any other problems or not. She was sick. Not long — one or two weeks.”

Brandon asked, “Did Hollena make any confessions or give any advice on her deathbed?”

Mae said, “I wasn’t a Christian at that time and I never asked her no questions like that. I don’t know whether she ever belonged to any church or not.”

Brandon said, “Somebody told me that right before she died she wanted a preacher named Charlie Curry to see her.”

“Probably did,” Mae said. “I don’t know. She may have.”

Charlie Curry, I remembered, was the preacher who once refused to baptize Ed Haley because he was drunk and wouldn’t give up playing the fiddle.

In Search of Ed Haley 186

25 Friday Oct 2013

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That evening, Brandon and I went to see Lawrence Kirk at his nice single-story home on Fowler Branch in Ferrellsburg, West Virginia. We sat around the kitchen table where Lawrence pulled out a map of the Tug Valley and showed us the route taken by the Brumfield posse after they apprehended Milt and Green in Kentucky. We made plans to re-trace the route the next afternoon.

I said, “Of course, they had to ford back and forth at the low water mark of the river. They were on horseback weren’t they?”

“Yeah, they rode horses back through there,” Lawrence answered.

I asked, “Do you reckon they had Green and Milt on the same horse or on different horses?”

“I figure they had a horse for all of them,” he said.

Reckon they had their hands tied?

“I imagine they did.”

Brandon asked if Lawrence’s grandfather Bill Brumfield had been in the Haley-McCoy mob. He was a younger brother to Al and a teenager at the time of the killings.

“Never did know,” he said. “I doubt that he was. I believe I’d a heard something about it. See, he was pretty young at the time.”

Bob Adkins had remembered Bill as a “mean old devil,” and most people around Harts said he was the roughest of Paris Brumfield’s sons.

“The old man, as bad as he was to fool with that liquor, he tried to keep order, but he’d get drunk hisself and he’d get out of hand, see,” Lawrence said. “Well, his son — my uncle — my mother’s brother — shot him and killed him. They said they was just on a big binge there at my grandfather’s.”

At midnight, we were still huddled around Lawrence’s kitchen table talking and looking over maps when Brandon’s mother showed up wearing flannel pajamas with a letter from Mildred Cook of Branchland, Lincoln County. According to the letter, Mildred was the daughter of Isaiah Mullins and a cousin to Ed Haley.

“I remember when Mr. Haley came up Little Hart and played the fiddle for me, my two brothers, sister and My Dad,” the letter partially read. “He had a little boy with him about 8 years old. Mr. Haley came to our house 1931. I was 11 years old. He was just visiting when he come to our house. He was there approx. 2 hours. The Best I can remember Ed Haley played ‘Wildwood Flower’ and ‘Turkey in the Straw.’ He went on up little Harts Creek after he stayed and talked a while.”

In Search of Ed Haley 176

27 Friday Sep 2013

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In a separate interview, one Mr. Miller told Fred B. Lambert, “Leander Fry used to come down from Lincoln on timber to play the fiddle. He was a great fiddler. Jack McComas was an old fiddler, as was also his brother. Mose Thornburg said that a man who wouldn’t fight to the music made by the musicians of the musters had no fight in him. Wm. Collins was a fifer. John Reece was a tenor drummer, Clarke Thurston a base drummer. On muster days, whiskey, ginger ales, cider, &c were plentiful. Hogs were fattened on the way East. That wore the valley out. Dishes were plain. Cups instead of glass. They were cheaper. No washboards. Lye soap. Used a board to beat clothes with. Later, washboards were made of soft wood and sold for 5 cents each. Old fiddlers: George Stephens and Wiley, — Joplin, Guyandotte (?). In later days Morris Wentz and Ben France.”

Amaziah Ross told Lambert about some of the other fiddlers.

“Old Charley Robison came from Alabama. Brought ‘Birdie.’ He was a colored man and a good fiddler. Bob Glenn lived up Ohio River about Mason Co., played at Guyandotte when I was a boy. A first class fiddler. His bro. Dave Glenn also was a good one. Jimmie Rodgers lived at Guyandotte. He was a bro. to Bascom Rogers who kept saloon at Guyandotte — The Logan Saloon when I was a boy.”

Ross gave Lambert the names of many old fiddle tunes, which I of course noted being an avid fan and collector of such things:

Shelvin’ Rock                                      played by Ben France

Natchez Under the Hill

Seven Mile Winder

Money Muss

Devil’s Dream

Mississippi Sawyer

Sixteen Days in Georgia

Little Sallie Waters

Marching Through Georgia

Whitefield, Georgia

Annie Adkins — By herself a fiddler when my father was a boy.

Ocean Wave

Over the Way

Grasshopper

Cabin Creek

Fisher’s Hornpipe

Sailor’s Hornpipe

Ladies’ Hornpipe

Gerang Hornpipe

Forked Deer

Third Day of July

Butterfly

Birdie

Lop Eared Mule

Billy in the Lowground

Wild Horse

Old Bill Keenan

Round Town Girls

SourwoodMountain

Old Joe Clark

Greasy String

Cross Keys

Bet My Money on Bobtail Horse

Blue Ridge Mountain Home

Someone told Lambert about the dances held after corn-shuckings.

“After a few weeks, it was ready to shuck. It was an opportunity for young and old to gather and spend a day at work in the name of play. Of course, the women and girls prepared the noon meal and sometimes even the supper. When night came on, the labors of the day were followed by a dance, which of all pioneer amusements was king. Shooting matches with rifles, wrestling matches, foot races, fist fights between neighborhood bullies, or to settle old scores. It was not uncommon for contestants to engage in ‘gouging’, as a natural sequence of a first fight. Weapons were banned, but many a man lost an eye by having it gouged out.”

Another person said, “Dances were very common at weddings, and on many other occasions.” Some of the tunes played were:

The Devil’s Dream

Old Zip Cook

Billie in the Low Ground

Virginia Reel

“I had a Dog And His Name was Rover,

When he Had Fleas, He had ‘Em All Over”

Irish Washerwoman

Mississippi Sawyer

Myron Drumond gave these tunes to Lambert: “Sugar in the Gourd”, “Chicken Reel”, “Fisher’s Hornpipe”, “Cincinnati Hornpipe” (the latter two tunes for “Jig dancing”) and “Irish Washerwoman”.

These tunes and fiddlers came from “a Barboursville man:”

Tunes

 Turkey In the Straw

Sourwood Mountain

“Hage ’em Along.”

The Lost Indian

Pharoah’s Dream

Hell up the Coal Hollow

The Devil’s Dream

Shady Grove

Arkansas Traveler

Little Bunch o’ Blues

New River Train

I Love Some Body

Hard Up

Fiddlers

Morris Wentz

Ben France

Percival Drown

Bob Claypool—Lincoln Co.

Staunton Ross—near Salt Rock

Burgess (“Coon”) Stewart — Lincoln Co.  Buffalo Cr.  Extra Good

Frank Jefferson — Nine Mile

Anse Blake — Nine Mile

A lot of Lambert’s research, particularly in regard to old-time music trailed off around the time of the War Between the States. He only mentioned Ed Haley twice — once in relation to Milt Haley and once in a list with Ben France, Blind Lish Adkins, Hezekiah Adkins of Wayne County, “Fiddler Cain” Adkins (a son of Jake Adkins), Gilbert Smith and Isom Johnson. His last letter on fiddling was from an uninterested Lucian W. Osbourne of East Lynn, Wayne County, who wrote in March of 1951: “Complying with your request, I send the names of a few old fiddlers, as follows: Champ Adkins, Kish Adkins, Ben Frances, George Crockett. All dead. For information about others write Mrs. Spicy Fry, Stiltner, and Harkins Fry, Kenova. Here are some of the old tunes: ‘Sourwood Mountain,’ ‘The Lone Prairie,’ ‘Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,’ ‘Nelly Gray,’ &c. I know but little about the fiddling, as I am a Sunday School man, and interested in better things. I think it is better to say after one when he is dead that he is a Christian than to say he was a fiddler or baseball fan.”

In Search of Ed Haley 171

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

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

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

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

The next morning, Pat first met Ed.

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

Pat said she met Mona later that day.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 170

16 Monday Sep 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 169

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

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Not long after talking with Patsy, while on a trip through Kentucky, I visited J.P. Fraley. I had Ed’s fiddle with me, which excited J.P. greatly. He fiddled Haley’s version of “Granny Will Your Dog Bite?” as best as he could remember it and said Ed used to sing:

Granny, will your dog bite, dog bite, dog bite?

Granny will your dog bite?  “No, child, no.”

Granny will your dog bite, dog bite, dog bite?

“Johnny cut his biter off a long time ago.”

He said Ed also used to play “Hunky Dory”.

Between tunes, J.P. talked about how Haley was the top fiddler in his section of Kentucky. “Daddy and Alva Greene and Doctor Sparks and Frank Clay, Drew Crockett — reputable fiddlers, I called them — ever chance they got, they’d go listen to Ed Haley. He was the yardstick of the fiddlers in this whole area.”

J.P. said, “I’ve kept something for years, buddy. I’ve got a fiddle bridge of Ed Haley’s. I don’t know what it’s made out of.”

Apparently, when he borrowed the Haley fiddle from the Holbrooks years ago, he had kept a little memento before returning it.

In the next couple of weeks, I finalized plans for another “Ed Haley trip.” Pat Haley said I could stay at her place in Ashland, while Lawrence Kirk said I was welcome to stay with him in West Virginia. I called Brandon Kirk, the Harts genealogist, and arranged to meet him at the Morrow Library in Huntington. There he said we would have a lot of genealogical material at our fingertips, as well as all the room we needed to sort through our books and old photographs. I was very interested in the Lambert Collection, which he said was full of local historical information.

In Search of Ed Haley 168

08 Sunday Sep 2013

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After getting familiar with the postcards, I called Patsy Haley to see if she could tell me any more about Ella’s young life with Ralph.

“Ralph was about five years old when Mom married Ed Haley,” Patsy said. “Ralph is not by Ed Haley. I figure that Mom and Pop must’ve got married about the end of the teens.”

I asked Patsy if Ed was very close to Allie Trumbo, who often wrote to Ella in her younger days.

“They weren’t really close or anything like that,” she said. “My husband and I moved to Cincinnati and that’s when I got acquainted with Allie and his wife. In fact, we lived right across the street from them. They really didn’t talk too much. Allie used to tell me about their father Mr. Trumbo auctioning off land and selling it for a dollar ’cause he owned quite a bit of land by that college. I think Mom had a falling out with him. Mom used to go and stay with them, like on weekends, when she’d go to Cincinnati to work. Allie had called her ‘Penny Ella’ ’cause when she paid them for staying with them she always paid them with change ’cause that’s what Mom got from selling her newspapers.”

Was Allie a musician?

“No, not that I know of,” Patsy said. “He was a fine pool player.”

Patsy didn’t remember Ralph making the records.

“No, that was just before I come in the family,” she said. “I don’t think he did any more recordings after I came into the family. You know, Mom had divorced when I come in the family and they never got remarried. But he lived in the house because the kids wanted him there. Now I can remember when I first came in the family and Mona and I talked, she was quite afraid of her father when she was a little girl because I guess he must’ve been mean. And he musta been abusive and mean to Mom or she wouldn’t a divorced him. But he was a sweet old guy when I knew him. I never ever saw Pop drunk or drinking. But I do remember one time — it was at the holidays — and Noah took his father and went up to Ferguson’s I believe for Pop to play music for them. Well, he kept them out all night ’cause I guess he got pretty loaded. But I never ever saw Pop drink. Now Pat said she had, but I never had.”

I updated Patsy on some of the things I’d found out about Ed’s past on Harts Creek and asked if she knew anything about his mother.

“He really didn’t talk about her too much,” she said. “Only thing that I understood — and he didn’t tell me this — Mom told me — that she was killed when the father was killed. There was never no bad feelings about his parents, either one.”

Patsy said she learned more about Ed’s parents on a trip to Harts in 1947.

“We went up to Harts Creek because Pop had gone up there and we went to get him back,” she said. “That was the first time I met Aunt Liza.”

Aunt Liza said Milt came from “the other side of the mountain,” and that he and his wife were buried up behind their old log cabin on Trace Fork.

“I can remember Aunt Liza pointing to where they were buried,” she said. “When she pointed up, she pointed over towards where the log cabin was.”

In Search of Ed Haley 167

07 Saturday Sep 2013

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On April 10, 1916, a postcard referenced Ralph for the first time. “Florence,” of Portsmouth, wrote to Ella, who had settled at 630 Curtis Avenue in Middletown, Ohio.

“Dear Friend,” she wrote. “I got your card. Was glad to hear from you. Kiss Ralph a dozen kisses for me. Ruth gave me Ralph’s picture and is awful sweet. Tell Mrs. Trumbo I said Hello. How do you like Middletown? Let me know how you and Ralph are.”

Ella was still in Middletown in December of 1916.

By November of 1917, Ella had settled at 913 10th Street in Portsmouth, Ohio. Today, this address (just around the corner from her former Portsmouth location) is an empty lot situated in a bad section of town. Ella’s brother Luther lived nearby on Gay Street, while brother Allie was away in the Army.

“Hello Sister,” Allie wrote. “I am now on my way to the training camp. Will arrive there Some time tomorrow. It is at San Antonio Texas Camp Travis.”

On January 10, 1918, “Miss Ella Trumbo” was living in Ashland, Kentucky. She remained unmarried, based on the usage of her maiden name in the postcard.

The next postcard is dated in the early 1930s. By this time, she had married Ed Haley.

On April 17, 1934, Ralph sent Ella a postcard from Fort Knox, Kentucky. It was addressed to “Mrs. J.E. Haley” at 1030 45th Street in Ashland.

“Having a fine time, leaving for Cal. Thursday,” Ralph wrote. “Wish you could go. Tell Allie, Jane, and the children hello.”

In another card from Ralph and postmarked from Fort Knox (April 19, 1934), he wrote: “Dear Mother. Rec. your letter yesterday. Glad to hear from U. I am leaving today for San Diego Cal. down on the mexican border. Am saving stamped envelope to write to U while on the train. do not try to answer till I send address. Your affecionate Son, Ralph.”

In May of 1934, there was a card from a sister in Cincinnati, Ohio (probably Sissy), which read, “Will be at your house a Bout noon Saturday. Will stay all night at Margaret’s. we will Leve circa in the morning.”

In April 1941, Clyde sent several postcards to the family at 337 37th Street from Washington, D.C. His message for “Monnie & Lawrence Haley” was: “Hello Kids! How is school now-a-days? Fine, I hope. Wish I could see you. I’ll be seeing you. Write soon.” To Jack: “How are you? Fine, I hope. I know I am. Wish you were here. It’s a great place.” To “Mrs. J.E. Haley”: “Am getting along Fine. Hope you’re O.K. Am Sight seeing in the mountains along Skyline Drive. Your affectionate Son.”

In May, Jack received this odd note from Louisville, Kentucky: “I thought may be I would write you a few lines to let you know I got in Louisville okay. Well Jack how are you getting along. Fine I hope. Jack how is the girls out in South Ashland getting along? Well you be a good boy honey and daddy will bring you a candy sucker. Well Jack I will have to close for now. It’s getting late. Jack it is Tuesday night. I am in Bed writing this card. Love James Brown.”

Clyde sent another card home from Cincinnati, Ohio, postmarked February 16, 1943: “Dear Mom: We are all well and hope you are the same. As soon as you send me my Birth Certificate I go to work. Get it tomorrow and send it. SALARY $33.50 a week. Go down town and get it and send it soon as possible.”

There was one final card dated April of 1943 from “Pvt. Ralph A. Payne” at Camp Crowder, Missouri. The Haley family was still at 337 37th Street.

In Search of Ed Haley 163

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

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Once I returned to Nashville, I called Lawrence Haley, who was in the mood to reminisce.

“Me and Pop hitch-hiked to Cincinnati out of Portsmouth a time or two,” he said. “We took old 52. And we’d had about three rides to get there.”

I asked him if Ed took his fiddle on those trips and he said, “Yeah, if he thought he was gonna be in a little bit other than country settings, he would put it in the case. But most of the time, he’d just carry it in his hand, tucked under his arm, maybe, with the bow in his hand.”

I wondered if Ed packed any extra bags on the road and Lawrence said, “Mostly just the clothes on his back, unless he was going on an extended trip — then he’d pack him a suitcase. He’d, of course, fill it up about a third with his homemade tobacco. His own cure — apple or peach or something. He’d take him some of that with him and off he’d go.”

Lawrence Haley passed away on February 3, 1995, the 44th anniversary of his father’s death.

In Search of Ed Haley 162

30 Friday Aug 2013

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By the mid-1990s, after several years of research, word had begun to leak out about my interest in Ed Haley. Around the first of 1995, Bluegrass Unlimited ran a story that prompted Bob Hutchison, a musician from Alledonia, Ohio, to write me.

“I played with an old fella down in Athens county (Ward Jarvis) who had played a lot and learned a lot from Ed Haley,” he wrote. “He played banjo with Ed and learned a lot of his tunes when he was a young man. He said Ed was the best he’d ever seen. Ward was in his 70’s when I got to know him and he was no slouch himself on the fiddle. He said Ed was big on different tunings on the fiddle. I learned the Icy Mountain tune from Ward that he had learned from Ed. Other tunes I remember him crediting Ed with were Camp Chase, Jimmy Johnson, Three forks of Reedy. Banjo Tramp was another of Ed’s. Ward has been dead for several years… Ward was originally from Braxton Co. W.Va.”

Ray Alden offered more information about Jarvis.

“In 1972 I went to Amesville, Ohio to visit instrument craftsman Ron Chacey,” he wrote. “Ron, on a very foggy night, brought me through some hilly back roads up to see Ward Jarvis, who had moved to the area in 1943 from Braxton County, West Virginia. Ward was 78 years old. I remember that special evening in which Ward played many unusual tunes, such as ‘Icy mountain,’ as well as a Kenny Baker Tune he had just learned from a record. It was lucky, since I didn’t have a tape recorder that evening, that Richard Carlin later went to tape Ward Jarvis [in 1976]. Old time musicians Dana Loomis and Grey Larson joined Richard and accompanied Ward at that session. Ward’s source for ‘Banjo Tramp’ was Ed Haley, who had a substantial influence over the Ohio River Valley Musicians in Ward’s younger days.”

Ray Alden’s statement about how Ed influenced a number of “Ohio River Valley Musicians” made me realize that thinking of him as a “Kentucky fiddler” or even a “West Virginia fiddler” was inaccurate. Early on, I’d dismissed the “Kentucky” label used on the Parkersburg Landing album, since he was born and raised in Logan County, West Virginia, and spent a great deal of time in central West Virginia, a hub for great musicians. Also, Lawrence Haley once said that he preferred to think of his father as a West Virginia fiddler because of how he was treated in Ashland. But I had to think, especially after reading Ray Alden’s statement, that it would be best to refer to Haley (in geographical terms) as a middle Ohio River Valley fiddler (or maybe even a Guyandotte-Big Sandy Valley musician) since his sphere of influence wasn’t limited to a single state.

Sometime in the middle of January 1995, I met Ugee Postalwait’s son at one of my shows in Birmingham, Alabama. It was my first encounter with Harold Postalwait, a rather robust man — clean-shaven with a beer gut and decked out in a snap-up shirt, cowboy hat and boots shined to perfection. He showed me Laury Hicks’ fiddle and some old family photographs.

In Search of Ed Haley 161

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

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After hanging up with Pat, I called Ugee Postalwait — Laury Hicks’ daughter in Akron, Ohio — to tell her about getting the picture of Ed from Maxine McClain. Ugee was full of energy. Her memory was obviously working in overdrive.

“I used to know all of them,” she said of the old musicians in her part of the country. “They was all to our house. They’d come from miles around to hear Dad play, especially when Ed was in the country. Maybe they’d stay two or three days at our house. I’d get up of a morning to look see who was in the house asleep and who all I was gonna have to cook breakfast for, when I was a girl growing up. The young men would sleep in the boys’ room and they’d sleep in the floor. Then they’d sleep four crossways in the bed, too. As I get old, I get to thinking about all of them and wonder how in the world my dad ever fed them all. I been a cooking ever since I was nine years old for workhands and people like that. One morning — I never will forget I wasn’t very old, then — got up and got breakfast. We’d had cabbage the day before for supper. A big pot of cabbage. And Ed and Ella was there. I never put cabbage on the table for breakfast. Ed looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, what did you do with that cabbage last night?’ I said, ‘It’s in there.’ ‘Well why didn’t you put it on the table for breakfast?’ I said, ‘Well who eats cabbage for breakfast?’ He said, ‘I do.’ Now I never seen anyone eat such a mess of cabbage for breakfast. Him and Ella did. Ella said, ‘Oh, we always eat the same thing we had for supper.’ I never will forget that. From that time on, whatever was left over from supper, I’d warm it up, you know, and fix it for their breakfast ’cause they would eat it. They liked cabbage or kraut.”

Ugee really laughed telling about that, then started in with another tale.

“One time they was some Baileys there and I believe they was some of them McClain boys, and I was peeling tomatoes for supper — you know, slicing them and putting them on the plate — and I had a plate on one end [of the table] and one on the other end. And Manuel Martin was there too, and Commodore Cole. And I looked in both places and them tomatoes was gone. ‘What in the world? Some of them’s come in and hid my tomatoes.’ I looked out and Ed was standing there sitting on the walk — I never will forget — a laughing, and he said, ‘Wait till she finds out.’ I said, ‘Ed did you get them tomatoes in there?’ He said, ‘We ate every one of them.’ I said, ‘If I could find the plate, I’d break it over your head.’ That Commodore Cole, he said, ‘You wouldn’t dare do that.’ Ed said, ‘Don’t dare her too much, Commodore. I know her.’ And they was a eating them tomatoes as fast as I was a peeling them. Them ornery birds, I never will forget that.”

“The last time I ever seen Ed was at his house,” Ugee said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, can you still make a rhubarb pie?’ I said, ‘Why lord yes, I reckon I can. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, I want a rhubarb pie.’ And I made four and I never seen no such eating as he done that evening, him and Ella, on them rhubarb pies while they was hot — with milk cream over them. I can see them yet. I went down to Ashland, Kentucky. They lived on 45th Street.”

In Search of Ed Haley 159

26 Monday Aug 2013

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

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

Pat seemed pleased that Mona was visiting Lawrence.

“He asks for her a lot,” she said.

I wanted to know more about Lawrence’s condition.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 158

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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I called Lawrence and Pat to tell them about this new discovery. Pat put me on the telephone with Lawrence, who seemed to be doing better. I asked him why he thought none of the Haley kids ever learned the fiddle.

“I think Pop took interest in us as far as he knew how to take interest in us,” he said. “Whatever he could’ve taught us he most certainly would have. But we’d ruther be out running in the woods than sitting at a table trying to learn ‘Forks of Sandy’ or something like that. He would ruther teach it to the ones who could and who showed interest in it, and let it go at that. Pop never did try to get me to learn the fiddle because I was left-handed. I guess he figured that would be too much of a challenge for him even, to try to teach violin to a left-handed violin player.”

I told Lawrence he knew more about the fiddle than a lot of professional musicians and he said, “Well, I guess I learned just about as much of it as he did. I appreciate any good words that can be said about me and the violin. My sister’s here and if you could get her interested, she might be able to tell you as much about it as I can. She took more interest in the music of our mother, I know that. But she could pick up the fiddle and play the fiddle and play the mandolin and the piano and other instruments.”

Lawrence said, “Now if you want to talk to my sister a minute, maybe she can tell you something. If she can’t, I don’t know who else to tell you. She could probably tell you as much about it as any of us.”