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Parkersburg Landing 30

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     It was clear to Lawrence and I that Roxie really knew her stuff. Her memories went back to the Bull Moose era — some twenty years before Lawrence’s — and while they were a little hazy they were clearer than anything else we had heard up to that point. I think Lawrence was satisfied with Roxie’s stories but maybe a little intimidated because she just knew things about his father that went beyond his years. He really wanted to keep everything we heard about his dad in this certain context and someone like Roxie could really just carry it outside of his realm of knowledge.

     “John keeps asking me about my dad,” he said. “I told him I couldn’t tell him too much about my dad, because half of his life was over before I was ever born.”

     That got Roxie going again.

     “All of his fun days was all over. I know he played music right on, but I mean all of his fun — when he married, he laid down part of it.”

     Roxie caught Lawrence and I off-guard when she said Ed tried to get a local preacher to baptize him one time. “He joined the church once down on the hill with Cecil. And Uncle Charley Curry said, ‘Ed, will you lay down your music?’ and Ed said, ‘No, Uncle Charley. That’s the only way I’ve got to live is my music, but I can just play sacred songs, good songs.’ And Uncle Charley said, ‘Now listen, you’re drunk. You go off and get sober and come back to me tonight. I’ll take you in but I can’t take you in like you are.’ Sure did. Ed shook hands with him but I don’t guess he ever went back.”

     Lawrence said, “Well, that’s news to me. I’m not sure he was ever baptized. The only baptism he got was Milt Haley’s baptism, and that didn’t amount to much.”

     That got us to talking about Ed’s father again. I really wanted to know why he was killed, but Roxie had no idea.

     “I don’t know why they killed him, son. They was just all into it. Now, Aunt Liza coulda told you all about it.”

     She looked at Lawrence and said, “You’re like me. You waited too long to come to talk to any of his people to find out anything about it. All the old people’s dead, you see, and gone. My mother, she was a Hager, and her mother went to the Western States and died there and was buried on the banks of the Wabash River. Uncle John told us — he was with her. He said she just lived there six months till she died. I know who my grandmother was — she was a Baisden — but I don’t know a thing on earth about my grandmother, and I don’t know nothing about Joe — that’s my grandpa — nothing about who he was, who his brothers was. Daddy died in ’40 and my mother died in ’42. I’m the only one that’s living. I can’t go ask nobody nothing. People never ask nobody nothing when they’re young.”

     Lawrence agreed, “That’s right. That’s exactly why I didn’t find anything out. You’re just young, happy to be alive.”

     Roxie’s mind was still on her father, Ticky George Adams.

     “My dad could play the accordion,” she said. “He could play ‘The Golden Slipper’ and he could play ‘John Morgan’. He could play ‘John Henry’. He could play just anything he wanted to play and how he learned it I just don’t know. And ‘Old Joe Clark’, that’s another one he could play. ‘Nelly Gray’, that’s another one he played. He could make them ring.”

     I asked Roxie if Ticky George ever played with Ed.

     “No, he never played with Ed. He wouldn’t let Ed hear him play, I guess. He could really play and sing. He had a song he sung. ‘Nothing Between My Soul and Heaven’ is the name of the song. They was four verses to that and buddy he could sing every word of that, and how he learnt that I don’t know. He couldn’t read. He didn’t know his letters.”

     Roxie told us about her uncle Peter, saying, “Uncle Peter, you know, was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards. When he bought him a pair of shoes, he had to cut the toe off here and sew it up, and his foot turned back in here.”

     I said to her, “And that’s the man that raised up Ed Haley?” and she said, “Yeah, he helped raise him. He stayed with Uncle Peter’s fellers and Grandma and Grandpa Jackson. See, she was married twice. When John Adams was killed, she married Andrew Jackson Mullins, and he kept Ed a long time, him and her. And he stayed with us. He just stayed with first one and then another. Wherever he wanted to go, he went. He was just his own boss.”

     Okay, so the Jackson Mullins I’d heard about from Bum was Ed’s grandfather and the John Adams involved in Weddie Mullins’ death must have been a Jr.

     I asked Roxie if she knew how old Ed was when he stayed with his grandparents and she said, “Well, when he was with Grandpa and Grandma Jackson, he was a young man. I guess he was twenty years old, maybe more. Grandpa and Grandma kept him a long time, and then he stayed with Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza. And he stayed with us some every now and then. He come and stayed with us two or three days at a time — with John and the boys. He musta left here about the age of thirty and went to Ashland, Kentucky. West Greenup, Kentucky, is where I wrote to them. I wrote to Ralph, Ralph wrote to me. Man he was smart, I’ll tell you that. Take anything you wanted to ask him about the books.”

     Roxie bragged on how smart Ella was, saying she tried to get her to move to Kentucky with the Haleys.

     “She graduated from college, she told us. She said The Pied Piper of Hamlin – they’s eight pages of it, on both sides. She’d beg me and Annie to go home with her and said she would learn us to play the piano. Man she could make that harmonica… Listen, she could put it in her mouth and she had things fastened under here. She didn’t have to have her hands on it. Man she’d just run that mouth over that the best you ever heard in your life. She played that mandolin right along with her fingers and then had that harp in her mouth.”

     Right before Lawrence and I left Roxie’s, she asked my name again and said she’d be watching for me on Hee Haw. She said Roy Clark used to come through “back when he was a chunk of a boy,” but Violet said she was confused — that it had been Roy Acuff.

     “That was back when he traveled through here some. He had some people or something that lived up on Buck Fork.”

     To say that Lawrence and I were blown away by our experience with Roxie would be a huge understatement. Lawrence had never heard anything about his grandfather being murdered. Maybe Ed had wanted to distance his kids from that part of his painful past on Harts Creek.

In Search of Ed Haley 29

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     Roxie wasn’t sure how Ed learned to play the fiddle.

     “It was just gifted to him, I guess. Lord man, he could make that fiddle talk. He had one song he sung, I’d give anything in the world to know it. If I could remember now… Man, it was really pretty. People’d ask him every now and then to play it but man listen, he got mad if you asked him to play again something when he got tired. He’d get tired. He’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ He’d jump up man and maybe get a knife man and go to quarreling with a knife. Yes, sir. He told me, he’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ And your mommy man she stayed with us some.”

     I asked Roxie if she remembered Haley playing at any dances on Harts Creek and she said, “Well, I don’t know. We never had many dances around here nowhere. He always played away from here. He went several places — big dances, you know — dance halls and played. We had a few little dances here, but he never was at them.”

     Roxie remembered Ed playing “Blackberry Blossom”.

     “Yeah, Lord he could play that, and he could play anything on earth you named to him. Anything. He played the ‘Brownlow’s Dream’. I could pick it on a banjo when I was young, but I ain’t picked none in a long time, honey.”

     I offered Roxie my banjo to see if she could play out any of “Brownlow’s Dream” (I’d never heard of it), but she said, “I belong to the church now and I don’t fool with no banjo or nothing like that.”

     I asked if she remembered Ed playing the banjo and she said, “I never did see Ed play no banjo. Uncle John Hager’s the one played the banjo. He run around with Ed a long time. I’ve got his picture a sitting in there. He was funnier than a monkey.”

     I asked Roxie more about Haley’s tunes.

     “Ed would play ‘Old Joe Clark’, you know, and pluck up on them strings. He had one he played he called ‘Devil in the Yearlings’. I don’t know what it was, but boy he could pluck up on them strings and Ralph would jump up. That little boy’d hop up and dance. Man he beat anything I ever seen in my life a dancing. Ralph was about eight years old or ten when they was at our house — Ed and his wife. First time we ever seen her. And they stayed two or three nights with us then they went to Uncle Peter’s and stayed all night. And that woman really had them trained. She had a whistle she could blow. Didn’t matter where they was at buddy, they’d come up in line.”

     I asked if Ed played “Ragtime Annie” and Roxie said, “‘Ragtime Annie’ — I heard Bernie Adams talk about that, but I don’t know whether Ed played that or not. Can you play ‘Red Wing’? That’s one of his tunes. ‘Blue-Dressed Girl’. He had something another about ‘Blue-Eyed Beauty’. Aw, he played all kinds of tunes. He’d tell us the names.”

     Talking about Ed’s tunes caused Roxie to say, “‘Brownlow’s Dream’ — it was the last tune his daddy ever played on the fiddle. Ed told us that. Right down there in Hugh Dingess’ house they was kept upstairs till they took him to kill him. French Bryant was the man that was in it — he’s dead. They said they was thirty of them, man, a whole mob of them that killed him. They was afraid of him, you see, because he had a pretty bad name.”

     I asked Roxie how Ed’s father was killed and she said, “Beat them to death, I reckon, ’cause they said the chickens was running through the yard and a pecking their brains laying in the yard. That’s what people told us children when we was little.”

     Listening to Roxie tell all these tales found me wondering about her life. I asked if she’d lived “here” — meaning Harts Creek — all of her life and she said, “No, Lord, no. We’ve lived different places. We lived across the creek there over yonder on that bank. George Baisden’s home, I bought there and lived there awhile. Moved out here on a point and the State came in and told me they’d have to condemn me if I didn’t sell to them and move out. Well, I just sold it to them and bought this then. When Floyd left me — he left me in 1940 — I been a widow woman since that. I’ll soon be 86. I didn’t have no divorce from him, and I got his railroad retirement. That’s all we had to live on. He’s been dead now — he died in ’86 — and his woman he left here with’s been dead fifteen year or sixteen, about eighteen. She didn’t last very long. I told them the Lord don’t let things prosper like people thinks they will. The Lord has blessed me a long time to live a man’s life and a woman’s life, too. I’ve raised three children myself and helped Violet raise her three.”

     At that point, I heard Violet singing to Lawrence off in the corner. She said it was one of Ed’s tunes, “The Drunkard’s Hell”, then sang it again for me, this time with Roxie:

     I started out one stormy night

     To see my poor neglected wife.

     I found her weeping by her bed

     Because her only babe was dead. 

     I started out one stormy night.

     I thought I saw an awful sight.

     The lightning flashed, the thunder rolled

     Upon the poor old drunkard’s soul.

     Roxie stopped and said, “We can’t remember it. You might find that in libraries in books or something another but honey we don’t know it. It’s been fifty or sixty years since he sung that to us.”

Parkersburg Landing 27

11 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     From Enslow’s, Lawrence and I drove out of Trace Fork and up Harts Creek to find the home of Turley’s aunt, Roxie Mullins. We stopped to see Louie Mullins, a grandson to Uncle Peter, who said Roxie lived just up the creek and to the right, kinda down under the road. We thanked him for directions and drove on until we turned off onto a rough driveway with jutting rocks and an intimidating grade leading down to a small wooden dwelling with a chicken house built almost against it. We had found Roxie’s.

     At the front door, Roxie and her daughter Violet greeted us and told us to come on inside. As we made our way, Lawrence motioned toward me and told Roxie, “This man would like to talk to you for a few minutes about my dad if you can tell him anything. He wants to know from me and I tell him that I don’t know anything about Ed Haley.”

     Violet said, “Sit down over there on the couch Mommy and he can sit down with you and talk to you and that way you can hear him.”

     I planted myself beside of Roxie — a tiny wisp of a woman weighing no more than ninety-five pounds who was dressed in an old-timey brown dress with a white butterfly collar.

     I told her, “I just want to know everything I can find out about Ed Haley,” and, thinking that I was Lawrence, she began to talk to me in a high-pitched, thick mountain brogue.

     “Well honey, I don’t know too much about him. I just know he was Ed Haley. And Emmy Mullins, she was my daddy’s half-sister. And Milt Haley married Emmy Mullins and she and him was Ed’s father.”

     I asked Roxie if Emmy had any children aside from Ed and she said, “I don’t know as she had any other child. I reckon that’s the only one they had. If they ever had any more I never heard nothing about them. Milt Haley was his daddy. They was Emmy and Weddie and Peter was my daddy’s half-brothers and sisters. And Emmy was Ed’s mother.”

     Roxie told a slightly different version of the story about Haley’s blindness than what I had heard from Lawrence.

     “When he was a little boy, they said it took some kind of a fever. I don’t know whether it was the typhoid fever, brain fever or what. And said its daddy took it to the creek and busted the ice and put it under the ice and that made him go blind. That’s how come him to be blind. They wasn’t no doctors then. We never heard tell of a doctor till I was grown. And he had such a fever, he thought that’d kill his fever, you see, and it went to its head, you see, and put his eyes out.”

     Lawrence didn’t hesitate.

     “I get different flavors why Milton Haley did this to Ed,” he said. “I get the flavor that he did it because he was trying to stop a whiny kid from crying continually. You think he did it because he was trying to break his fever?”

     Violet said, “That’s what we always heard. My grandmother always told he had a fever.”

     Lawrence said, “That’s a better explanation,” seemingly preferring that version of the tale to that of his own.

     Roxie said, “There is men does their children like that. I don’t think he’d a done that. I don’t know.”

     Lawrence said to Roxie, “You know, the only thing I could get from Aunt Liza about my grandfather was that he come from across the mountain. He was a stranger here in this area until he met Emma, my grandmother. Can you tell me anything about that?”

     She said, “I don’t know a thing in the world about him.”

     I asked if he was a musician and she said, “I don’t know about that. Ed was a real musician. I don’t know whether your grandfather was but he was awful bad to drink they said and he kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door they said. People was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill people before they did kill him.”

     I’d never heard that Ed’s father was killed, so I asked Roxie if she knew who killed him.

     “I don’t know that,” she said quickly. “Whether the Brumfields killed him or the Conleys… I know the Conleys killed John Brumfield, Cecil’s daddy. My sister’s husband’s daddy. And then they shot Hollene Brumfield. She was on behind her husband. Shot her through the jaw, and that hole was in her jaw when she died. Some of them killed Milt then I think. Milt Haley, he was took… Now you’re getting me into it just right. Him and McCoy was captured and took in a house ’round here over on Smoke House where Sallie Dingess’ home is. They was took in there and put upstairs and kept till supper. And when they got their supper ready, they brought them down to eat their supper and Milt looked over at McCoy or McCoy looked over at Milt and said, ‘Eat a good supper, Milt.’ Said, ‘This is the last supper you’re gonna ever eat.’ They kept them there at that house and they give them their supper and they played their last tune on their fiddle, they said, and they took them to Chapmansville and killed them. And Grandma’s the one told me this.”

     I was blown away. So was it Ed’s father or this McCoy who played the fiddle before being killed?

     “Milt, I guess. I never did see him. I was born before he was killed, but I was little. And they said when they took them in the house to kill them, they told everybody to go out. And they was a little girl or a little boy one — I forget which Grandma said — hid in behind the stove and they killed them men and throwed them out in the yard and that little young’n run out right over the top of them and run and hid and got away.”

     We told Roxie what little we had heard about Emma’s murder at the mouth of Harts Creek and how we had no idea about Milt’s murder. She had never heard of Emma’s murder but seemed sure that Haley and McCoy were killed together.

     “They said Grandma went to see them put away,” she said. “They was both buried in one casket — their caskets right side by side in one grave, I mean. Grandma went and seen them bury them.”

     While trying to digest Roxie’s story about Milt Haley, I asked if she knew anything about the rest of Ed’s family — starting with his mother, Emma. Roxie said Emma died young — “she died before I’s ever born, honey,” which was 1905. She didn’t know of Ed having any brothers or sisters but said, “Now Uncle John Adams, he had a house full of children. He was Grandma’s child but he was them boys’ half-brother. My daddy knowed a whole lot about Ed. He traveled around a whole lot with Ed. And Uncle John Hager, he traveled with Ed and made music. But now Milt… You see we didn’t know nothing about him. We was all little when Milt was killed.”

What happened to John Fleming? 3

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek

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On February 28, 1912, I.J. Beverly, sheriff of Wise County, Virginia, wrote Jacob D. Smith, assistant prosecuting attorney in Lincoln County, West Virginia, to inform him that John Fleming — a fugitive on the run — was living in a nearby town called Glamorgan and using the alias of George Fleming. The letter read as follows:

Wise, Va., March 7th

           Prosecuting Attorney Lincoln county, Hamlin, W.Va.

           Have John Fleming in custody. He agrees to come without requisition if I will bring him but refuses to go with your officer. I will bring him if you will pay all expenses and Two Fifty per day. Answer.

            I.J. Beverly

            Sheriff Wise County

On March 8, Smith received Sheriff Beverly’s letter. Three days later, he left Hamlin, seat of government for Lincoln County, for Richmond, Virginia as an agent to secure requisition papers from Virginia Governor W.H. Mann. A little later, he hired G.A. Lenz, a C&O special agent in Huntington, West Virginia, to accompany him to Wise County as a guard. By March 16, Smith and Lenz had delivered Fleming to the Lincoln County jail. On March 30, Fleming’s bail was set at $2,000.

Early in May, the following witnesses were called to appear before the Circuit Court in the State v. John Fleming, scheduled for June 4: Caleb D. Headley, Lewis Cass Gartin, Andrew Sias, Paris Brumfield, Tilden Gartin, W.A. Adkins, M.E. Nelson, Joe Gartin, Tilman Adkins, John Gartin, Grover Gartin, E.C. Lucas (Sr.), Jeff Lucas, Alvin Sias, Harrison Neace, Bob Fleming, Bud Workman, Jessie Adkins, Lewis Lucas, Ben Noe, Levi Rakes, Flora Lucas, Thomas Sias, Samp Davis, Lona Neace, Albert Neace, George Fleming, Robert Adkins, T.B. Hatfield, Peter Mullins, Ike Fry, William Adkins, Floyd Mullins, Harlan Mullins, Mary Burns, Lula Burns, Jane Moore, Zack Neace, Bill Neace, Abe Noe, Floyd Workman, Wiley Lucas, Dr. Jenks Adkins and Little Cane Lucas.

Days later, John Fleming escaped from the county jail using tools given to him by his brother, Willard. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Willard and placed in the hands of Boyd S. Hicks. According to records maintained at the Lincoln County Circuit Clerk’s Office: “Whereas Burnie Smith has this the 4 day of June 1912 made complaint upon oath before M.D. Hilbert, Justice of said county that one John Fleming was confined in the Lincoln county Jail, being so confined to answer to a charge of shooting with the attempt to kill Caleb Headley, and while in said Jail as a prisoner awaiting trial on said charge, one Willard Fleming did on or about the 10 day of May 1912 willfully and feloniously give and cause to be given the said John Fleming prisoner as aforesaid certain saws, chisels, and other implements for use of said John Fleming in effecting escape from said Jail, and by means of which said saws and other implements he the said John Fleming did saw the bars in said Jail and make his escape there from.” On June 5, Willard Fleming, Matthew C. Farley, Lewis Maynard and Zac Williamson posted Fleming’s $1000 bond.

In an effort to re-arrest Fleming, the Lincoln County Circuit Court issued capias warrants for him on October 29, 1913, December 21, 1914 and March 29, 1915. Fleming was no where to be found.

With John out of the way, his former wife, Lizzie Fry, felt safe enough to remarry. On November 8, 1915, she married Boss Keith. It’s not clear if she had ever married Charley McCoy, the man whose cuckling of Fleming had prompted the ’09 shootout.

In the years following Fleming’s escape, surprising details surfaced about his role in the shootout at Fourteen. “The Fryes and Headleys were blamed for Grandpa Hariff’s death,” said one local man in a 2003 interview, “but an old Frye woman sent word on her deathbed who killed him. She said it was his first cousin, John Fleming.”

Meanwhile, the court continued to issue capias warrants for Fleming on November 14, 1916, February 16, 1917, April 11, 1919, April 5, 1921, April 19, 1922 and December 29, 1922.

Finally, on March 26, 1923, according to Law Order Book 17 at the Lincoln County Courthouse, prosecuting attorney Jacob D. Smith, “with the assent of the court says that he will not further prosecute the defendant John Flemmings, of the Felony of which he now stands charged in this Court. It is therefore considered by the court that the defendant John Flemmings be acquitted, discharged and go thereof without delay.”

By that time, Fleming was probably dead.

“John Fleming went back to Virginia with someone,” said Willard Frye, a nephew to Lizzie, in a 2003 interview. “He got off his horse at a stream to get a drink of water and when he bent down at the stream this man shot him in the back of the head.”

What happened to John Fleming? 2

01 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Fourteen

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While John Fleming was away serving a term of imprisonment at the West Virginia state penitentiary, his wife Lizzie returned home to live with her father, John Henan Fry, at Fourteen. “Aunt Lizzie ran away from John and came home to Fourteen,” said Willard Frye, nephew to Lizzie, in a 2003 interview. She secured a divorce from Fleming and began an affair with Charley McCoy, a man who newspapers later dubbed a “bitter enemy” to Fleming. Fleming didn’t take the news well. He swore that he would have her back after his release.

On Saturday, March 13, 1909, Fleming was freed from prison. On his way home from Moundsville, he made preparations to recapture Lizzie from McCoy. “When John Fleming returned home from the penitentiary, on his way back, at Huntington, he proceeded to supply himself with the necessary guns and ammunition to start a young war in Harts Creek district,” reported the Lincoln Republican of Hamlin, West Virginia. “It is said he stated to parties on the G.V. train that he would go to John Henan Fry’s home, where his former wife was staying and have her or kill every man on Fourteen.”

“When the intrepid John got back to his native haunts,” reported the Republican, “he got his brother Bob Fleming and together they proceeded to the home of their cousin, Herf Fleming, who was a merchant and a very good citizen and persuaded him to go with them to go to the home of John Henan Fry on their desperate mission.”

Hariff, born illigitimately in August 1878 to Lucinda Fleming, was a first cousin to John and Bob. He had settled in West Virginia around the same time as the other Flemings where, in 1896, he married Delphia Workman. In the summer of 1899, after killing a local bully in self-defense, he had moved with his wife and children to Clintwood, Virginia. Not long before cousin John’s release from prison, however, Hariff had returned to Harts Creek. At the time of John’s visit, he lived at Workman Fork with his family.

“The good wife of Herif’s — Delphia by name, pursued her husband with tears in her eyes to stay at home saying that Bob and John had just been in trouble and was going to get into it again,” reported the Republican. “But as vengeance rankled in the bosom of John for the man who wooed and won his wife in his absence to the pen, he plead with his relatives and companions to pursue their journey.”

Hariff told his worrying wife that he would use the trip downriver as an opportunity to get back a yoke of cattle he sold to a man on Ten Mile Creek.

Before making the trip to Fourteen, Fleming reunited with his familiar confederates, including Charley and Bill Brumfield. These men, like Fleming, had only lately been released from prison for their role in the Adkins conspiracy case. All together, they constituted some of the more mischievous outlaws in the community — men who newspapers claimed had “terrorized Harts Creek.”

“John sent word that he was coming to get his wife, but Aunt Lizzie’s family sent word back to not try it,” said Mr. Frye.”They came with the Charley Brumfield gang.”

The Fry clan was ready for them.

“My dad was there,” said Mr. Frye. “He was Aunt Lizzie’s brother. His brothers were there, too. Uncle Caleb and Albert and Anthony. Poppy was 19 years old. The Fryes and Headleys and Neaces gathered in ambush in barns and behind trees.”

Upon reaching the vicinity of the Frye home, “John Fleming called for his former wife” to leave with him, the Republican reported, “which she refused to do whereupon the trouble started, and John Henan Fry, who was a small, weakly man, started down the branch at about a 2-40 gait.”

At that juncture, someone began firing.

“The guns became much in evidence,” reported the Republican, “and a general shooting affray took place. Herf Fleming was killed by a bullet from a Winchester said to have been fired by Charley McCoy the new lover of the recent Mrs. Fleming who had secreted himself on the hillside in the woodland near the home of his lady lover. He shot into the bunch and shot John Fleming through the arm, and then it is said, sought safety in flight.

“It is useless to state that Mrs. John Henan Fry and children were scared so Mrs. Fry went under the bed after her husband had run off and left the home; but she had a son there and a young man by the name of Caleb Headley who went out at the rear door of the little home and came out to see the result of the battle whereupon John Fleming leveled his pistol on them and maliciously attempted to murder these two unarmed and helpless boys, his aim was so accurate that he cut a lock of hair from Caleb Headley’s head.”

This Caleb Headley was the 19-year-old nephew to John Henan Fry.

“The former Mrs. Fleming,” wrote the Republican, “seeing that she had no further protection against this desperate criminal capitulated, not for any love or affection she had for him but by being put in fear of her life, started to leave with him, and after going a short distance, being stung from his wounds, and remembering his cousin, Herf Fleming having been killed, sent her back to see after him; and she returned to the bullet riddled little home to tell her mother and brothers and sisters that the battle was over for the present, at least.”

“Grandpa Hariff was shot through the shoulder and down through the stomach,” said one grandson, in a 2003 interview. “He lived a while. A little child, maybe named John, came and told Grandma Delph about it. Samp Davis took a wagon with a mattress and bedsprings on it to get him. Ene Adkins and Bud Workman went too. Grandma killed a chicken to make Grandpa a dinner but he was already dead when the wagon got there for him.”

Regional newspapers carried the story. On March 17, 1909, the Marion Daily Mirror of Marion, Ohio, offered a piece titled “Desperate Men Shot.” That same day, the Times Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia printed a story titled: “Shot From Ambush: Members of Feud Gang in West Virginia Waylaid.” On March 20, the Watchman and Southron of Sumter, South Carolina gave one account (“Feudist Shot from Ambush.”) On April 16, the Times Dispatch reported this: “FREELING, Va., April 15 — Hariff Bryant, formerly of this county, was killed on Hart’s Creek, in Logan county, W.Va., according to a late dispatch. He was engaged in an altercation with one John McCoy, a member of the old Hatfield-McCoy feud, when the latter fired the fatal shot. Bryant was about thirty years old and married.”

By that time, county authorities had initiated proceedings against the belligerent parties.

“The next grand jury after the shooting John Fleming was indicted and charged with the shooting at Caleb Headley with intent to kill, and Chas. McCoy was indicted and charged with the murder of Herf Fleming,” the Republican reported.

Unfortunately, many participants in the case had fled West Virginia to avoid possible legal entanglements.

“Poppy and Jesse Headley went to Virginia for a while,” said Mr. Frye. “There were no indictments brought against them.”

John Fleming was also gone. It was later learned that he left West Virginia and traveled to Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A capias was issued for him on January 4, 1910, March 16, 1910, March 30, 1910, June 30, 1910, October 8, 1910, January 9, 1911 and February 8, 1912.

“Grandma Delph put out a reward of $500 or $1,000,” said a Fleming descendant.

In Search of Ed Haley 12

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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I told Lawrence that I wanted to know about Ed Haley’s early life but he said he really wasn’t old enough to know much about his father’s younger days.

“My dad was 45 years old, I guess, when I was born,” he said. “He was born in 1883 and I was born in 1928. That was about 45 years. I know my mother was 40 years old and to the best of my knowledge my dad was five years older. She was born in ’88 and he was born in ’83.”

Lawrence said his father was born on the Trace Fork of Harts Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. He was the only child of Milt Haley and Emma Jean Mullins. Milt was partly responsible for causing Ed’s blindness, according to one story that Lawrence had heard on Harts Creek, which he reluctantly told.

“We was up there approximately seven years ago and we stopped over on Harts Creek and visited with my dad’s first cousin, Joe Mullins,” Lawrence said. “He told me that when my dad was very young — he couldn’t a been over two or three — he had the measles or some childhood disease. And when his father came in from working in the timbers that evening he didn’t like the whiny way my dad was acting. It was the dead of winter. They was ice on the creeks. So to make him more of a man and cut out his babyish crying, he took him out and held him by the feet and dropped him in a rain barrel through the ice.  Now according to my cousin Joe that’s partly what caused my dad to go blind.”

What? That wasn’t in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes.

“Now, I don’t know for sure about that,” Lawrence said. “That’s hearsay. I don’t want to bad-mouth anybody — my granddad or anybody — this many years after everybody’s in the ground and forgot about.”

Lawrence said Ed’s mother Emma Jean Haley was killed not too long after the rain barrel incident. “During the end of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, other families became involved. Pop’s mother Emma Jean was down at the mouth of Harts Creek visiting some feudists — seems like they were Brownings — when two or three people came to the door looking for somebody. I don’t know his name, whether he was a McCoy or Hatfield or some other person that had allegiance to one of them. And when my grandmother opened the door, they thought that he was going to answer the door so they just shot her and killed her. Now, that’s hearsay. I heard that story and that’s all I can tell you about that.”

I asked if the house was still standing and Lawrence said, “I don’t think so. It was a big two-story house. The best I can remember, it had a double porch on the front. It was standing there when I was just a little small child.”

Pat said she’d seen a picture of Ed’s mother during a visit to Joe Mullins’ place on Harts Creek several years ago. “Joe and his wife Stella had this beautiful enlarged picture and it was framed,” she said. “It was laying in some back room up there in Joe’s house. I don’t think it was on the wall, because it was very, very dusty when she brought it in to show me. And she said, ‘This is Larry’s grandmother,’ and she made a statement to the effect of, ‘We’ve no use for it.’ This lady has since passed away, but Joe should have the picture because it’s just been a few years ago.”

Already, I could see plenty of inspiration for a musician: tragic blindness — a cruel father — a murdered mother — an orphan alone in the world.

I asked Lawrence what happened to his grandfather Milt Haley and he said, “Apparently he stayed around there. Joe told me he’s buried somewhere down on Harts Creek in a cemetery. He apparently didn’t raise his child. Uncle Peter Mullins and Aunt Liza Mullins raised my dad after his mother was killed. My dad’s mother must have been an older sister to Uncle Peter.”

Uncle Peter, Lawrence said, was nicknamed “Club-Foot Peter” because one of his feet was “turned in.” He was the father of Joe Mullins, the source for many of Lawrence’s stories. “I guess Joe is about as old as my brother, Clyde. He might be around 70 now. He was a lot younger than my dad.”

Lawrence wasn’t sure when his father left Uncle Peter’s household.

“I guess he left when he got old enough to get out and start playing music,” he said. “I would say he was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. People’d come after him to go play music.”

In Search of Ed Haley 11

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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Eight days later, I was with Lawrence Haley in Ashland looking at Ed Haley’s fiddle and holding old family photographs while he talked as if he’d just seen his father the day before. Pat was gone for the day, so it was just Lawrence and I, talking carefully in the kitchen with funeral home silence in the background. Lawrence — or Larry, as his wife called him — was a short, stocky man with thinning hair and a very straightforward manner. I could tell that he was a no-nonsense kind of guy and that it would serve me best to walk on pins and needles for a while. I also had the impression that in talking with me he hoped to correct some of the errors in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes. He was very careful with his words. Occasionally one of the Haley grandchildren would come in and sit nearby as quiet as a mouse before leaving to play in the yard.

In the initial small talk, I looked over Ed Haley’s fiddle, which appeared to be of an inexpensive Czech variety. It was stained brown and was without strings and a bridge. According to Lawrence, his father acquired it during the early 1940s. He confirmed that it was the one used to make the home recordings featured on Parkersburg Landing but was not the one pictured on Parkersburg Landing. He said Ed used “regular old steel strings — no cat-gut at all” and remembered that he always kept his fiddle on an old “pump-type” organ at home. He had the bridge somewhere around the house in a drawer, which he promised to find.

“If you ever find that bridge, we ought to rig that thing up and put some strings on it,” I said.

Lawrence reached me Ed’s bow, which he said was the same one he used the last ten years of his life. “He just used the same bow,” he said. “Whenever he got another fiddle, he’d change the bow.” I looked it over and noticed that it was as heavy as a log.

I started questioning Lawrence slowly with important but seemingly mundane questions about Ed’s music. I wondered if Ed knew what key he was playing in and Lawrence said, “Sure. Well, when my brother Ralph first started playing, Pop’d tell him which key to change to in a piece of music. He’d just lean over to Ralph and tell him.”

I asked Lawrence if he remembered the names of Ed’s favorite fiddle players and he said, “I couldn’t tell you, John. He’s mentioned a few fiddle players but I couldn’t tell you their name now.” Lawrence said he didn’t even remember many of Ed’s local fiddling buddies because he was a kid “wanting to get out and do something else.”

“I don’t even remember Doc White as far as that goes,” he said. “But I remember Laury Hicks up in Calhoun County, which is the next county right against Clay County there.”

I had read about Haley’s friendship with fiddler Laury Hicks on Parkersburg Landing. Hicks was a veterinarian in Calhoun County, West Virginia.

“One of Ed’s lifelong friends was an Ivydale physician named Laury Hicks,” it read. “Shortly before he died, Hicks requested that he be able to hear Ed Haley one more time. Ed arrived too late and it is said that he played over Laury’s grave for hours into the night.”

I asked about Asa Neal, the great Portsmouth fiddler. “Yeah, Asa Neal,” Lawrence said. “I’ve heard my dad talk about him. But I never seen the guy to my knowledge.”

He seemed to know the most about a local physician and casual fiddler named Doc Holbrook, whose name J.P. Fraley had mentioned to me. “They was long-time friends,” Lawrence said. “Doc Holbrook was a physician that practiced medicine in the county seat of Greenup County, which is also named Greenup. He was a fiddle buff and apparently a pretty good one because my dad wouldn’t a fooled with him if he hadn’t showed a lot of promise in playing the violin.”

This was a little confusing. Ed apparently had several doctor friends: Doctor Laury Hicks, Doc White and Doc Holbrook.

“They tell a tale about how Pop would come down to Greenup County and he’d go to where Doctor Holbrook had his practice. He had it in part of his home — had a riverfront home there. When Dad would go over to visit Doctor Holbrook, regardless of how many patients Doctor Holbrook had in his office, he’d shut his office up — he might have a half a dozen patients sitting out there — and him and Pop’d go in and play the fiddle half the day. That’s hear-say, but that’s what they tell me.”

I really liked that image.

Lawrence said his father made a recording for Doc one time, which he assumed was in the hands of Holbrook family descendants.

“Doctor Holbrook wanted this particular piece of music called ‘Over the Waves’ and he bundled my dad and mother up one day and, since there was no recording studios around this area, he took them to Columbus, Ohio where they had a good soundproof recording studio and had them make this piece of music. Now, whether they was other pieces of music made at the same time, I really don’t know. There probably was.”

In addition to giving Doc records, Ed also gave him a fiddle. “Pop had a real good copy of a Stradivarius, and it had a real good mellow tone and a real good solid deep resonance to it,” Lawrence said. “I think it was the one that he give to Doc Holbrook.” Lawrence said it was also still in the Holbrook family. “Doc had a son who had an office down at the Second National Bank Building and he inherited that fiddle,” he said. “J.P. Fraley was supposed to’ve taken that fiddle to the Smithsonian or at some kind of a centennial or something. But that was Pop’s fiddle.”

I asked Lawrence if his father had perfect pitch.

“Yes,” he said. “He never used a pitch pipe or anything. He tuned the fiddle by ear. One of his fiddles, I think had that little tuner on that high key. I never seen one on every string, though. It took him maybe four or five thumps on his strings to get them in tune. You know, them keys would get awful dry and squeaky in their pegs — in their holes — and they’d strip a lot of times and if it was a real dry season or something and it wasn’t holding in tune, he’d blow moist breath on them pegs to get them to hold in place.”

Lawrence had no idea where Ed got any of his tunes, except for one song.

“My dad and mother used to say they played a certain piece of music they heard from this old fella by the name of Greasy George. I won’t say his last name. Greasy George had apparently stolen a pig from somebody and had put it in a small pen close to the house. And two or three days later, he was sitting on the porch playing the fiddle and he saw the sheriff coming up the drive and he began to play a piece of music my dad plays. I don’t know the name of it, except that it went something like this: ‘Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed, further in the bed, further in the bed. Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed. Katy, can’t you understand me now?’ And his purpose in singing those words was trying to get his wife to hide that pig under a blanket, I think. Or that’s what my dad and mother inferred to me — that he wanted his wife to hide that pig somewhere. Mom was telling me about it.”

I asked Lawrence how Ed met his mother.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Pop was either in Catlettsburg or somewhere around here close. My grandfather on my mother’s side, he moved from Morehead up here to Ashland. People followed work wherever they could get it. My granddad was an old timber man, I guess. They mighta been some work around here for him. In fact, I’m pretty sure at the time my dad met my mother, my grandfather was working at an old stave mill over here — where they make barrel staves. I guess Pop was playing and somebody heard him and told my mother that she ought to come hear him play. Somebody thought that my mother — which was supposed to be a trained musician — they wanted her to hear this old fiddle player. And they got them together that-a-way, I guess. Just a chance-type meeting. They got together and raised a family.”

Lawrence tried to describe the extent of Pop’s travels, a crucial detail in ascertaining the extent of his influence as he was primarily a non-recording, non-radio fiddler. “His travels, as far as being too enormously wide, was restricted to about a three state area, I guess. But apparently his influence got around eventually. Like you say, he might be the granddaddy of Texas style contest music. Far be it from me to dispute it. I really think if he’d been around during the sixties when old-time fiddling was coming back and everybody was wanting to hear this fiddle music, I think he could’ve been worth something. I think he could’ve made a little bit of money at that time. And he might not’ve wanted to do that, see. He didn’t want to do it back in the twenties when they was making recordings around.”

I said, “Well, he’d been on the street. He knew what was going on out there. That’s where life is lived.”

Lawrence said, “Well, that’s why he always steered away from these commercial record companies. The way I feel about my dad, if somebody wants to learn about his music or play it, maybe it might not be completely forgotten. I don’t want to make a dime out of it. If there’s any money anywhere to be made out of it that might come to Pop, turn it over to the Foundation for the Blind. I don’t want to make anything off of my dad. He brought me into this world and raised me up and I’ve had a pretty good life.”

I asked Lawrence what Ed did when he was sitting around home and he said, “He liked to chew tobacco. He’d take this old twist — Stader’s twist, they called it — and he’d take his pocketknife and cut that up and put it down in his pocket. It was picked right off a farm. In fact, that picture of him on the front of that album, I think he had a chew of tobacco in his mouth then. He always carried a vegetable can with him to spit in. Mom never did like it but it was just almost a part of him when he was around the house, except when he’d get out on the porch — then he’d spit out in the yard.”

Lawrence said his dad liked to play music on the porch.

“We lived down on 17th Street and he’d get out on the front porch with that banjo or fiddle and he’d sit on the front porch and play. He’d cross his legs and sit up on the banister where he could spit easy or he’d just sit down with a banjo and play it.”

Lawrence had no clue what happened to Ed’s banjo. “It was one of those things that left when I was in the service, I guess. And Mom’s mandolin disappeared. The accordion my mother had, she let Aunt Minnie have it because Aunt Minnie played the organ some and she wanted to try that accordion. They took it up there and she left it up there for Aunt Minnie and then the house burnt down. It was not a very expensive accordion.”

Aunt Minnie, Lawrence said, was Laury Hicks’ widow in Calhoun County, West Virginia. Lawrence mentioned that I should get in touch with their daughter, Ugee (Hicks) Postalwait, in Akron, Ohio. “I guess she must be close to 81 or 82,” he said. “She was a young woman when I was just a kid. She would dance around Pop when he played and while he was noting the fiddle she’d be up there hitting them strings that he was noting. It had a real nice little ring to it. She heard him like these people hear you right now. She heard him live, danced around it and played on it and everything else. She said all that scratch on the records didn’t sound like Ed Haley. It’s not the same.” I said I would call Ugee when I got back to Nashville.

Lawrence told me a little about his childhood trips to Harts Creek — the place of Ed’s birth. “Most of the time we’d ride the train up there and get off at Harts and then maybe walk and it seemed to me like it took us half the day to get up Harts Creek. You’d ford that creek half a dozen times and the road was in the creek half time time.”

I asked him if Ed carried his fiddle all the way up there and he said, “Most of the time he carried the fiddle. I’ve seen him carry nothing but a fiddle — not even a case a lot of times. He’d carry it out in the open.” He said Ed never played it or thumped on it while walking — “he’d tuck it under his arm and go.” What if it rained? “That’s another thing,” he said. “I can’t remember any instance like that, but I imagine he’s had instances like that. But I know he has went around with a fiddle with no case — just a fiddle and a bow. Same way with Mom. She didn’t have a case for her mandolin.”

At that point, Lawrence showed me several family photographs, including a wonderful picture of his family just before his birth in 1928.

“I was born just a year before the Depression hit,” he said. “They was two of us just babies when the Depression started. Ralph, Clyde, Noah and Jack were stepped from five to fifteen. A lot of times it was skimpy eating and at other times it was pretty good. We never starved or anything. We’d go down to an old dairy just below us called Sanitary Dairy and get a big lard bucket full of buttermilk for a dime, and I could take a piece of cornbread and a glass of buttermilk and make a meal out of it. I’ve done that a lot. I’ve taken ten cents when Mom could scrape up a dime and us kids would all walk downtown to one of them ten-cent movies and stay all day and be starving to death when we came home and there wouldn’t be nothing but cold cornbread and pinto beans or something like that. That’s the way our life went, during the Depression anyway.”

There was another remarkable photo of Ed and his family just after the Depression started. “Everybody can tell you about hard times in the Depression,” Lawrence said. “I know in my second summer Mom said she fed me fresh corn and I took the trots and liked to wasted away from diarrhea. That was about 1930. We made it anyway.”

As Lawrence showed me a few family pictures, his wife Pat showed up with a few of her “bingo buddies.” Pat was a very polite English lady with dark hair and a small frame who wore large glasses. We said our “hellos” and I played a few tunes.

Once the guests left, I spoke more about Ed Haley with Pat and Lawrence in the kitchen. With Pat’s presence, Lawrence’s demeanor was a little different. I could tell that he wanted to present his dad to me in just such a way and he almost openly resented any input from Pat. There was a slight tension in the air. At one point, Lawrence said to Pat, “Go ahead Pat. You tell it. You know more about it than I do.” Pat took it all in stride. She just wanted to be helpful. In any case, Lawrence gave me the impression — and this was very important — that if I did or said anything to his disfavor I would be more than welcome to hit the road. Ironically, and contrary to what I had heard, he seemed more over-protective of his father’s story than his music. Needless to say, it took me a while to get up enough nerve to pull out my tape recorder and record his memories.

In Search of Ed Haley 2

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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     It was only natural that I would want to know more about this man who had such a strong grip on me. I first turned to a brief biography written on the Parkersburg Landing album cover. Right away, his life interested me almost as much as did his music.

     “James Edward Haley was born in 1883 on Hart’s Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. When he was quite young, his mother was killed in an altercation with the Hatfield and McCoy feud. He was subsequently raised by his Aunt Liza. An attack of the measles when he was three left him completely blind. He received no formal schooling [and] on occasion food was so scarce that his dinner would consist of nothing but a bunch of wild onions washed in a nearby stream.”

     Like most Americans, I was somewhat familiar with the Hatfield-McCoy feud. I knew the names Devil Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy. I remembered hearing about some kind of trouble over a pig. But after looking through a few books about the feud, I could find no reference to any Haleys killed in it. Actually, maps showed Harts Creek – the place of Haley’s birth – situated a significant distance from feud sites. Haley was born in the Guyandotte Valley of northern Logan County, while the Hatfield-McCoy Feud occurred primarily in the Tug Fork Valley of western Logan County (now Mingo County).

     I wondered about Haley’s family life. What happened to his father? How old was he when his mother was murdered? And what influences did either parent have on his life? Did he have any siblings? And who was “Aunt Liza”?

     I was also fascinated by Haley’s blindness. There is a long history of blind musicians, from Turlough O’Carolan, the famous eighteenth century Irish harper, to Doc Watson, the legendary guitar player from North Carolina. Surely, the optic perception and visual hallucinations of a blind man is much more intense and interesting than what sighted people see. There’s no telling what incredible pictures Haley saw in his mind when he played music, when he was in the “zone,” seeing the colors and smelling the smells. I found it interesting that Haley, unlike most of the blind musicians I knew, had not been born blind. According to Parkersburg Landing, he lost his eyesight at the age of three. It was possible, then, that he possessed faint memories of sight. Did he remember his mother’s face? His father’s hands?

     Parkersburg Landing revealed that measles caused Haley’s blindess. In the late nineteenth century, measles constituted a serious childhood disease. Its initial symptoms, as per Household Cyclopedia of General Information (1881), were “inflammatory fever, drowsiness, pain in the pit of the stomach, pain in the back. [and] vomiting.” On the third day, little red points resembling flea bites appear on the face, neck and breast. Two days later, “little round vesicles filled with a transparent fluid appear on the top of each pimple. The eruptive fever now declines. On the ninth day the pustules are perfectly formed, being round and filled with a thick, yellow matter, the head and face also swelling considerably. On the eleventh day the matter in the pustules is of a dark yellow color, the head grows less, while the feet and hands begin to swell. The secondary fever now makes its appearance. The pustules break and dry up in scabs and crusts, which at last fall off, leaving pits, which sufficiently mark the cause.”

     Ed Haley likely contracted a particularly terrible case of measles, called “the confluent.” In that case, according to Household Cyclopedia, “all the symptoms are more violent from the beginning. There is delirium, preceded by great anxiety, heat, thirst, vomiting, etc. The eruption is irregular, coming out on the second day in patches, the vesicles of which are flatted in; neither does the matter they contain turn to a yellow, but to a brown color. Instead of the fever going off on the appearance of the eruption, it is increased after the fifth day, and continues throughout the complaint. The face swells in a frightful manner, so as to close the eyes; sometimes putrid symptoms prevail from the commencement.”

     While there were various treatments for measles, Household Cyclopedia recommended the victim be placed “in a cool, airy room” and “lightly covered with bed clothes. Purge him moderately with salts, and give him thirty drops of laudanum every night. The diet should consist of panada, arrow-root, etc., and his drink consist of lemonade or water. If from any cause the eruption strikes in, put him into a warm bath, give a little warm wine whey, or the wine alone, and apply blisters to the feet. Obstinate vomiting is to be quieted by the effervescing draught, with the addition of a few drops of laudanum. If the eyes are much affected, it will be necessary to bathe them frequently with warm milk, and to smear the lids with some simple ointment.”

     Measles can cause corneal blindness through several mechanisms, including acute vitamin A deficiency, exposure keratitis, herpes simplex keratitis, secondary infection and harmful traditional remedies. Vitamin A deficiency, a common condition today among poor people of the world, begins with night blindness. If untreated, it causes the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of the eyelids and extending over the forepart of the eyeball, to dry. Thereafter, the cornea shrivels up and becomes ulcerated. Triangular gray spots may appear on the white of the eye. Finally, total and irreversible blindness results due to inflammation and infection in the interior of the eye.

     I could just picture little Ed Haley, suffering from measles, stumbling and grasping in an ever-darker world without the words to express himself. And all he may have needed to save his sight was a strong diet of liver, eggs, milk and carrots.