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In Search of Ed Haley 111

17 Friday May 2013

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After listening to the Lozier tape, I played a 1992 interview/jam session with Abe Keibler, last of the old fiddling Keiblers in South Shore, Kentucky.

“The first Keibler to come into this area was my grandfather, Henry C. Keibler,” Abe said. “He come here when he was 21 years old from Germany. I don’t know whether he played any music or not but they was some good ones in the uncles that raised me. The fiddlers was John and Sam and Henry and Charley but Uncle John Keibler, he was the best fiddler in the whole bunch. He won contest after contest. [When he was young and learning to play a fiddle,] his dad wouldn’t let him bring it into the house. My aunt told me he didn’t want to hear him screeking around on it, you know, so he took it out in the cornfield. My grandpap said, ‘Well, them boys is into something. I’m gonna slip out there to see what they’re into.’ And he sneaked out there and the old son was a picking the banjo, and him the fiddle and some a dancing. Then he said to him, ‘Well John, you can bring your fiddle in home now.’ Then he brought it in and it didn’t bother him no more. He was playing then good.”

Abe said, “Then I had an uncle, Charley ‘Shorty’ Keibler — they said he was an awful good left-handed fiddler, but I never heard him, see. Uncle Charley died young. He’s the one bought that old fiddle that I was raised with. Uncle Charley lived over in Portsmouth. Back then, they had old saloons and my other uncle John he tried to buy [this fiddle from a man there]. But [this man, he wouldn’t sell it to John. He] told Uncle Charley, he said, ‘Now, Charley, if you want that fiddle I’ll sell it to you for ten dollars.’ Well, he bought it [from the man] and Uncle John give him the money and he kept it over the years. He wouldn’t let me touch that fiddle though ’til I was sixteen years old. He didn’t want to hear me jigging around on it. He thought you ought to already know how to play, I guess. [Uncle John], he had a stroke and he tried to tune it up one day and he couldn’t tune it. And he told his nephew, said, ‘Take that fiddle and give it to Henry.’ Uncle John died on September 6, 1932. Then in ’55, I think it was, Uncle Henry said to his sister, ‘I’m gonna give old Abraham this fiddle. Next time he comes down I’ll give it to him.’ I went down and he said, ‘There’s the fiddle. She’s yours. Now, do whatever you want with it.’ He couldn’t play much then. He was sick. Henry died in 1959.”

On the tape, someone asked Abe about the Glenn Brothers, who I had heard about in connection with Clark Kessinger.

“Abe Glenn, I was named after him,” he said. “Bob Glenn, they said he was a real fiddler. I never heard either one — that was before my time. They said he was really about as good as you could find.”

Abe also remembered Asa Neal.

“When he first come here to play, he couldn’t play a hornpipe nor nothing — just them old blues. When I was about sixteen year old, he come there to my uncle’s and he learnt to play all of these old tunes. He used a lot of slip notes but he could get them in there, boy. He learnt to be a good fiddler, ol’ Asa.”

On the tape, Abe mostly played old standards — “Sally Goodin”, “Turkey in the Straw”, “Liza Jane” — but every now and then he came out with some obscure tunes, like “Portsmouth Airs”, “Headwaters of Tygart” and “Old Coon Dog”.

In Search of Ed Haley 108

11 Saturday May 2013

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I asked Lawrence if he knew anything about his brother Clyde supposedly trying to play the fiddle.

“Well, he never said anything about it to me and if he ever played the violin I never saw him, John,” he said. “But he did sit around and play a little on the guitar. Then he got away from home and got in some kind of industrial accident working in a woodshop or something and a band saw got his fingers. Mona, she’d take off with Pop a lot of times up into West Virginia and they’d be gone a week or two. She went with him as much as any of the rest of us did. Most of the time whenever I’d go, there’d be my mother, too.”

I told Lawrence what Wilson Douglas had said about Ed being able to get around extremely well on his own.

“I can remember, just like going up Harts Creek,” he said. “Remember where you turn off to the Trace Fork they got a big new church and stuff? They wasn’t anything in there then. They wasn’t even a road. People made their own footpaths around close to the hillside. Most of it was just pathways. And that’s how Pop could go from one house to another, I guess. He’d know when he was on that path — how many steps or something it was from his place to anybody else’s he wanted to go to. It’d be like if somebody could count the streets in succession — if they’re numbered streets… Mom could get around Ashland here anywhere she wanted to by herself, but Pop wasn’t too good at that. He couldn’t keep track of how many blocks he’d walked or where he’d started from a lot of times. He just didn’t have the training, I guess, to learn how to handle hisself as a blind man. Mom went to that Louisville School for the Blind. She was there about twelve or thirteen years, I reckon, and they taught her piano music.”

Lawrence told me more about his memories of his father’s appearance.

“He walked fairly fast and upright as a fence post with his shoulders throwed back,” he said. “He was no slouch. He set in his chair upright. A lot went through his mind, I know that. He used to tell me, ‘Son, if a man can think it up and imagine it, then it’s possible.’ In later years, he was always having some problems with his arms and hands. I remember him shaking his hand real vigorously, like he was trying to get circulation going back in it. He’d walk through the house a lot. ‘Course he’d go up and down the street some. If he felt like he wanted a beer or something, he might get out and go and play down at Russ’s Place half a day and drink what beer he wanted to and then he’d come home. I’ve seen Pop get pretty high at times.”

Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve tried to think and tell you everything I know my dad did. If I’m helping you at all, I’m tickled to death. I didn’t know him that long. He was about 44 or 45 when I was born. I went into the service when I was about eighteen and I wasn’t out of the service maybe a year and a half and he was dead.”

In Search of Ed Haley 107

10 Friday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 105

08 Wednesday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

 

In Search of Ed Haley 104

07 Tuesday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby wasn’t surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 102

03 Friday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Lord have mercy.

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

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

     What about him giving your dad a fiddle?

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 96

27 Saturday Apr 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 93

22 Monday Apr 2013

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After securing Patsy’s telephone number from Lawrence Haley, I called her up with questions about Ed’s background. Patsy said she first met Ed just after Thanksgiving in 1946 when she and Jack moved in with the family at 105 17th Street in Ashland. At the time, Mona and her husband Wilson Mullins lived there, as did Mona’s son, “little Ralph.” She was in daily contact with Pop for the next three months.

I asked if Ed drank a lot in those days. “Sir, I never saw the man drunk,” she said, in a very pronounced Cleveland accent. “I know one time he went off with his son to play for some people that were having a party and I guess he got kinda high on the horse then, but he never came home.”

Patsy said Ed never played on the street after she came into the family but would play around the house for the kids. She remembered Ed putting the fiddle on his shoulder and playing tunes like “Black Jet” and “Lightning Express”.

“Pop had one special song for me,” she said. “It was, ‘I took a fat gal by the hand the other afternoon and someone yelled out where’s the string that goes with your balloon?’’ because I was a little on the chubby side. Oh, that man could play anything. He could listen to the radio and play popular music. He played the guitar. Beautiful banjo. I don’t think he used a pick.”

Around 1948, Molly O’Day came to see Ed at his home on 45th Street in Ashland. She brought her husband and fiddling brother — and a lot of recording equipment. Everyone settled in the living room, where Ed played the fiddle, “long neck” banjo and mandolin. Patsy said it seemed like they were just “horsing around,” although there was one song that Molly wanted to hear “real bad.” She didn’t recall much else about the visit because she mostly stayed with Ella and little Ralph in the kitchen.

Patsy said Ed never told any stories but she heard from Ella how his parents were killed on Harts Creek. It was a totally different account from anything I’d heard. “Mom Haley told me that they were both murdered in the log cabin,” she said. “Now, that’s not what happened according to what everybody has been telling me from down in Kentucky.”

I asked Patsy why she thought Ella would have told her something that was apparently untrue and she said, “Well, they might’ve just not wanted me to know everything. They thought I was just one of them big city girls from Los Angeles.”

She had also heard how Ed came to be blind.

It was measles that did it — that’s what Mom Haley told me — and that they left him out in his buggy in the sun.”

In Search of Ed Haley 91

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Clyde said Ed never said “too much” about where he learned to play the fiddle.

“Well, he was blind all his life, since he was a small boy, and he started with a cornstalk.”

Ed did talk about other fiddlers, though.

“Oh, yes,” Clyde said. “He knew Sam Vie and Asa Neal, and all those old-timers. Did you know Bill Day? Well, my dad used to play with him a lot. But Bill Day couldn’t play the fiddle as far as I’m concerned.”

Bill Day’s wife Rosie was a sister to Laury Hicks, Haley’s veterinarian friend in Calhoun County, West Virginia.

“Well, Rosie was Laury’s sister, as I remember,” Clyde said. “Rosie stayed with my mother and helped take care of Mom because my Mom didn’t like to cook in the summertime because of the flies. I got in trouble one time and I had to go stay with Laury and Aunt Minnie. And I stayed with them in my growing up years. Laury was a doctor, you know, and so was Minnie. She’d just go on a horse, travel miles and miles and miles on a horse, to go deliver a baby or something like that.”

Clyde also remembered Doc Holbrook, Ed’s friend in Greenup, Kentucky.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Monnie, my sister, was named after Dr. Holbrook’s wife: M-O-N-N-I-E.”

Clyde was well aware of Ed’s suspicions toward the commercial music industry.

“My dad didn’t ever want his music recorded and it was difficult to get him to get in a position where he would let anybody record his music,” he said. “There was a guy named Bus Johnson in Cincinnati that wanted my dad — I remember — he wanted my dad to come down there to Cincinnati to WLW and get some music recorded for him but he wanted to commercialize it, you know, which I wish he had’ve now. My dad and mother would’ve had a lot better life with the money they could’ve made off the music. I always did tell my dad, ‘Pop, you ought to get those things recorded because you got money laying around in the fiddle case.'”

Talking about Ed’s refusal to make commercial records caused me to ask about his home recordings.

“Him and my mother had over six hundred records,” Clyde said. “Them old records that Ralph sent home out of the Army. He was in the Signal Corps at Camp Crowder, Missouri, and he took a lot of the equipment home — borrowed it from the Army — and my dad and my mother was in on some of the records, too, you know. And Lawrence has got all that kind of information; more than I would have because I’ve been gone from home. I’ve been a roamer, you know. And I used to drink a lot. I don’t think I’ll ever take another drink, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m in this hospital and it’s what it’s for. I had strokes. It’s not a nut-house hospital or anything. It takes care of people like me. I used to drink quite a bit myself, but I’ve made up my mind since I had the strokes that I’ll let that stuff alone when I get out of this place. I talk like it’s a jailhouse, but it’s not. It’s full of women.”

In Search of Ed Haley 89

14 Sunday Apr 2013

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Clyde’s memories of Ed playing in contests were much more detailed than anything I had heard from the other kids.

“I’ve seen him go to contests and look like a farmer and he won every one he ever got into,” he said. “He’d go down to the Armco there in Ashland — they’d put up a bandstand up there — and when they’d have contests they had these eight or ten fiddlers up on the stage and he’d be up in all that mess. He fiddled with some of the best that there was in that country in that particular part of the time. I know he had a lot of people used to come to the house and play music with him.”

I asked Clyde what tunes Ed won contests with and he said, “Well, ‘Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and tunes like that. Not any particular ones. He could play any kind of music if he knew it. If he knew the words, he could make music like nobody you ever heard in your life. He had one tune called the ‘Flop-Eared Mule’. I remember ‘Brownlow’s Dream’, ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’.”

Gradually easing into specifics, I wondered if Ed held the bow in the middle or out on the end.

“It would depend on what kind of music he was playing,” Clyde said matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen him hold a fiddle bow down at the end, where the hair hooks up. Depending on the tune, the fastness of the tune, he could hold a bow anywhere he wanted to.”

Did he bow with short strokes or long strokes?

“Well, it would depend on which way he was sitting,” Clyde said. “If he was sitting on a chair with his right leg put out far… He never held the fiddle like anybody else I ever saw. He held it way low on his chest, almost down to his belt-line. My dad had long arms, you know. He was a long, thin man. We have a tendency to want to exaggerate a little bit and say he was bigger than he was, but I knew him pretty well. His hands were real thin — looked like a piano player. He could finger that fiddle like nobody you ever heard or saw.”

I asked if Ed picked the banjo and Clyde said, “Oh, yes. He was better with a banjo than he was with his fiddle. It didn’t have a thumb-string on it. I tried to learn how to play the banjo, too, but I never could do any good at it. Well, my mother bought me a fiddle in the store somewhere and she tried to get me to learn how to play the fiddle because she knew she was gonna be dead one of these days and him too and she wanted to have all that music made for posterity. My mom didn’t want me to do it, but my dad wanted me to. He called me his favorite son and said he wanted me to carry on his tradition. I tried, but I got my fingers cut off when I was a lot younger — two-thirds of my first and second fingers on my left hand — and that messed me up from noting. Ralph was the one that played with my dad a lot. He played the guitar like Roy Clark played. He had a big Martin guitar that was a double-header and he could play on both necks of it at the same time. Ralph was a good musician. He died in 1945.”

Clyde talked a lot about Ed being a drinker, which was something Lawrence kind of kept “under wraps”.

“He was a rip-snorter, don’t think he wasn’t,” he said. “You know, he could be pretty boisterous when he wanted to be. Ed Haley was a mean person — believe me he was. I loved him… He used to take me because he knew I liked to go with him. He would give me a drink every once in a while. He knew I got to liking that and he’d take me with him just about everywhere he went. I think he was the one who got me to drinking too when I was a kid and it’s the worst thing I could’ve done. Course I had no control over it then.”

I asked Clyde what Ed’s drink of choice was and he said, “Whiskey. He wasn’t a beer drinker much, or wine. He didn’t go much for that kind of stuff. He drank moonshine when he could get it, and he generally got it.”

Clyde had seen Ed drunk but said it didn’t hurt his fiddle playing.

“I think if anything, it made it better.”

In Search of Ed Haley 88

12 Friday Apr 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about “Indian Squaw”?

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

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

How about waltzes? I asked.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 82

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

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

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

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

I asked him how old he was.

“38,” he said.

Clifton had just moved back to Harts.

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 81

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

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

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

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

So where all did they travel to?

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

I asked about Johnny Hager.

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

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

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

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

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

So Ed had brothers?

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

This was a major development.

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

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

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

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

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