04 Tuesday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
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Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Clyde Haley, culture, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, Great Depression, history, Jack Haley, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, music, Noah Haley, photos, Ralph Haley, U.S. South
Ed Haley family, circa 1929
03 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
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Appalachia, Arkansas Traveler, Ashland, Battle of New Orleans, Beautiful Ohio, Birdie, blind, culture, Down Yonder, Dry and Dusty, Ed Haley, fiddler, fiddling, Fire on the Mountain, Flop-Eared Rule, genetic memory, Goin' Up the River, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Midnight Serenade, Mississippi Sawyer, music, Sally Will You Marry Me, Soldiers Joy, U.S. South, Wagner, Whispering Hope
Hoping to stir Lawrence’s memory further, I got my fiddle out and played some tunes. He said Ed played something like my version of “Dry and Dusty”. He whistled a tune his dad played that resembled “Goin’ Up the River”. I asked him how many of Pop’s tunes he could name from memory and he called out several titles (many of them not among the records): “Mississippi Sawyer”, “Arkansas Traveler”, “Soldier’s Joy”, “Down Yonder”, “Midnight Serenade”, “Beautiful Ohio”, “Sally Will You Marry Me”, “Battle of New Orleans”, “Flop-Eared Mule”, “Wagner”, “Fire on the Mountain”, “Birdie” and “Whispering Hope”.
At some point, I asked him if there was anything in my fiddling that reminded him of his father and he said rather dryly that I sounded pretty good but, if I really wanted the truth, I didn’t play at all like him. Not even a little bit. My bowing was all wrong, he said, and I played way too many notes.
I really wanted to pick his brain about Ed’s technique, so I spent an hour just playing and asking, “Well, did he do this?” or “How about this?” He’d just shake his head no and tell me the difference between what I was doing and what Ed did. At times, I tried to triangulate the answer by asking the same questions in many different ways. It was somewhat frustrating for Lawrence. He kept pointing out that he had never been a musician and would never really be able to describe how his dad played.
I disagreed, though, based on my belief in what I call “genetic memory” — that we inherit our ancestors’ memories in our DNA or in our body’s chemicals somehow. Little commonplace clues and reminders can jar this knowledge loose or make it pop out like deja-vu. It made perfect sense to me that in addition to all of Lawrence’s conscious memory of Ed playing the fiddle, he might also have a genetic memory of it. I told him how I thought he had a lot of secrets locked away back in his mind that he didn’t even know he had and that with the right signals and clues maybe we could access that information. He had an “okay, whatever” attitude about the whole thing.
Lawrence and I mostly discussed Ed’s bowing. He said Pop held the bow at its very end and sometimes used so much of it (“one end to the other”) that it appeared as if he might “draw it right off and shove the tip end of it under the strings.” He “used every bit of that bow,” except when he wanted to “put a little force or drive into it or a slur” — then he “might work the bow.” Lawrence said, “Not many people can get that kind of music and do it at the speed and the purity that my dad played. I don’t think he was trying to make a big show of it. He was just trying to play the music and get it done.” Lawrence figured that his dad had to use his imagination in developing his style of bowing, since he “couldn’t see anybody else’s bow.”
03 Monday Dec 2012
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Appalachia, Ashland, Bill Day, Blind Frailey, Bonaparte's Retreat, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, fiddling, history, Ironton, Jack Haley, Jesse Stuart, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Library of Congress, life, Mona Haley, music, Noah Haley, Ohio, Pat Haley, U.S. South, Washington's March
Pat said, “My mother-in-law used to worry about Pop — whether Pop would go to heaven, because Pop would curse and I guess Pop was a rough man when he was growing up.” Lawrence added, “A drinker and a swarper, I guess.” Pat went on: “My father-in-law used to wear these big Yank work clothes — the dark green and navy blue, he liked those — and I would tell him, ‘Pop, time to change your clothes.’ Pop had been dead, I guess, about two years and one night I had a dream. And I saw my father-in-law on this cloud and he had an almost brand new set of big Yank work clothes on. He was chewing his tobacco and he had his pipe, and he said, ‘Patricia, I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I can chew my tobacco all I want and spit anywhere I want.’ I got up and my mother-in-law got up and I said, ‘Mom, you don’t have to worry about Pop anymore. I had a dream about him.'”
Hearing this caused me to think about how Jesse Stuart, the famous Kentucky writer, wrote about Haley — who he called “Blind Frailey” — playing in Heaven.
This is a fiddler when he gets to Heaven
As people say “Blind” Frailey’s sure to do —
He’d go up to the golden gates of Heaven,
“Blind” Frailey would, and fiddle his way right thru.
He’d fiddle all round God’s children with harps,
“Blind” Frailey doesn’t know the flats and sharps,
But all God’s children will throw down their harps
And listen to a blind man fiddling thru.
“Blind” Frailey will fiddle on the golden street
Till dancers will forget they are in Heaven,
And they’ll be swept away on dancing feet
And dance all over golden streets of Heaven.
“Blind” Frailey will fiddle for the dancers there
Up where the Lord sits in his golden chair,
He will sit down to jolly fiddling there.
And if one Plum Grove man has gone to Heaven
And if he hears this fiddle by a chance,
He will call out the angels here in Heaven;
The sweet fair maids here all white-robed in Heaven,
And they’ll renew again the old square dance —
The old Kentucky mountain “Waltz the Hall” —
The most Kentuckian of all dance calls —
The Lord will sit in his high golden chair
And watch “Blind” Frailey from Kentucky there,
The Lord will sit wistfully a-looking on
But the Lord will never say a word at all,
Not when he sees his angels “Waltz the Hall — “
And when he hears Frailey from Kentucky there
He will sit back and laugh from his golden chair.
And if “Blind” Frailey finds rest in Heaven
And if the Plum Grove folks knew it back here,
I’m sure these folks would try harder for Heaven
To follow the “Blind” Frailey fiddler there —
They love to dance to his magic fiddle —
They could dance all the night and all the day —
And if they would become light spirits in Heaven
And get all the thirst and hunger away
Their light spirits then could dance till Doomsday —
There’s danger that they would forget to pray —
But when “Blind” Frailey starts sawing his fiddle
Only he stops long enough to resin his bow —
When he does this, spry dancers will jig a little —
Jig on till Frailey says: “Boys, let ‘er go!”
I wondered if Ed was a religious man.
“A lot of preachers, he was with them like he was the record companies,” Lawrence said. “He took about half of what they said as truth. But he believed in a heaven and hell, I’m pretty sure, because his hell was if he had to play music with people like Bill Day or some other half-assed musician. And that would be his hell, and that’s the way he felt about it.”
Not long after Ed’s death, Ella divided their home recordings among the kids. Lawrence showed me his share — some were aluminum-based, while others were paper-based. Most had been scratched. Others were warped or had the disc holes entirely off center. But in spite of their poor condition, I could tell that Lawrence had faithfully guarded them with a passion and a stubborn resolve that his dad’s music would survive. (Back in the fifties or sixties, he’d refused a $5,000 offer for them by a Gospel singer from Nashville.) His dedication seemed to stem from a deep love for Ed and Ella, as well as an unyielding pride in their music. When I told him that Ed was a musical genius, he wasn’t surprised or flattered — it was something he already knew. He took it all in stride. If I started bragging on Ed too much, he joked about how I never did see his “mean side.”
Lawrence didn’t know much about the circumstances surrounding Ed’s records, because they were made during his years in the Air Force.
“I was in the service, and they give me what they thought I’d like. They mighta duplicated some of the same records they gave me and gave them to some of the other children. Like ‘Old Sledge’, maybe one of my other brothers or somebody liked that piece of music, so they’d make one for me and one for them. Maybe a fifth of those were duplicated.”
Most of the records featured Ella on the accordion or singing.
“Mom would sing things like ‘Me and my wife and an old yellow dog, we crossed the creek on an old hollow log.’ She would come up with that mostly. Maybe one little thing like that through the whole tune.”
In addition to Haley’s home recordings, Lawrence showed me the four reel-to-reel tapes of his dad’s music, which the Library of Congress had made for him in the early 1970s.
I asked him about the other kids’ records and he said, for starters, his brother Clyde sold his to “a guy by the name of Brickey that run a store down on 12th Street and Winchester. Pop used to go around and play with Brickey — sit around the store with him and play music. I think this guy was from out in Carter County originally. But Clyde sold him all of his records, just for enough money for him to take off on one of his wild jaunts. He’d start out and take off and be gone two or three years at a time.”
Lawrence didn’t think any of the Brickeys were still around Ashland.
“I think this old gentleman died. I got some of the records back from him, but I know he didn’t turn loose of all of them.”
Lawrence’s sister Mona lost her records when she got behind on her rent.
“I know my sister, she lived over in Ironton, and she got in back on her rent some way and moved out. She took one of them ‘midnight flights’ you know, and didn’t take this trunk — she had a big trunk — and all those records was in that and where they went to from there nobody knows.” Pat said, “She never could get the trunk. The woman later told her that she discarded it. We also know for a fact that my sister-in-law trashed a bunch of the records because she was angry at her husband and threw them at him.”
Oh Lord.
Lawrence’s brother Jack apparently lost most of his records, too.
“Jack and his family, they probably just wore a lot of theirs out and discarded them,” Lawrence said. “They didn’t take care of them right. They just played them to death, I guess.” Pat agreed, “Jack said they didn’t take care of them. They let the kids play with them.”
Noah, Lawrence’s older brother, lost his records when his ex-wife threw them at him in various arguments.
Lawrence sorta dismissed their destruction.
“They went. We all had our share of them — just one of the gifts that Mom and Pop gave us.”
As our conversation turned away from Ed’s life and toward his music, Lawrence almost immediately mentioned his father’s version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.
“Well, they call the first part of it ‘Washington’s March’,” he said. “My dad would tune the low string way down and you could hear the real fast march, like the men marching at a pretty good pace, and all at once he’d lift that bow up and hit that low string and it’d sound like a cannon booming. And he’d go into this real fast finger-work that had to do with the troops moving out of Russia as fast as they could and then there’d be a small section that was slow, like it was a sad, sad situation for these French soldiers coming back out of Russia. You can picture it, I guess. A bunch of soldiers coming out with their shoulders stooped and rags around their feet and just barely able to move. Pop would play part of that real slow like a funeral dirge and then he’d go back to the fast march with the cannons booming.”
02 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, Ed Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, music, photos, U.S. South, writers, writing
Lawrence Haley, 1991
02 Sunday Dec 2012
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2144 Greenup Avenue, Appalachia, Ashland, Ashland Cemetery, Bake Lee, Bill Bowler, Charlie Ferguson, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddle, fiddler, fiddling, Freeman's Shoe Store, Ghost Riders in the Sky, guitar, history, Imogene Haley, Ironton, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Colliver, Lawrence Haley, Lazear Funeral Home, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Noah Haley, Ohio, Over the Waves, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, radio, Steve Haley, The Shadow, U.S. South, West Virginia, Winchester Avenue, writers, writing
I asked about Ed during that time period. Lawrence said he stayed in a little room just back of the kitchen, which was furnished with a chair, cot, wardrobe and small radio. His fiddle was always on top of the wardrobe, although he seldom played it.
“He listened to the radio quite a bit,” Lawrence said. “You surely have heard of Vaughn Monroe, his version of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop had a transistor radio he carried up to his ear. ‘Goddamn,’ he’d let out, ‘That’s some tune.’ Cause he felt hell was a place where you had to do something you done all your life. I never heard him try to play it but he’d listen to it and listen to it. He’d say, ‘That’s some hell, ain’t it?'”
Pat said, “Pop would shiver when he would hear ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop heard it once or twice on that little radio he carried, and he kept his ear right to it.”
I found it strangely odd that Haley had such a high opinion of the tune — maybe he just liked the words.
The cowpokes loped on past him and he heard one call his name,
If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range,
Then, cowboy, change your ways today, or with us you will ride,
A-trying to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.
Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo, ghost riders in the sky.
Lawrence said Ed eventually gave up on music broadcast over the radio and started tuning in to programs like “The Shadow.”
“We had a great old big crank-up record player and we had a great old big stack of thick RCA records a quarter of an inch thick, I guess,” he said. “They played a lot of them. I guess they learned some pieces of music off of that. ‘Over the Waves’, I guess that’s been around for a hundred years. Pop was pretty good at those slow pieces, too.”
Pat said she never had a real conversation with Ed, so I guess he kind of kept to himself. She remembered him having a white, foot-long beard, which he was very proud of and combed out every day. She said she had a picture of him with Lawrence and Ella in the back yard at 2144 Greenup but couldn’t find it. It was taken in the fall of 1950, when Lawrence was called back into the service.
Around that time, Bill Bowler, a blind guitar player in town, came and asked Ed to play a gig for the grand opening of Freeman’s Shoe Store in Ironton, Ohio. It was kind of a big deal — there was some type of parade going on. Pat said, “We were so happy somebody had finally got him out because he just all of a sudden stopped playing.” Lawrence drove the two over in his brother Noah’s car, then came home. Pat said, “Larry had hardly got back and was telling his mother, ‘Yes, he sat Pop down with Bill Bowler,’ and the next thing we knew Pop came through the front door just cursing a blue streak.” Something had really upset Ed at the shoe store, but the family never did know what happened or how he made it home. Lawrence said, “He just saw that they wasn’t nothing over there for him. He didn’t tell me that I done wrong by taking him over there or anything. He just wasn’t happy, so he didn’t stay.”
Not long afterwards, Lawrence saw his dad play for the last time at Charlie Ferguson’s. He said Noah got him so drunk that he sat down on the floor and played until he fell over. I wanted Lawrence to show me how Ed was playing at Ferguson’s, which he did after joking, “Now John, I don’t want you to involve me in what my dad did.” As he sat there in the floor with my fiddle, Pat laughed and said, “Oh boy, this was a good idea.”
Pat told me about February 3, 1951, the snowy day Ed passed away at home.
“It was very, very cold. My son Stephen was born January 27th, and it was exactly a week later. Pop was in the front room listening to the radio and he came through our bedroom around three o’clock. He had my daughter Beverly on his shoulders and he took her off and he rubbed his head in her tummy and he said, ‘Mmm, you smell so good. You don’t smell like those pissy-ass babies out in the country.’ The children in the country apparently didn’t wear diapers a lot of times and we always kept rubber pants on Beverly and of course the baby powder. After my father-in-law had played with my little girl, he went through and asked my sister-in-law, ‘Patsy, when will supper be ready?’ She was fixing dinner and she said, ‘Aw shortly, Pop.’ And he said, ‘Well I’m going to take a nap.’ He had a room in the back of the house. And we had a nephew Ralph Mullins living with us. He was born in 1946, so he was about five years old. And he took little cars and he was running them up and down while Poppy was napping.”
Pat said, “And when Patsy got dinner ready, she called for Pop to come to the table. My mother-in-law got a little bit irritated because Pop didn’t come. Larry and his brother Jack had been working on a car outside and they went in to check Pop.” Lawrence said, “Mom went in and lifted up his hand and said, ‘Ed.’ Shook his hand, you know. She said, ‘I can’t get him awake. I know he’s alive. I can hear him breathe.’ Well, when she was lifting up his hand, you know, she was pumping out his last breath of air.” Pat said, “And the boys told their mother then that Pop was dead. But the whole time Ralphy had been playing with his cars, so Pop apparently did not cry out in pain. That was it. He just passed away. It was a massive coronary that took him.”
“Pop died just as peaceful a death as could be, I reckon,” Lawrence said. “He died in his sleep.”
When the Ashland newspaper ran Ed’s obituary on Sunday, February 4, 1951, it mistakenly referred to him as the “flower huckster” of Winchester Avenue. Much to the embarrassment of the family, the newspaper had confused Ed with Bake Lee, a blind man in the area who sold pencils and flowers on sidewalks. Bake usually worked the streets with his wife, Lula Lee, an old schoolmate of Ella’s who played the mandolin and French harp.
“Mr. Haley, who had been blind for 65 years, was a familiar figure on Ashland’s streets, having sold flowers in the 1400 block on Winchester Avenue for several years,” the paper partially read. “A resident of Ashland for 35 years, he was born in Logan County, W.Va., a son of Milton and Emma Mullins Haley.”
Lawrence showed me a copy of his father’s corrected obituary: “HALEY: Funeral services for James Edward Haley, 67, retired musician, who died Saturday at his home, 2144 Greenup Avenue, will be conducted at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Lazear Funeral Home with the Rev. Lawrence Colliver officiating. Burial will be in AshlandCemetery. The body is at the funeral home.”
No one played the fiddle at Ed’s funeral.
“Had a little organ music,” Lawrence said. “I don’t reckon they was anybody he’d care for playing at his funeral.”
Pat said she heard that Ed didn’t look “natural” because the funeral home had shaved off his white beard. Ella had his favorite flower, morning glory, carved on his tombstone.
02 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
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Appalachia, blind, culture, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, music, photos, U.S. South, writers, writing
Ed Haley and family, circa 1927
01 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
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Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, music, U.S. South, writers, writing
Ella, Ralph and Ed Haley, about 1920
01 Saturday Dec 2012
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Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, music, Pat Haley, U.S. South, writers, writing
Lawrence seemed to think of his parents as traveling musicians leading exciting lives — always on the go meeting new people and covering a rather large geographical area. I wondered what affect such a lifestyle had on the Haley children.
“You’ve got to remember, we didn’t start going with them — or I didn’t — until I was about seven years old, and that had to be in the summertime,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes I’d go with my mother, sometimes I’d go with my dad and my mother, sometimes my dad would take off somewhere on his own. If some of his old friends or something come around and said, ‘Ed, I want you to go with me,’ he’d be gone a week maybe somewhere. And they’d go off and play here or there.”
I asked if Ella ever got aggravated when Ed took off and Lawrence said, “I don’t think so. You know, two blind people like that trying to raise kids, I guess Mom felt that she could just stay home with her children and be a housewife. She done her own cooking and sometimes Rosie’d be around. I call her Aunt Rosie, but she was no kin to me, see? She was a big old strong stout woman — just raw-boned. Rosie married Bill Day. I guess she met Bill Day by being down here with Mom and Pop.”
Bill Day, I knew from talking with Annadeene Fraley, was Jean Thomas’ second choice to role-play Jilson Setters — after Haley. He once lived a house away from the Haleys on Halbert Avenue (now Blackburn Avenue). I wanted to get Lawrence’s spin on the Ed Haley-Bill Day relationship.
“He was a left-handed fiddler and he was a ‘Mississippi sawyer,’ I guess,” Lawrence said. “Well, at one time they lived about a quarter a mile of us, I guess. But he was the one that Jean Thomas picked for Jilson Setters. See, this Jean Thomas was supposed to take Bill Day over and play before the Queen of England or something. I don’t think that ever happened.”
Pat said, “I know I’ve heard Larry’s mother tell that Bill Day was supposed to have gone to England and played for the king and queen. And my mother-in-law said, ‘That’s impossible for them to have gone there and back in that short of time.’ When I came over in 1949, it was eight and a half days on the ocean, so it would have taken seventeen back when he went.” Lawrence laughed, “He seemed to think he went there but I think she took him out on a trip down the river somewhere and back.”
That was a really funny image but I told Lawrence that Bill’s trip overseas was pretty well documented.
“Really, Pop didn’t have much for Bill Day,” he said flatly.
As I suspicioned, Haley didn’t think much of Thomas, either, and didn’t tell her “no” politely when she offered him the part of Jilson Setters. Pat told me about meeting her years later, long after Pop’s death.
“Larry and I went out there to see if we could bring the cub scouts through her McGuffey School. She was very nice to start with and then when Larry told her who he was and who his father was she didn’t want any part of him and she told him in no uncertain terms that Pop was a drunk and a blasphemer. She was very rude to Larry and Larry was very upset about it. He stormed out and told her to go to hell. He was deeply hurt by that. I was embarrassed.”
Lawrence said he had few memories of his father toward the end of his life because he enlisted in the Air Force in 1946 and was stationed away from the family for about three years. At that time, Ed was almost completely bald and “stretched back” a lot and shook his hands, probably due to heart problems.
“Every time I’d come home on leave or something, I’d get a fifth of whisky and me and him would sit there and drink whiskey and he’d play the fiddle for us,” Lawrence said. “I’d get him to cross-tune down that bass string and he’d play such pieces as ‘Old Sledge’ and ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ and ‘Lost Indian’ for me. And a lot of other pieces.”
So Ed would take a drink?
“Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Of course, my mother didn’t like Pop to drink, but I always tried to see that he didn’t drink too much — if I didn’t drink too much myself.”
“Uh oh,” I thought, well aware that drinking is one of the chief occupational hazards of a fiddler.
Between swigs of Jim Beam, Ed told Lawrence that music never stopped, that it went on forever into outer space. He even talked about Armageddon and had “visions of the hereafter.”
Lawrence said he was stationed in England when he met Pat. By the fall of 1949, Lawrence and Pat were married and renting a two-story home at 1040 Greenup Avenue in Ashland. Lawrence’s older brother Jack lived upstairs with his wife Patsy and paying a rent of forty-five dollars per month, while Ed and Ella lived downstairs with a grandson, Ralph Mullins, paying fifty dollars a month rent.
“Downstairs was a very small bedroom on the left as you went through the front door,” Pat said. “That was Pop’s. He had a little table in there where he kept his Prince Albert tobacco and he kept a Prince Albert tobacco can for a spittoon and his bed was like an Army cot. Mom and Ralph’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. And on the right, there was the living room and then there was the dining room. The bathroom was off of the dining room and then from the dining room you went straight into the kitchen. They were large rooms with high ceilings. Linoleum on the floor. Mom and Pop were big on radios. The Victrola was in the living room. Pop used to listen to the radio in the living room. He would run that dial up and down and cup his ear up to it when he couldn’t get what he wanted on it and cuss like the devil. But Mom had one in the dining room and she had a little one in her room. You could go to the upstairs through the kitchen or you could go upstairs through the hall. Jack and Patsy had a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom upstairs and Larry and I had a bedroom. It’s a used car lot now.”
Not long after Lawrence and Pat moved in at 1040 Greenup, Jack and Patsy moved to a little cottage on a farm outside of town. “When they moved from 1040 Greenup, Mom could not afford the rent for upstairs and down,” Pat said, so the family soon moved to 2144 Greenup. At that time Ed received sixteen dollars a month for a blind pension, while Ella received nine. Lawrence drew twenty dollars a week from the Air Force and was attending watch-making school.
“Mom was also going to Cincinnati to sell newspapers and pencils,” Pat said. “She’d ride the bus on Thursday and stay till Saturday with her brother Allie. If they had a falling out, she’d stay with Sissy. I can’t ever remember her taking an instrument with her. Larry would pick her up at the bus depot on Saturday night. Sometimes we would drive to Cincinnati and get her. If we picked her up, she always gave us money for gas. If we went to Uncle Allie’s in Cincinnati and they fixed us supper, Mom always paid them for it. But when they got back to the house, Mom and Larry would always go to her room and there he would count the money. And that was always their secret.”
At 2144 Greenup — today the site of a mental health center — the Haleys rented the downstairs of a place.
“When we moved up the street to 2144 the rent was forty-five dollars a month for the downstairs,” Pat said. “There was the front room, then we had the middle room, the dining room, Mom’s room was off of the dining room, and then through the dining room you went into the kitchen and Pop’s room was off the left from the kitchen. Mom had it fixed pretty nice. She didn’t have end tables with lamps — anything like that. They didn’t need anything they would stumble over. Their furnishings were very plain. I remember the winter of 1950 was very bad and Patsy was pregnant, so Jack and Pat came in from the farm and moved in with us. They turned the front room into a bedroom for Pat and Jack.”
01 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, culture, Ed Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, life, music, photos, U.S. South, West Virginia
Johnny Hager and Ed Haley, about 1914
01 Saturday Dec 2012
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Appalachia, Ashland, Beckley, Bluefield, Chillicothe, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Farmers, fiddler, fiddlers, fiddling, Gallipolis, Gene Goforth, Hazard, history, Jenkins, Jess Adams, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Lexington, Missouri, Morehead, music, Nila Adams, Ohio, Pat Haley, Pikeville, Portsmouth, Pound, Princeton, Shannon County, U.S. South, Virginia, West Virginia, Winchester, writers, writing
Ed Haley spent his young bachelor days just “running around all over,” Lawrence said. He didn’t know any specifics about that time in his life but I could fill in the blanks based on memories of myself at that age. When I was growing up in Missouri, Gene Goforth, the great Shannon County fiddler took me into some of the darkest dives I could ever imagine — real “skull orchards.” Those places were filled with hot-tempered, burly men who were mean enough to fight or kill anyone. Even though Gene and I felt safe around them because we played their type of music, there was always an unpredictable danger in the air. I bet Ed’s music at that time in his life was as exciting as anything I would’ve ever wanted to hear, but to stay in some of those old taverns to hear it would’ve been like being in a cave full of rattlesnakes.
I asked Lawrence if he had any idea about how far Ed traveled with his music and he said, “I don’t know where he went when he was single, running the country. The way people talked, he started out about the time he married my mother. Hell, he was going twenty years before that. When he married my mother was more or less his settling down time. Well, I know he’s been all the way south through Beckley and Princeton and Bluefield, West Virginia and all the way down into Pikeville, Kentucky and over into Pound, Virginia. I guess he’s been as far as Hazard and Jenkins, Kentucky and all those little towns. County seats mostly is where he played.”
Lawrence didn’t think Ed made it as far west as Lexington, Kentucky. “They say that he never was down through the Bluegrass, but I’m pretty sure he’s been as far west into Kentucky as Winchester,” he said. “And I know he’s been to Morehead and Farmers; that’s a little town just outside of Morehead, Kentucky. He’s been to Chillicothe and Portsmouth, Gallipolis — up in Ohio that a way. Now, I don’t think he ever made it into the Carolinas or Johnson City, Tennessee but if he did it was before my time.”
Lawrence said his parents supported the family by playing music on the streets, but would play just about anywhere money could be made. “Pop used to go down to Portsmouth to a steel mill. It’s closed down now. It was a pretty good sized mill. They made everything from steel plate down to wire nails and fencing and everything else in there. It was Detroit Steel or one of those. He used to go down there, and he’d go to the railroad YMCA, too, because there was all the time train men coming and going on the N&W train line. A lot of train crews’d come in there and stay all night and Pop and Mom used to go in there and play right in the YMCA building. They used to do it down here at the Russell Y.”
Lawrence told me more about seeing Ed and Ella play for dances. “I’ve walked Mom and Pop to Morehead down the C&O Railroad tracks to Farmers — that’s six or seven miles — to play at a home. They’d take any rugs and furniture out of a room and pack them in another room and then dance. It might have been seven to nine o’clock sets, but it seemed to me like they lasted all night. I’ve seen Pop sit one set right after another without really stopping. When he’d play a piece of music, he’d play it as long as the caller wanted to call. Pop’d play ten minutes on a piece of music if that’s what was requested. Them was awful long sets. I’d get up and we’d start home at daybreak.”
I asked how Ed was paid for a dance and he said, “It would be more or less passing the hat or somebody coming up and wanting a certain piece of music played in a set or something. I don’t think they ever contracted a certain monetary fee for anything. They just took it as it came.”
Lawrence obviously preferred to think of Ed and Ella playing at dances instead of on the sidewalks, probably because street musicians are often regarded as being little more than talented bums. It was surely more romantic to think of them at county fairs, courthouses or little country houses. No doubt, he thought his father was above the street scene and likely had strong memories of long hot or cold days spent on sidewalks with passersby throwing out nickels and occasional slurs.
Pat gave me a little insight into that facet of Ed’s life story when she asked Lawrence if he’d told me about his “winter coat.” Lawrence said no because I wanted to know about Pop — not him — but she said, “Oh, I thought that was cute. He was a little boy and he was with his mama and they were in Cincinnati. It was very, very cold and he didn’t have a coat. And they were standing — you know his mama was playing — and his mother had told him he would get his winter coat for Christmas and he said, ‘Santa Claus better hurry up, Mama, ’cause I won’t be here.’ His mother went that very day and bought him that winter coat so he got his coat from Santa Claus a little bit early.”
Those were clearly memories that Lawrence didn’t care to re-hash.
“Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was lean,” he said. “Apparently, Mom and Pop was making enough. They always kept some kind of roof over our heads. We didn’t have anything fancy. Mom swept her own floors a lot of times, and she swept barefooted, and that’s the way she knew her floor was clean. She felt with her toes and her feet.”
Pat said, “My mother-in-law was very, very particular. She couldn’t stand to feel the least little thing on her — it bothered her. And if she sat down at your table — even though somebody would say, ‘These are very clean people’ — she would put her hand in the cup or the glass and run her hands over the plate. And I’ve heard people tell that they had the cleanest clothes in the area because she scrubbed them on a board and she would scrub twice as hard and twice as long to be sure those clothes were clean.”
On occasion, according to Pat, Ella even hired out neighbors to work for her. “Aunt Nila Adams worked some for your Mom,” she said to Lawrence. “She did a lot of the big cleaning.” She looked at me, “And his mother paid them well,” seemingly in an effort to compensate for the “winter coat” story. “She paid better than the average.”
Lawrence said, “Well, people like Nila Adams and Jess Adams — he was a hard-working man. He just was uneducated and that’s all he ever knew was hard work. And a lot of times that ditch-digging and hard work wasn’t around, so I guess Mom helped Nila Adams. When she’d come clean house for Mom she was helping Nila Adams keep her household together, too, in a way.”
One thing was to be understood: Ed Haley and his wife were not bums on the street begging for money. They were professional musicians who earned a decent living and who raised their children as well as any one else in the neighborhood.
30 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley, Music, Spottswood, Warren
30 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, feud, fiddler, Harts Creek, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, history, Imogene Haley, Joe Mullins, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Pat Haley, Peter Mullins, Stella Mullins, Trace Fork, U.S. South, West Virginia, writing
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.”
30 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, fiddler, history, Kentucky, music, U.S. South
Ed Haley
30 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, Ed Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, music, photos, U.S. South
John Hartford and Lawrence Haley, 1991
30 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Canada, Ed Haley, fiddler, fiddling, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, music, Pike County, Snake Chapman, U.S. South
Snake Chapman, Canada, Kentucky, 1991
29 Thursday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Akron, Appalachia, Asa Neal, Ashland, books, Calhoun County, Catlettsburg, Clay County, Clyde Haley, Columbus, Doc Holbrook, Doc White, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, feud, fiddle, fiddler, fiddlers, fiddling, Greasy George Adams, Greenup, Greenup County, Harts Creek, Ivydale, J P Fraley, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Minnie Hicks, music, Noah Haley, Ohio, Over the Waves, Parkersburg Landing, Pat Haley, Ralph Haley, Sanitary Dairy, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
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.
28 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Annadeene Fraley, Appalachia, Ashland, banjo, Benny Thomasson, blind, books, Catlettsburg, Charleston, Cherry River Rag, Clark Kessinger, Cripple Creek, DC, Dunbar, Ed Haley, fiddler, fiddling, Georgia Slim Rutland, Gus Meade, Harts Creek, history, J P Fraley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Library of Congress, life, Liza Mullins, Logan County, Marietta, music, Ohio, Ox in the Mud, Parkersburg, Parkersburg Landing, Pat Haley, Ralph Haley, Rouder Records, Sourwood Mountain, Steve Haley, Washington, West Virginia, Wilcox-Gay, writing
I spent the next two months thinking about the best way to approach Lawrence Haley. It was imperative that I made the right impression — should I call or write? Should I ease into the situation or just tell him how great I thought his father was? It was a fantastic moment — a period of time just before “contact” when I was mostly daydreaming and not nearly so swept away. In that instant, I was content to just talk with Ed Haley’s son and find out as much as I could about one of the world’s greatest fiddlers.
I finally decided to write Lawrence a letter, a perfectly natural thing to do since he was a retired postman. I had a million questions but limited myself to this:
Dear Mr. Haley,
I am deeply inspired by your father and his music. I’ve almost completely worn out the Parkersburg Landing album and have become very interested in him. I believe him to be the best as well as the most important fiddler of our time. Through his influence on Clark Kessinger and Georgia Slim who in turn influenced Benny Thomasson he could be considered the grandfather of the present Texas contest fiddling style.
I would have given anything to have heard him and seen him. I’ve read everything I can find and have talked to J.P. and Annadene Fraley at length for any little tidbit about him. I would love to meet you and hear you talk of him.
Yours very truly,
John Hartford
Because of my promise to Gus Meade, I was careful not to divulge the fact that I had heard any of Ed’s tunes not featured on Parkersburg Landing and had resolved that if I should be so lucky that Lawrence would at some future time play some of them I would act surprised.
A few days later, after getting the “go-ahead” from Annadeene Fraley by telephone, I gave Lawrence a call. He was extremely nice and seemed happy that I was interested in his father. He said he used to watch me on TV years ago.
“You’re the guy with the derby that danced and played the fiddle at the same time,” he said in a somewhat raspy voice.
I hesitantly asked about his father’s records. He said he had most of his dad’s original home recordings, as well as reel-to-reel copies made by the Library of Congress.
“I got four little seven-inch tapes here with some music on them,” he said, before reading the titles. I carefully wrote each title down, taking special note of the ones I had never heard of. Lawrence said his father sometimes named tunes after places where he played, like with “Catlettsburg”, a small river town near Ashland, or with “Parkersburg Landing”, a West Virginia city just below Marietta, Ohio.
“I don’t know where Pop gets all these names from,” Lawrence said, as if Ed were still alive to name them. “I think when my dad went somewhere and played, and if people liked what they heard, that’s the way he named them. Like that ‘Parkersburg Landing’, he was probably up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, playing and people liked it so that’s what he called it. I’m not sure how they got named but that’s what I’d say.”
There were other tunes like “Dunbar”, named for a small town near Charleston, West Virginia, and “Cherry River Rag”, named after a river in eastern West Virginia.
After reading Ed’s titles, Lawrence said, “Pop played quite a few more pieces than that, of course. It’s really hard to say how many of his records are out there that I don’t know about. Several years ago, this guy brought me one of his records with a tune on it called ‘Ox in the Mud’. He said he had wanted it on a record so bad he took Pop to one of these recording studios and had it made. Well, I traded him one of those Parkersburg Landing albums for it and I guess he was satisfied with that because he got quite a bit more music.”
Wow – the prospect of finding more Ed Haley records was exciting. I could just imagine digging through a box in some antique store along the Ohio River and finding Haley records mixed in with old Big Band orchestra albums and selling at a quarter each.
Putting such thoughts aside, I turned my mind back to Lawrence, who was actually holding Ed Haley records at that moment in Ashland, Kentucky. I asked him about the type of records and their general condition.
“The records are mostly Wilcox-Gay plastic records,” he said. “When I took them to the Library of Congress in Washington, some of them was in pretty bad shape. The hole where the spindle was, some of them was wore oblong and they had to put weights and everything else on them and they come up with a flutter in them. I allowed Rounder Records to make a copy of them because they said they was gonna put out a couple of albums.”
I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve heard a lot of fiddling that was made on old records at that time and your dad was so far ahead of any of them it’s not funny. In the one sense, he’s an old-time musician. In the other, he’s modern. That knocked me out. He may be the heaviest musician I ever heard. His syncopation and his timing and his intonation… Because them old-timey notes, you know, you can’t hit them right on the head. You’ve got to shade them. And to shade them, you’ve got to really know if they’re in tune or not and not just anybody can do that. And boy, he is a master of it.”
I was obviously a little carried away and caught up in the moment.
Lawrence sort of laughed and said, “I know he was a good, fine fiddler. My dad held the fiddle out onto his left side right at the top of his bicep where his arm and chest met – the armpit, just about. It was more of a classical violinist’s stance than the old mountain fiddler holding it down towards his knee or close to his knee and right in front of him. I’ve seen him lean his chin over on the base of the violin at times. You know, like people trying to hold that fiddle up there on their shoulder and under their chin, they can’t get their fingers right if they don’t let go of the fiddle on the neck of it. Well, Pop didn’t have to dip the bow a lot of times. What he did, he’d rock the fiddle to that string to meet the bow, see? And that was tricky, too.”
I said, “I’ll tell you what, he’s got one of the best bow arms I’ve ever heard. He gets those notes out so clear.”
Lawrence interjected, “He used all the bow, too. A lot of people, they’ve got to saw the bow back and forth. My dad used every inch of the bow from one end to the other. He didn’t grab the bow up on the strings like a lot of fiddlers. You know, half way up the bow. He got right back on the bow where you tighten the string and his finger was on that tightening fret. His little finger was wrapped around that, more or less.”
I said, “It sounds like he long-bowed a lot, where he’d pull that bow down and get four or five notes on a bow stroke.”
“Yes he did,” Lawrence said without hesitation. “Pop would use every bit of that bow to get it.”
Discussing Ed’s bowing prompted me to think about Ed’s fiddle. I had looked at it many times in the Parkersburg Landing picture and wondered if it survived fifty years after his death.
“I’ve got the old fiddle,” Lawrence said, “but it’s really not playable. We lived at a place one time where we had an excess of moisture and it got to this old fiddle and it started coming apart. My son Steve took it and had some instrument re-builder to put it back together but they never could get it back together right so it’s lost all of its intonation. I’ve got it but it’s not really worth playing because it hasn’t got the resonance to it.”
I told Lawrence I was hoping to be back in Ashland in a few days and would love to visit him and see his father’s records.
“Well, if you come up and you can get a hold of some kind of portable tape player I don’t care to let you copy Pop’s records,” he said. “They will probably just set here till some kind of magnetism comes along and takes all the information off of them. But they’re here and I hope nothing happens to them.”
Well, this was an unexpected offer from someone who was reportedly so over-protective of his father’s music.
I asked Lawrence how old Ed was when he passed away and he said, “Let’s see. I was about 23 or 24. Right now, I’m an old man. I’ve had quite a bit of heart problems. I spent the biggest part of November in the hospital on a ventilator. I was having congestive heart failure. I guess you hear how my voice sounds. They rammed something down my vocal box between my vocal chords and I’ve never got my voice back right. Well, I’m more or less living one day at a time. I’m 63 now.”
I said, “Well, you’re exactly ten years older than I am.”
“Well, you’re getting up there, too, aren’t you? Not the young man we remember on TV,” Lawrence said.
Hoping to get more at the source of Ed’s music, I asked Lawrence if his dad talked about where he learned to play.
“Not to me, no,” he said. “I’ve heard some stories but just like all other legendary people whenever a story is told twice it’s been embellished quite a bit. One fella said to keep from starving to death my dad sat out and eat wild onions with a piece of cold cornbread that he’d take out of the kitchen of my great-aunt Liza’s house, who raised him. But that wasn’t true. I’ve heard Pop tell me personally that he’d take a salt-shaker and a big onion and something like that and a piece of cornbread and go out in the garden and get him a tomato and eat that. I’ve never heard him talk about eating wild onions.”
I had given little thought to Ed’s childhood and birthplace.
“Where he was raised it was kind of rough country up in West Virginia,” Lawrence said. “He come out of Logan County, West Virginia, out in a country called Harts Creek. We used to go up there quite often until I was about nine or ten years old because my dad would go back there. He’d go around courthouse days and play music out in the courthouse lawn for change and things and that’s the way he made his living. He’d go to fairs and any other activities that might draw a crowd where he could play music. That’s how him and my mother made their money and raised us kids.”
How many kids were there in the family?
“They was seven of us all together,” Lawrence said. “I was the youngest boy and then I had a sister younger than me. But I had one brother to die when he was in infancy so really there was only five boys and one girl they raised. They got us up one way or the other without jerking us too hard.”
I asked Lawrence if he remembered his father playing for dances.
“I remember one afternoon we walked from Morehead, Kentucky down to Farmers,” he said. “That’s four or five miles. At that time they didn’t have too good a roads through there so we walked the railroad tracks. I was just a kid. We went to these people’s house and they rolled back the rugs and things and Pop sat there and played all night until the sun come up. I don’t know when Pop made the arrangements. Just him and my mother.”
For the next minute or so, I really bragged on Ed’s music. I had listened to it for years and had a lot of emotion about it. Finally, Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve heard him make a sour note on a few of these records but I think he learned his violin real good.”
Lawrence said his father played the fiddle from the time he was a small child.
“The way I understood it, he become blind when he was a couple of years old and they couldn’t figure out what to do with my dad,” he said. “He was blind and living out on the farm and somebody made him a violin out of a cigar box and he started out from there and just self-taught hisself, I reckon. As he went along, he got a hold of old instruments, I guess, and showed some promise and somebody looked after him and saw that he got the right things any way.”
I was very interested in Haley’s early travels, particularly before he married and settled in Ashland.
“I guess by the time Pop was eighteen, nineteen years old — that’s back at the turn of the century — he was traveling all over West Virginia and eastern Tennessee and western Old Virginia and parts of Ohio and eastern Kentucky,” Lawrence said. “He went to White Sulphur Springs and Webster Springs — these places that were pretty well known as spas and health resorts. He went to the state capital around Charleston. I’ve heard Pop talk about when he’d be in Charleston. He said he’d guarantee if he was at the Capitol building or somewhere playing music, Clark Kessinger would be there a listening trying to learn his style. I think that’s the way that Clark Kessinger got his style of Ed Haley, just watching him around Charleston, West Virginia.”
I told Lawrence that Kessinger was a great fiddle player but that he wasn’t even close to his dad.
That seemed to delight Lawrence, who was quiet for a moment before saying, “I’m glad to hear somebody say that. That’s one reason I agreed to let Rounder Records make an album or two. I thought there might be somebody out there that would appreciate that type of music and want to preserve it some way or the other. Once bluegrass and country rock and all that took off the old mountain-type music that came over from England and Ireland and Scotland and some of the Dutch and Scandinavian countries has just about been lost.”
Easing into more musical dialogue, I told Lawrence about my theory that Haley was a grandfather of the modern Texas contest fiddling style.
“Well, I don’t know about all of that John,” he said, “but when he’d start a piece over — he’d play each piece about four or five times — he had a different variation. It would still be the same piece of music but it always seemed to vary some from the first run through to the second run through. Well, I’ve seen him vary the speed even. When he is getting toward the end — maybe the last run — he’ll speed up the tempo and things like that or make some different finger work. And that was some of the difficulties my brother had about making records with him. My brother played the mandolin or guitar and my mother played the mandolin some.”
Lawrence said his father’s blindness, as well as his distaste for the up-and-coming commercial music industry, hindered his willingness to record music.
“When radio first took off they tried to get my dad to make records, but he always felt he couldn’t do it because they had to cue him in as to when to start,” he said. “My brother had quite a bit of problems like that when he made those home-made records with my dad. And on top of that, my dad felt that recordings were just some way for somebody to take him. After so many records had been sold over a thousand, he might get two cents on the record or something like that. He felt like he’d rather get out on the street and play it for free among friends. I’ve come to the conclusion, Why not?”
I asked Lawrence if Ed played around the house and he said, “Yeah, he’d practice sometimes. I’ve seen him get out the fiddle and just play for himself. He’d listen to a piece of music… One that I can think of real good, but I don’t think he ever really come out and made any version of it for hisself was Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. I think he figured the afterlife was about like Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’: what you did all your life was gonna be your hell if you didn’t do it right, if you didn’t enjoy it.”
While crediting some of Ed’s contemporaries, Lawrence seemed to regard his father as a highly gifted prodigy surrounded by mediocrity. He implied that his father humbly felt the same way, although it was an occasional source of aggravation, especially in his later years. “A lot of guys would get around Pop and aggravate him,” Lawrence said, “but I think he enjoyed music.”
I told Lawrence I would give almost anything to have seen his father play.
“Well, it’s a shame there’s no kind of video of Pop because he had an easy style of violin playing. It didn’t look strenuous to him.”
Ever conscious of genetics, I asked Lawrence if any of his family played music. He said his son Steve Haley — who lived just north of me in Hendersonville — was a former band instructor.
“He graduated from Morehead as a music major and taught high school band in Knoxville. His two daughters are taking violin lessons and are in whatever little junior symphony they have there in Hendersonville. They play semi-classical stuff.”
I asked Lawrence if Ed played any instruments aside from the fiddle and he said, “My dad was an old hammer-thumb banjo-picker like Pappy Jones. He played ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘Sourwood Mountain’ — really just about anything he played on the fiddle. And he put just about as many notes in on the banjo as he did on the fiddle. I’m not a bragger about my dad but he was a good banjo player, too.”
This was a new twist: I hadn’t even considered that Haley might have been a multi-instrumentalist.
“I never seen Pop play a piano,” Lawrence said, “but he could set down and play a piece of music on our old pump organ. And he taught my older brother Ralph how to play the guitar. Sometimes my dad would be playing the fiddle and my brother would be trying to pick up a piece of music with him and he’d tell Ralph what chords to hit, how to change chords and all that. He could make a run between notes and my dad could, too. Yeah, Pop could play any instrument, or I guess a little bit on anything that was handy to him anyway.”
I wondered if there were any recordings of Haley playing the banjo.
“No, not a thing on the banjo. My brother Ralph, when he come out of the service — in 1946, I guess it was — he got a hold of one of these Army surplus machines that had a cutting needle on it that cut the grooves and that’s what he made all these records on. Some of them are paper with a plastic coat on them. Others are a solid plastic. But most of them are all scratched and some of the paper ones are wore completely through the plastic into the paper. I’ve tried to keep them here at home. Some parts of the records are good.”
Just before hanging up, Lawrence said, “It was kind of a surprise to us to have got your letter. Annadeene called here and told us that you’ve been trying to get a hold of us. Our daughter, when you was here, she’d just had her operation, I guess. I think they’re gonna give her some radiation treatment and we will be making some trips back up there to Ohio but we’ll try to be here if you come.”
At that point, Lawrence turned the telephone over to his wife Pat who said in a pleasant British accent, “I do invite you and whoever you’re bringing with you to stay with us overnight or whatever. I have a front bedroom with two double beds and it’s just Larry and I that live here and we appreciate you showing an interest.”
28 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Arthur Smith, Benny Thomasson, books, Cacklin Hen, Clark Kessinger, Clayton McMichen, Dr. Charles Wolfe, Earl Spielman, Eck Robertson, Ed Haley, fiddler, Forked Deer, Georgia Slim Rutland, history, J P Fraley, John Hartford, Ladies on the Steamboat, music, Nashville, National Folklore Festival, Parkersburg Landing, Skeets Williamson, Snake Chapman, Tennessee, Texas, The Devil's Box, Tug Boat, U.S. South, writers, writing
Back in Nashville, I thought a great deal about Ed Haley’s place in relation to other fiddlers of his time. I’m not much on categorizing people but I agreed with Dr. Wolfe, who put Ed in a “creative” class of fiddlers that included Eck Robertson, Clark Kessinger, Arthur Smith and Clayton McMichen. These fiddlers, according to Dr. Wolfe, felt that technique was just as important as repertoire – one of the trademarks of the Texas contest fiddling style so popular today.
“I like to flavor up a tune so that nobody in the world could tell what I’m playing,” Haley once told Skeets Williamson.
For creative fiddlers, writes forensic musicologist Earl Spielman in The Devil’s Box, “a fiddle tune is not just an ornamented melody; a melody is merely the raw, undeveloped, unprocessed material out of which a tune can grow and reach maturity. In Texas, instead of playing a repetition of the melody, the fiddler plays a variation of the original material. Each new variation can be radically different from the preceding one. The object of the fiddler is to avoid duplication and to be as innovative as possible within the limits of what is acceptable. As might be expected, any regular pattern of bowing is avoided. The bowing characteristic of Texas fiddling consists of fairly long bow strokes executed very smoothly with the bow rarely leaving the strings and with the number of notes played on each stroke varying from a single note to as many as seven or eight.”
Creation of the Texas contest style is accredited to Benny Thomasson, who competed with rival Major Franklin to such a fierce degree that he started improvising tunes and adding new parts onto them.
“Back when I started they had only two part tunes, and that was it,” Thomasson said in a 1982 interview. “In the older days when I began to come up I took these old tunes and began to build different sections to them. Like there would be two parts. Well, I’d add another. It would be the same part but in a different position. The old-timey fiddling that they try and hang onto nowadays, it’s all right. It’s good to listen to but we take those same tunes and just weave a web around them and make it come out real pretty.”
Many fiddle scholars agree that Benny Thomasson got his ideas about adding onto tunes from Texas fiddler, Eck Robertson. He was inspired enough by Robertson’s multi-part version of “Sally Gooden” (recorded in 1922) to say that Eck played it “better than anyone else in the world.” Haley was also proficient at adding parts; his “Forked Deer” had four parts, while his “Cacklin’ Hen” had eleven.
While there is no documented evidence that Ed Haley ever met Eck Robertson or Benny Thomasson, there is a link between Thomasson and Ed through Clark Kessinger and Georgia Slim Rutland. Benny borrowed heavily from Kessinger’s Haley-like early records, particularly “Tug Boat”, which Kessinger had gotten from Haley’s “Ladies on the Steamboat”. Likewise, Georgia Slim Rutland – one of radio’s top fiddlers in the 1940s – “allegedly spent one year in Ashland listening to Ed Haley play,” according to Parkersburg Landing, and was personally acquainted with Thomasson.
Because of Haley’s connection to Clark Kessinger and Georgia Slim, and their subsequent influence on Benny Thomasson, I began to formulate a theory that Haley was a “grandfather” of the Texas contest fiddling style. I must have been onto something because when I later mentioned it to J.P. Fraley, he said, “Well see, I knew Benny Thomasson and he knew about Ed Haley because I was playing at the National Folklore Festival and he wanted to know about that fella.”
Aside from such speculation, I also tried to discover more about Haley’s music from Parkersburg Landing. Hearing Snake Chapman and J.P. Fraley’s account of their experiences with him made my thirst to know more about his life and music overwhelming. I hated that I would never be able to see him play or talk to him. My family kidded me about trying to make up for that impossibility by doing everything short of digging him up and screwing him back together. They were aware – even before I – that I was obsessed with his story. My wife often poked her head into my office thinking I’d gone crazy listening to his recordings over and over. To her, they were nothing more than a bunch of surface noise and static, but the music was there and the feelings and pictures it made were unforgettable.
27 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Annadeene Fraley, Appalachia, Ashland, Ballad Makin' in the Mountains of Kentucky, Bert Hatfield, Bill Day, Birdie, Black Mountain Rag, Bloody Ground, Bonaparte's Retreat, books, Canada, Catlettsburg, David Haley, Dick Fraley, Doc Chapman, Dry and Dusty, Ed Haley, fiddler, fiddlers, fiddling, Gallagher's Drug Store, Grey Eagle, history, Horse Branch, J P Fraley, Jean Thomas, Jilson Setters, John F. Day, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Maysville, music, New Money, Paul David Smith, Pikeville, Snake Chapman, The Singin' Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow, The Wheel, Wee House in the Wood, White Rose Waltz, writers, writing
As soon as my schedule cleared, I loaded my car and traveled north on I-65 out of Nashville toward the home of J.P. and Annadeene Fraley in Carter County, Kentucky. I took the Bluegrass Parkway northeast to Lexington, where I boarded I-64 and drove eastward past Winchester, Mt. Sterling and Owingsville. In a short time, I was in “Ed Haley country,” passing by Morehead — birthplace of Mrs. Ed Haley — and through the northern end of the Daniel Boone National Forest. A little later, I took the Grayson exit, where I found J.P. and Annadeene at their beautiful log home in a small settlement called Denton.
In the initial small talk, J.P. told about seeing Ed Haley play on the streets of Ashland. He specifically remembered him playing at Gallagher’s Drug Store where he sat cross-legged “like an Indian” with his back against the wall “right by the doors where you go in.” Ed kept a hat out for money and knew people by the sound of their voices. In the cold months, he played inside for square dances, Kiwanis Club events, and at local beer joints like “The Wheel.” J.P. said, “Now business people treated him good but the general public, they didn’t know what they was doing.”
At that point, we got our instruments out and squared up to play some tunes. As J.P. worked through his repertoire — “Birdie” (Haley’s version), “New Money”, “White Rose Waltz” — he sang little ditties and gave some of the history behind his tunes. He played a great tune called “Maysville” and said, “Daddy played it. What it was, they wasn’t no tobacco warehouses in Morehead or Flemingsburg so they had to haul their tobacco plumb into Maysville to sell it. When they was going there, they played the tune fast because they was happy. They were going to get that tobacco check, see? On the way back, they was playing it slow because they were drunk. They all had hangovers.”
J.P. also played “Grey Eagle”, “Black Mountain Blues” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat”. His treatment of this latter piece was somewhat unique — he began it with “Dry and Dusty” (“Daddy’s introduction”) — although he really bragged on Haley’s version. “If you listen to that record you got, you can hear… It’s just like cannons going off. I mean he was doing it on the fiddle. Man he had the best version of that. Ed Haley was colorful with his fiddle tunes.”
In between all of the fiddling and reminiscing, little comments spilled out about Haley. Things like, “His fingers was like a girls.” Then more fiddling.
Some time later, J.P. and I put our instruments away and sat down to dinner. Between bites, I asked him where he remembered Haley playing in Ashland.
“His range was right along 15th – 16th Street on Winchester Avenue. When you went down between Winchester and Greenup, there was shoe shops and a saloon or two and a poolroom where mostly a congregation of men were. Then over on Greenup the women’d be shopping. Sometimes he played on Front Street, but that was a wild part of town. I don’t ever remember his wife being over in there but I seen him there when the boy was picking with him. Down by the railroad over on Front Street, there used to be stores over there — and on Greenup. I mean, grocery stores, family stores. I can remember seeing him play in front of one — had to be down there. I guess around 14th Street on Greenup. I guess hunting season was going on because wild rabbits was hung up out there for sale…with the fur still on them. And stocks of bananas. Slabs of bacon, hams. I mean they wasn’t bound up to keep the flies off of them.”
After dinner, I played some of Haley’s music on cassette tapes for J.P. He casually told how people sometimes griped about Ella’s accompaniment being too loud. He also brought up how people occasionally complained when Haley played inside Ashland businesses. J.P.’s father once confronted a store owner who had asked Ed to leave his store. “Daddy told me he’d went in that hardware store, you know, to take up for Ed,” J.P. said. “The storeowner knowed Dad. He said, ‘Now Dick, you forget about it ’cause I’d ruther for him to be out there a fiddling as all them people to come in here that’s been a complaining about him.’ It wasn’t really a problem.” I said, “So he fiddled outside the hardware store all the time?” and J.P. said, “Right in that vicinity. If it was rainy or a real hot sun, you’d find him along there playing.”
Annadeene and I made plans to visit Ed’s son, Lawrence Haley, in Ashland the following day. J.P. showed me to a guest bedroom, presumably to turn in for the night, but we were soon playing music again. He cranked out “Goin’ Back to Kentucky”, then said, “I bet you money Ed Haley played that because Asa Neal did.”
The next morning, Annadeene and I hopped onto US Route 60 and made the thirty-minute drive into Ashland, the place where Ed Haley lived the last thirty years of his life. In those days, Ashland was a somewhat affluent industrial town on the Ohio River. Today, its population has dwindled to around 20,000 and its once prominent river culture seems long gone. It is best known as the hometown of country music stars, Naomi and Wynonna Judd, as well as movie actress Ashley Judd. It was clear that the place seemed to be somewhat depressed in the way most river towns are in this section of the Ohio River, outside of a budding shopping center to the northeast.
Annadeene and I drove around town for about an hour. She pointed out all the places she remembered Ed playing and told me all about his relationship with Jean Thomas, the late Ashland folklorist. I had heard of Jean Thomas and was roughly aware of the arguments for and against her work in Ashland to preserve and perpetuate mountain culture. She was the creator of the American Folksong Festival, an annual production held at the “Wee House in the Wood.” The central character in Thomas’ festival was Jilson Setters, a blind fiddler character “from Lost Hope Hollow” who Annadeene said had been inspired by Haley. She was sure of this, having served as Thomas’ personal secretary years ago.
In The Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow (1938), Thomas gave an account of her first encounter with ‘Jilson’ at a local courthouse: “There under the great leafy oak in the court house yard, the sun gleaming on its wet leaves, stood an old man, tall, gaunt, with a hickory basket on his arm, a long oil cloth poke clutched in his hand. It was the poke that caught my eye. Already a crowd was gathering about him. He put down the basket, then took off his dilapidated wide-brimmed felt and placed it, upturned, on the wet grass at his feet. Carefully he untied the string on the oilcloth poke and – to my surprise – took out a fiddle! In another moment, fiddle to chin, his sightless eyes raised to heaven, he swept the bow across the strings with masterly ease…and sang in a strong, a vibrant voice for one so old. While he fiddled a measure, before starting the next stanza, I fairly flew across the road. I wanted to be close at the old minstrel’s side, lest I lose a word that fell from his lips. When the song was ended I clapped loud and long, like the rest, and like them, too, tossed a coin into the old fellow’s hat.”
Annadeene said Thomas first offered Haley the opportunity to role-play Jilson Setters but he refused. He likely agreed with writer John F. Day, who offered a scathing criticism of Thomas in Bloody Ground (1941). “The trouble with most ballad-pushers, as well as of the other ‘native culturists,’ is that they’re seeking their own exultation under a guise of working for the benefit of the mountain people,” Day wrote. “One wonders as he watches the American Folksong Festival whether it’s all for the glory of God, art, and mountain balladry, or Jean Thomas, Jean Thomas and Jean Thomas. After reading one of Jean Thomas’ books I feel ill. Everything is so lovely and quaint; so damnably, sickeningly quaint. Writers like Jean Thomas would have one believe that every-other mountaineer goes around singing quaint, beautiful sixteenth-century ballads as he plunks on a dulcimer. The people of Kentucky laugh at Miss Thomas’ stuff, but the people outside the state are willing to lap it up. Now in the first place thousands of hill dwellers know no old ballads and other thousands know the old ones but prefer the newer ones. In the second place 90 per cent of the ballads and 90 per cent of the ballad singers stink. Further, the only dulcimers left in the hills are gathering dust on the walls of the settlement schools. The mountain people found out long ago there wasn’t any music in the damned things, and so they discarded them for fiddles, banjos, and guitars.”
After Haley refused to play the part of Jilson Setters, Thomas chose Blind Bill Day, a left-handed fiddler and migrant to Ashland. At some point, she took him to play his fiddle for the Queen of England. Based on Thomas’ book, Ballad Makin’ In The Mountains of Kentucky (1939), Day met his future wife “Rhuhamie” (actually named Rosie) on Horse Branch in Catlettsburg, Kentucky.
I went to Ed Haley’s the day it was bright
I met with a woman I loved at first sight.
I asked her some questions about her past life.
She told me she was single – but had been a wife.
In deep conversation I studied her mind,
She had come down to Brushy to wait on the blind;
The labor was hard and the wages was small,
I soon saw that she did not like Horse Branch at all.
Needless to say, the entire concept of Jilson Setters went a long way in destroying Thomas’ credibility as an authentic folklorist. John F. Day wrote: “The mountaineers had to be quaint. Such determination led to hoaxes like the one Jean Thomas perpetrated with ‘Jilson Setters, the Singing Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow.’ She took this ‘typical representative of the quaint mountain folk of Kentucky’ to New York and to London and made quite a name for herself and him. But though he might have been Jilson Setters to the New Yorkers and the English he was James William Day (nicknamed ‘Blind Bill’ Day) to the people of Kentucky who knew him. There may be a ‘Lost Hope Hollow’ – they name them everything – but nobody in the Kentucky mountains ever heard of it. There was no particular harm of course in changing Bill Day’s name to Jilson Setters if the latter sounded more poetic – or something. Names are changed every day in Hollywood. The harm came in pawning off Bill, well-coached in quaintness, as a representative of the Kentucky mountain people. But the most laughable part of the whole affair was that Bill Day had lived for years in Ashland and Catlettsburg, and of all the sections of the Kentucky mountains, that in which the two cities lie is the most modern. Ashland is an industrial city of more than 30,000 population, and Catlettsburg is almost a suburb. The Big Sandy Valley was opened up years before southeastern Kentucky, and thus if one is to find any ‘quaintness’ at all he must get out of the Big Sandy country.”
Annadeene and I drove around Ashland for about an hour discussing such things before heading to nearby Catlettsburg, Kentucky on US Route 23. According to J.P. Fraley, Catlettsburg — a former boomtown for loggers who rafted timber out of the Big Sandy River at the turn of the century — served as Ed Haley’s place of residence during the twenties and early thirties. Today, its historic and interesting downtown area — featuring the Boyd County Courthouse and other buildings that attest to its short prosperous history — is almost hidden from view due to a railroad to the south and a large floodwall to the north. Its most visible section is a modern strip along US Route 23, consisting of a slow-moving four-lane road dotted with gas stations, old dwelling houses and fast-food restaurants. A sign proclaims Catlettsburg as a town of 6000 residents and maps show it situated across the Big Sandy River from the town of Kenova, West Virginia and across the Ohio River from South Point, Ohio.
After looking over the place, Annadeene and I drove back to Ashland on Winchester Avenue and turned onto 45th Street at a large, brick Presbyterian church. We drove up a narrow and curvy street until it crested at Gartrell Street, where Annadeene pointed out the home of Lawrence Haley, an unpretentious white one-and-a-half-story residence. We parked on the street and eased out of the car toward the Haley porch. As I stood there preparing to ring the doorbell, I noticed the original picture of Ed Haley featured on Parkersburg Landing hanging just inside a window on the living room wall. I had goose bumps in realizing how much this experience meant to me. After a few rings of the bell, it was clear that no one was home.
Just as we were ready to step off of the porch, a young girl with a wonderful smile came up from next door and said that her grandparents had gone over into Ohio. I realized just then that she was Ed’s great-granddaughter and was instantly as impressed as if I’d just met the daughter of the President of the United States. A stocky man with a dark mustache followed her over and introduced himself as her father, David Haley. Annadeene and I talked with him briefly, then said we’d come back some time when his parents were home. I walked out of the Haley yard wondering if the girl or her father had inherited any of Ed’s musical talent.
Later in the day, after parting ways with the Fraleys, I drove south through the Big Sandy Valley on US Route 23 to see Snake Chapman, the fiddler who remembered seeing Ed Haley so often during his youth in Pike County, Kentucky. At Pikeville, I took US Route 119 to Snake’s mountain home up Chapman Hollow near a settlement called Canada. Snake was a retired coalminer who spent most of his time caring for his sick wife. He was very mild-spoken — almost meek — and had what seemed like hundreds of cats all over his yard (even on the roof of his house). Once we began playing music, it was clear that he was a great old-time fiddler. I had a blast with his buddies, Bert Hatfield (a relative of the feuding Hatfields) and Paul David Smith.
Snake told me a little about his father, Doc Chapman. “He was an herb doctor, Dad was. Everybody knowed him by Doc Chapman. He knowed every herb that growed here in the mountains and what they was for and doctored people all around.” Doc was also a fiddler.
Snake took up his fiddle and played several more tunes, including Haley’s version of “Birdie”. Snake was a man of few words, so most of my visit consisted of playing old-time tunes. I spent the night at Bert Hatfield’s, then left eastern Kentucky on US 119 and US 25E via the Cumberland Gap.
26 Monday Nov 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, Billy in the Lowground, Birdie, Blackberry Blossom, blind, books, Catlettsburg, Charleston, Clovis Hurt, Columbus, Doc Holbrook, Ed Haley, fiddle, fiddler, Flannery's Dream, Forked Deer, Grayson, Greenup, history, J P Fraley, James A Garfield, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, logging, Morehead, music, Ohio, Old Sledge, Parkersburg Landing, Portsmouth, Ralph Haley, Rounder Records, Route 60, Snake Chapman, Soldiers Joy, Tennessee Wagner, The Wild Rose of the Mountain, West Virginia, Wild Wagner, writing
A few days later, while re-reading the liner notes for Parkersburg Landing, I focused in on the name of J.P. Fraley as one of the informants for Ed’s biographical information. Encouraged by my success in contacting Snake, I got J.P.’s telephone number from a mutual friend and just called him up. He lived near Grayson, Kentucky, a small town southwest of Ashland and roughly mid-way between Ashland and Morehead on Route 60. I could tell right away that Ed Haley was one of his favorite subjects.
As soon as I mentioned Haley’s album, J.P. just took off. “You know, he never did make a commercial record. Those little old things, they had a cardboard center. They was home recordings. At the time, Rounder was a making the record that I did, The Wild Rose of the Mountain, and I told them about Ed Haley. And we was lucky with Lawrence, one of his boys…”
J.P. stopped.
“John, I’ll tell you quickly the story of it. Lawrence was really proud of his daddy, but people around Ashland would say, ‘Aw, he was just a bum.’ Well, he wasn’t a bum. Anyway, I got a hold of Lawrence and he was dubious about even letting us make an album of the records. He was pretty well put out because his daddy never did get recognition, but I told him Rounder was legitimate. He said, ‘I’ll go with you and take them records.’ He insisted on it. He was on the verge of being a retired postman. So he went to the Smithsonian and finally come out with the album. It tickled me to death that they did it.”
J.P. paused and then said, “Well, so much for that. I’m on your nickel,” – as if what he’d just told me was something I didn’t really care to hear.
I asked him to tell me more, specifically about his memories of seeing Haley on the street. He said, “You know, he fascinated me. When I was just a kid learning to fiddle, my daddy was a merchant. He’d take me into Ashland and stand me on the street just to listen to this blind fiddler and his boy play. I was about twelve or fourteen. Well, even earlier than that I was listening to him on the street – watching him – and I swear to god, his fingers, when he played the fiddle just looked like they was dancing. It was out of this world. Now, I don’t know which world’s fair it was, but they picked him up – I think it was Mr. Holbrook, the doctor – and took him to the world’s fair and the critics in New York – might have been ’35 or somewhere in there – wrote about him. Said he was a ‘fiddling genius.’ Just what I already knew, and I was just a kid.”
In the 1940s, one of J.P.’s friends, Clovis Hurt, had a run-in with Haley at Murphy’s Ten Cent Store in Ashland. “Clovis Hurt played fiddle in a band. He discovered Ed playing on the street and it just had him washed away. So Clovis told Ed that he was a fiddler. Ed said, ‘Have you got a fiddle?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Ed said, ‘Where’s it at?’ He said, ‘It’s in the car.’ Ed said, ‘Get it and play me a tune.'” J.P. chuckled. “Now, this happened. They was several of us around there when this took place. Clovis never did like Ed after what happened. He got his fiddle out and he played a tune called ‘Grandmaw’s Chickens’. It sounded like a whole flock of them – scared chickens. Ed said, ‘Listen, I wanna tell you something. Don’t you play the fiddle in public anymore. You’re just a learning it a little bit.’ Clovis hated him. Well, I mean he didn’t hate him, but he said he didn’t like him. Said he didn’t have any personality. I said, ‘Well, Clovis, he didn’t have to have. He made it with the fiddle.’ But he was nice enough.”
So Ed wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even though he was blind?
“Oh, no,” J.P. said. “I’ve heard him get loud. He would actually try to fight if somebody bothered him. He’d tell them, ‘Come around here.'”
Haley apparently had a cranky side: according to Parkersburg Landing, he “was known for his irascible moods and anyone who did not properly appreciate music was liable to his scorn.
I asked J.P. about Haley’s fiddle and he said, “Well, Ed wouldn’t fool with a cheap instrument. Over the years, he had several fiddles. This doctor I told you about – Doc Holbrook – he had one of Ed’s fiddles and I got to keep it for two or three years.”
As for Haley’s technique, J.P. said he “leaned” the fiddle against his chest when playing and held the bow at its end. I wondered if he played long or short bow strokes. “He done it both. I know when he played for his own benefit he used more bow. But he played a lot for dances and as they used to say they had to play ‘quick and devilish.'”
Did he play in cross-key?
“Oh Lord, yeah.”
What about bluegrass music? Did he like it?
“I honestly don’t think Ed woulda fooled with it. He didn’t do a whole lot of double-stopping or too many minors and stuff.”
Being an avid collector of fiddle tunes, I was very curious about Haley’s repertoire. J.P. said, “Oh, Lord. I play some of his tunes: ‘Birdie’ and ‘Billy in the Lowground’. And he played tunes like ‘Old Sledge’. He played all the standards like ‘Soldiers Joy’ and ‘Forked Deer’ and all of that. ‘Wagner’. He didn’t call it ‘Tennessee Wagner’, but he called it ‘Wild Wagner’. He played a tune that I woulda loved to learned – one called ‘Flannery’s Dream’. He was limited but now he would play hymns, too – especially on the street, on account of this is the whole Bible Belt. He played some waltzes. They were crudely pretty. I don’t remember him a singing at all, but now I have heard his wife sing and him backing her on the fiddle.”
I asked J.P. if he remembered Haley playing the eastern Kentucky version of “Blackberry Blossom” and he said yes – that he played it, too. He knew a little bit about the tune’s history: “Well, General Garfield was a fiddler. A lot of people didn’t know it. I guess it had to be in the Civil War. The ‘Blackberry Blossom’ – the old one – was General Garfield’s favorite tune. Ed – I never will forget it – he told me that that was General Garfield’s ‘Blackberry Blossom’.” This “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”, J.P. said, was a different tune entirely than the one made famous by Arthur Smith. J.P. said local fiddler Asa Neal also played the tune. “He was from around the Portsmouth area. He’s dead, and he was quite a fiddler. Now, he knew Ed. Fact of the matter, he learned a lot from Ed, but he was about Ed’s age.”
J.P. said Haley never talked about where he learned to play. “I have an idea that it was probably a lot like I learned. See Catlettsburg was a jumping off place, I call it, for loggers and coal miners and rousters and so forth, and they was always some musicians in them. And Ed had this ability – he couldn’t read – but he had an ear like nobody’s business. If he heard a tune and liked it, he’d play it and he’d just figure out his own way to do it.”
J.P. was on a roll: “See, Ed has become more or less of a legend now…and rightfully so. His range was from, say, Portsmouth, Ohio to Ashland, Catlettsburg, and up to Charleston, West Virginia. I think he was at Columbus, Ohio, and then he went to the world’s fair. He played consistently up and down the river. He made good money on the boats.”
I asked J.P. how Haley got around to all of those places and he said, “What he would do, especially when that boy was living… He drank all the time and it was easy for him with his cronies. Somebody would move him here or yonder in a car. But now, like if he was a going to Portsmouth or someplace, usually Mr. Holbrook – he lived down at Greenup – he’d take him anywhere he wanted him to. And doctored him. I mean, if he got sick or anything, he took care of him.”
Doc Holbrook “was a pretty famous doctor in the area. He was known pretty well for a pneumonia doctor, which was hard to find then.”
J.P. kept mentioning “that boy” – meaning one of Haley’s sons – so I asked him about Haley’s family, particularly Lawrence. He said, “Fact of the matter, I didn’t know Lawrence at all. I had done something. I don’t know what it was. I think I’d played at the Smithsonian and had given Ed credit for some of the tunes and Lawrence read about it. And he called me and he almost cried thanking me for recognizing his daddy for what he could do. You see, when it comes to his daddy, he’s got up like a shield. He’ll say, ‘You can come this far, but you ain’t gonna go no farther.’ But once you know him, well, he became a good friend of mine. Now Annadeene, my wife, she worked with his wife a little while at a sewing factory and she broke a lot of ice, too. They’re on good terms with us.”
I told J.P. how much I’d like to meet Lawrence and his family sometime and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, John. You’re welcome to yell at us anytime you want to and we’ll get you in contact with them.”
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