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In Search of Ed Haley 300

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Lincoln County Feud

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We next inquired about Green McCoy. We were particularly curious about why he left Kentucky and settled in Harts.

“I don’t know why he went up there,” Daisy said. “He was just playing music and started running around, I guess.”

Green and Spicie had a love for music in common.

Daisy said her mother “always liked music” and sung “from the time she was a little girl.” She “could sing any part of music — all four parts” — and “could play a banjo and she was left-handed. Played pretty good. She said she could play a dulcimer.”

Green was Spicie’s “first boyfriend” and she was crazy for him, even though she knew very little about his past.

“Grandma Spicie, she called him Will,” Faye said. “His name was William Greenville.”

“She didn’t even know Green McCoy was married till after she was engaged to him,” Daisy said of her mother. “He come up there with his brother and pretended to be single. Aunt Angeline, I think, was the one who found it out. And after Grandmaw found it out, she tried to keep Mom from marrying him, but Mom loved him so good she couldn’t believe it. They tried to keep Grandmaw from marrying him, but that just made her love him that much more.”

She “loved him so good she went ahead and married him anyhow.”

Green and Spicie settled in one of the small shacks on the Adkins farm. Faye said she’d heard that Green “would go off for a couple of weeks for a time,” then return home to his young wife, who always ran out to hug him. He’d tease her by running through the yard or “maybe around the house a couple of times — make her chase him. She was thrilled to death to see him come back.”

We wondered if perhaps Green was traveling between wives or playing music abroad, since Daisy said he never had any occupation aside from music.

I asked if he was a drinking man and Faye said, “If he had a been, Grandma wouldn’t a told it ’cause that woulda looked bad on him. Grandma Spicie told Green that she would swim the briny ocean for him.”

Okay…so what about Milt Haley?

Daisy said he was a good friend to Green and her mother. I asked if she thought we would ever find that picture of them together and she said, “No, I don’t. Mom kept it in her trunk. My niece has got it but she’s sick and got a house full of junk like I have and will never find it. She got Mom’s pictures. It was a little tintype snapshot of him and Green McCoy standing together. I think he had a hat on — seemed like both of them had a hat on in that picture. That was when they was playing music, but they didn’t have no instruments with them.”

I got a sheet of paper and tried to do a sketch, asking questions like, “Do you remember if he had bushy eyebrows?” or “Thin face, you reckon?”

I was pretty desperate.

Daisy kept insisting, “I can’t remember. I can’t tell you how somebody looks.”

Brandon asked if Milt and Green knew each other in Kentucky, before their move to Harts.

“No,” Daisy said. “Not until he come up there. I don’t know, now, where Milt Haley come from. They played music together.”

I wondered if Milt was the best fiddler between the two and Daisy said, “I don’t know which one was the best.”

“But Grandma thought Green was the best, didn’t she?” Faye said to her mother.

“Oh yeah,” Daisy said. “That was her husband. I never heard her say nothing against Haley.”

I asked if Spicie ever mentioned the names of any tunes that Green played and she said, “She might’ve said some of them. One of them I think was ‘Fire on the Mountain’.”

I got real excited hearing that and asked if she would remember more tunes if I played for her.

“No, I wouldn’t recognize…,” she said. “I never heard fiddles very much. My brothers had them there some, but they never played fiddles too much. They had guitars and banjos and pianos and organs and other stuff.”

I gave it a try but all I got when I played Ed’s version of “Fire on the Mountain” was, “That’s all right, but I don’t feel like dancing.”

We all cracked up and Faye warned us about her mother, who sat stone-faced in her chair.

“Sometimes she’s a smarty,” she said.

In Search of Ed Haley 38

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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I reached Ugee my Parkersburg Landing album, hoping it might rekindle the names of more Haley tunes.

“Ed had a habit of changing the name if he was in a different town,” she said. “Now just like this ‘Parkersburg Landing’, that’s another song that he always played.”

Ugee remembered Haley’s singing ability more than his fiddling.

“He had a beautiful voice,” she said. “It’d bring tears to anybody’s eyes. He could sing low, he could sing high. He sang ‘Stacker Lee’ and he didn’t lay his fiddle down when he sung. He played his own music and sang at the same time. I never heard nothing like him and I’ve heard a lot of them, Mr. Hartford, because they used to come to my dad’s house. Anybody come in anyplace close, they’d come to our place. They didn’t stay all night — they stayed a week or month. Banjos, guitars, whoever played music come to my dad’s. They wasn’t nobody in the world loved it any better than he did.”

Ugee went through some other tunes — like “McKinley” and “Old Zed Tanner” — but only remembered pieces of them. There was also “Fire on the Mountain” and “Buttermilk Mountain”.

Going on Buttermilk Mountain to see my old girlfriend again.

When I come out, there’ll be no Buttermilk girlfriend to meet me again.

When I come back, I’ll bring my girl from old Buttermilk Mountain.

I’m a goin’ away, I’m a goin’ to stay, I’m a goin’ to Buttermilk Mountain.

“Ella didn’t like that song,” Ugee said. “She’d say, ‘I hate that song. I don’t want to hear that old thing.’ She thought it was some girl Ed used to go with that he was talking about. Harvey my brother would get around and have Ed to sing it.”

Ugee said Harvey would come around with whisky and get Ed to play what he wanted, usually songs that made Ella jealous, like “Florene”.

I’m leavin’ you sweet Florena.

I’m leavin’ you sweet Florene.

I’m goin’ away, I’m goin’ to stay.

I’m a leavin’ you sweet Florene.

Oncest I bought your clothes sweet Florena.

Oncest I bought your clothes sweet Florene.

Oncest I bought your clothes

But now I ain’t got no dough

Now I have to travel on, sweet Florene.

Down in the pen sweet Florena.

I’m down in the pen sweet Florene.

I’m down in the pen, but for you I’d go again

I’m a leavin’ you sweet Florene.

“Harvey was a good man but he’d slip Ed a little shot of whiskey,” Ugee said. “He’d say, ‘Ed, it’s about time for you to have a little drink of water, ain’t it?’ Oh, it wouldn’t be but about a few minutes till old Ed was playing like crazy. You give him a shot and boy you oughta heard him. Then he’d say, ‘Ed, I’d like to hear that old Florene song.’ Ella would shake her head — ‘I don’t like that song. That’s about some of his old women that he used to run around with probably.’ And that’s all she’d say about it, but she’d shut her eyes tight and shake her head.”

She remembered Ed playing ‘Blackberry Blossom’ but couldn’t quite remember the story behind it.

“And then there was a song called ‘Pat Malone’,” she said. “Did you ever hear that song?”

Before I could answer, she started singing:

Times are hard in an Irish town. Everything was a going down

And Pat Malone was short for any cash.

He for life insurance spent all his money to a cent

And the most of his affairs had gone to smash.

Pat’s wife spoke up and said, “Oh dear Pat, if you were dead

There’s twenty thousand dollars we could get.”

So old Pat laid down and tried to make out that he had died

Until he smelt the whiskey at the wake.

Then Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.

Oh, he raised right up and shouted from his bed.

“If the wake goes on a minute, the corpse’ll sure be in it.

You gotta get me drunk to keep me dead.”

So they gave the corpse a sup.

After they had filled him up

And they laid him back upon his bunk again.

Then before the break of day everybody felt so gay

That they all forgot that he was dead.

So they took him from his bunk, still alive but he’s awful drunk.

And they laid him in his coffin with a prayer.

Then the driver swore by dad that he’d never start ahead

Until he seen that someone paid the fare.

And Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.

He raised right up in the coffin and he said,

“If you dare to doubt my credit, you’ll be sorry that you said it.

Drive on or this corpse will smash your head.”

So the driver started out on the cemetery route

And the people tried that widow to console.

Then near the churchyard lot, Pat Malone’s last resting spot,

They begin to lower the dummy in the hole.

When the clods begin to drop, Pat burst off the coffin top

And quickly to the earth he did ascend.

Then Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.

He quickly from that cemetery fled.

Pat come near a goin’ under, what a lucky thing by thunder,

Old Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.

I was blown away. I said to Ugee, “That’s great! Where in the world did that come from?”

“Oh,” she said, “that was from back in the hills there. That’s an old song. Just like that ‘Black Sheep’ song. You ought to have heard Ed play that.”

In a quiet country town not so very far away

Lived a rich and aging man whose hair was silvery gray.

He had three sons, his only ones, Jack and Tom were sly.

Ted was as honest as he could be and he would not tell a lie.

They both began to ruin him within the old man’s eyes.

Then the poison began its work and Ted was most despised.

One day the father said to him, “Be gone ye to the poor,”

And these words the Black Sheep said while standing in the door:

“Don’t be angry with me Dad. Don’t turn me from your door.

I know that I’ve been a worry, but I’ll worry you no more.”

Give to me one other chance and put to me the test

And you’ll find the Black Sheep loves you Dad far better than the rest.”

Year by year passed by and the father he grew old.

He called in both Jack and Tom and he gave to them his gold.

“All I want is a little room, just a place by your fireside.”

Jack returning home one night and he brought with him a bride.

The bride begin to hate the father more and more each day

Until one night she declared, “That old fool is in our way.”

They decided to send him to the poor house which was near.

And like a flash that Black Sheep’s words went ringing in his ear:

“Don’t be angry with me Dad. Don’t turn me from your door.

You know that I’ve been a worry worry, but I’ll worry you no more.

Give to me one other chance and put to me the test

And you’ll find the Black Sheep loves you Dad far better than the rest.”

Well a wagon drove up to the door, it was the poor house van.

The boys laughed and pointed to their dad and they says, “There is your man.”

Just then a rich and a manly form came pressing through the crowd.

“Stop you brutes,” the stranger said, “This will not be allowed.

You’ve taken the old man’s property and all that he could save.

You’ve even sold that little lot containing his wife’s grave.

I am his son but I’m not your kin from now till Judgement Day.”

The old man clasped the Black Sheep’s hand and the crowd all heard him say:

“Don’t be angry with me lad. Don’t turn me from your door.

I know that I was foolish, but I’ve repented o’er and o’er.

I should have gave to you my gold ’cause you have stood the test.

Now I find the Black Sheep far better than all the rest.”

Ugee apologized for her voice, saying, “Now, that’s not sung right. You oughta heard Ed Haley sing that to you. The first time I ever sung that, I sung a little bit of it to Ed, and when he come back again he was playing and singing that. It’d raise the hair on your head.”

I wondered if Laury was a singer and she said, “My dad couldn’t carry a tune but he could play that fiddle. My dad could whistle.”

In Search of Ed Haley 17

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

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Later in the evening, Pat put me in touch with Lee “Trick” Gore, an Ashland preacher and musician who remembered Ed Haley from his childhood days on Harts Creek. We met Gore the following day at his home in what was my first meeting with someone from Ed’s birthplace. He was a polite man with a loud clear voice, somewhat thick in stature and decked out in a tie and button-up sweater.

“I understand what you’re trying to do,” Gore said right away.

It wasn’t long until he and Lawrence were in a deep discussion about the people and places in and around Harts.

“We used to spend a week or two with Aunt Liza or Uncle Peter,” Lawrence said, prompting Gore. “Most of the time we’d ride the train up there and get off at Harts. They run passenger trains up into coalfields then. We’d get off there at the mouth of Hart and walk up and it was nothing but creek. You’d ford that creek a dozen times trying to stay close to the road and the road was in the creek half the time. You had to wade the creek half the way up through there. It’d take us half the day it seemed like.”

Lawrence said his father spent some time in Chapmanville, a town upriver from Harts about nine miles.

“I remember staying in Chapmanville, too. There was a beer joint or something that Pop wanted to stop at. They was some guy in there got to down-mouthing Pop. Stoney Ferrell, that’s exactly who it was. This guy kept aggravating him and Pop just edged toward his voice, you know. Instead of carrying a blind man’s cane, Pop carried a big heavy cattle cane. He got pretty close to him and he reached out and grabbed him around the neck with that cane.”

Gore said Ed used to come see his uncle Charley Gore at Ferrellsburg, a settlement about two miles upriver from Harts.

“Uncle Charley was a fiddler,” he said. “Charley was the principal of the school and Ed stayed with him. Well, once a year he’d happen by. That was right on the heels of the Depression. I was twelve. I was just learning to play the guitar then.”

Gore looked at Lawrence and said, “Either you or Mona was leading him.”

I asked Gore what Ed looked like at that time and he said, “He just dressed ordinary. He never dressed up, but he wasn’t dirty looking or nothing like that — just old-fashioned.”

He stopped for a moment, lost in thought, then said, “He was just something else. He was far ahead of a lot of fiddlers, buddy. There wasn’t none of this grinding on that violin. When he played it, it was just as smooth in that bow hand. I know he played ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Fire on the Mountain’ and ‘The Wild Horse’. Uncle Charley played those tunes, too. I guess he learned them from Ed Haley.”

“I wish my daddy was alive,” Gore said. “Boy, he could tell you about Ed Haley because he loved him. Uncle Charley loved him dearly. And Ed knew that he was welcome at our house and that’s where he hung his hat buddy — where he was welcome. Do you know how I think of him? I think of him as kind of a mountain poet. He sung religious songs and them old mournful mountain tunes. It seems to me like he sung a song called ‘The Dying Californian’. I can’t remember the poetry to it, but it was a mile long.”

Ed sang while fiddling it.

Gore said Ed sometimes traveled with “Little Johnny” Hager, a banjo player who used to stay weeks at a time with his family when he was a boy. Lawrence Haley had shown me a picture earlier of Ed with Johnny Hager in Webster Springs in 1914.

I asked Gore if he knew that Ed could play the banjo and he said, “Seems like I heard him play it when him and Johnny was together. No doubt he could play it.”

Gore asked Lawrence if he remembered a man his father used to play with named Ode Curry (he didn’t), then said, “Ode Curry was just a fella that played the banjo and sang and he had a big nose, as well as I remember, and it’d vibrate when he’d sing because he sung through his nose. But let me tell you something: they would give him all he could drink to play and Ode knew some of the lonesomest, heart-breaking songs you ever listened to.”

Gore got his guitar and sang several songs for me, then whistled the melody for “East Tennessee Blues” and named it as one of Haley’s tunes. He said, “That’s funny how things come back to you when you sit down and get to talking about it, and reminiscing.”

I encouraged him to “play another tune and see what it stirs up,” so he strummed and whistled out a few more melodies.

At some point, Gore’s wife said she remembered seeing Haley play at Logan Court House and in a nearby coal town named Ethel.

Just before Lawrence and I left, Gore called his 85-year-old aunt, Mag Gore, about Haley. “Mag was a singer,” he said. “She married Ira Gore, her third cousin. She couldn’t get out of the Gore family.” He spoke with her briefly on the phone, then told us: “The only thing she remembers was that her husband Ira went to town one day and Ed Haley come home with him because Ira had a little bit of that good ol’ ‘moon’ they make over on the West Fork. They was a sipping that a little bit.”

West Fork, Gore said, was a tributary of Harts Creek with its headwaters in Logan County.

In Search of Ed Haley 16

03 Monday Dec 2012

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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.”

In Search of Ed Haley 5

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley, Logan

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In the early days of my interest in Ed Haley, I did locate one enthusiast of his music. Dr. Charles Wolfe, a foremost country music historian at Murfreesboro, Tennessee regarded Haley as “a misty legend – perhaps the most influential of all the early eastern Kentucky traditional fiddlers…whose contributions [to country music has] been little known or appreciated.” Of the Haley recordings he had written: “The quality of the fiddling comes through even on these scratchy home recordings, and makes us wonder what this man might have sounded like in his twenties or thirties.”

Dr. Wolfe said Clark Kessinger, the famous fiddler from Charleston, West Virginia was a huge fan of Haley’s music. “Ed Haley, an old blind fellow, he was from over around Logan, close to the Kentucky-West Virginia line,” Kessinger said in an interview several years before his 1975 death. “Yeah, he was a great fiddler…he was a smooth fiddler. Oh, that Haley I thought was the best. Him and Tommy Magness used to play around Nashville, Grand Ole Opry.” There was a reference on Parkersburg Landing to Haley liking Kessinger’s fiddling, although he “once complained that Kessinger always shied away from playing in front of him.”

Clark Kessinger, born in 1896, was only slightly younger than Haley. He took up the fiddle at the age of five and was playing for dances when he was ten. By the twenties, he was a local radio star and recording artist. His career fizzled during the Great Depression, although the National Fiddlers Association declared him as the “fiddling champion of the East” in 1936. All of these accolades were in sharp contrast to Haley, who refused to make a commercial record for fear of having his music “stolen” and who sometimes shied away from contests because they were often rigged.

“Ed was always afraid the companies would take advantage of a blind man,” Parkersburg Landing claimed. “This suspicion also kept him from the folklorists recording in Ashland.”

In time, Kessinger was rediscovered. During the folk music revival of the sixties and seventies, he made appearances on the Today show, at the White House and even at the Grand Ole Opry.

Dr. Wolfe also mentioned Dick Burnett, the blind minstrel of Monticello, Kentucky. Burnett traveled extensively through the South with Leonard Rutherford during the early decades of the twentieth century. Haley played Burnett’s “Man of Constant Sorrow”, while Burnett credited him as his source for “Ladies on the Steamboat” and “Blackberry Blossom”.

“Ed Haley was the first man to play that in the State of Kentucky that I know of,” Burnett said, referencing the latter tune. “He was a blind fiddler in Ashland, Kentucky. I played in Ashland different times. He’d go down every day to meet the crowds comin’ in at the river. He was a good fiddler. He played that, and Bob Johnson of Paintsville, Kentucky, he learned it. I never heard any words to it. It’s just an old time hillbilly piece.”

Dr. Wolfe told me about Mark Wilson and Gus Meade, the two scholars who had produced Parkersburg Landing in the mid-seventies. He said they first heard about Haley from older fiddlers in the Tri-State region of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. Inspired by stories of his greatness, they located Haley’s son Lawrence in Ashland, Kentucky. Lawrence Haley had most of his father’s home recordings and he agreed to allow the Library of Congress to copy them. This led to the release of Parkersburg Landing in 1976 by Rounder Records. Since then, Lawrence had made it clear that he wanted to keep his father’s records only in the family. Dr. Wolfe suggested I contact him for more information on Haley’s life and music.

The next time I was in Washington, DC, I visited Gus Meade at his home near Alexandria, Virginia. Gus had spent years of his spare time at the Library of Congress making lists of fiddle tunes, fiddlers, and old-time recordings, scanning newspapers, documenting fiddlers’ contests, studying the evolution of tunes, and going on expeditions with fiddle-buffs John Harrod and Mark Wilson. I spent much of my visit looking through various manifestations of his research, most of which was congested in the basement of his home. He had more copies of Haley’s recordings than what was used on Parkersburg Landing, which he agreed to share with me so long as I didn’t tell anyone about it.

I next went to the Library of Congress to access its complete archive of Haley’s home recordings. I initially spoke with Alan Jabbour, head of the American Folklife Center. Alan had supervised the original copying of the records with Lawrence Haley. Within a few minutes, I was given a mimeographed list of Haley’s recordings, which included the following introductory notes:

Three 10″ reels of tape double-track at 7.5 ips.  Copy of 54 original discs of Ed Haley, fiddle and vocal, Mrs. Haley, mandolin, accordion, and vocal, and their son Ralph Haley, guitar. Recorded April and September 1946 and (probably) other occasions by Ralph Haley. Lent for duplication by Lawrence Haley (son of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Haley), May 23-25, 1973. An interview of Lawrence Haley by Alan Jabbour (May 25, 1973) concludes the B-side of tape 3. The interview concentrates on the musical life of his parents, who were traveling professional musicians throughout eastern Kentucky and southern and central West Virginia during the first half of the 20th century. They were both blind and relied upon music for their livelihood.

     Just before giving me access to the recordings, Alan warned me of their poor sound quality. He said the Library had secured the best copies possible by playing them on a special turntable with weighted tone arms and hi-tech filters and equalization but had been unable to overcome their general overuse and fragility.

A few minutes later, I was lightly searched – no recording equipment was allowed – and placed in a booth with a volume knob, where I communicated with an engineer on the other side of a wall by use of a talkback switch. Referencing the mimeographed list, I called out the names of Ed’s tunes one by one: “Forks of Sandy”, “Money Musk”, “Salt River”, “Fire on the Mountain”… As they played back to me, it seemed like they were coming through the radio on a distant station during a rainstorm.