Tag Archives: Grace Marcum

In Search of Ed Haley 137

29 Saturday Jun 2013

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Charlotte Spaulding, Grace’s daughter, guided Lawrence, Pat, and I to see 81-year-old Babe Hale. I told him about my interest in Ed’s life and he started talking about his Aunt Josie. I showed him one picture of Ed and he said, “That looks just like her almost.” I pulled out Ed’s picture from Parkersburg Landing and he said, “Looks more like Uncle Mont.” I was pretty sure that there was some kind of family connection between Ed and Mont and Josie, especially when Babe said his brother George Hale had went by the nickname of “Milt.” Maybe Josie and Mont were somehow Milt Haley’s children by a previous marriage.

“Josie’s mom and dad are buried down here at Grey Eagle,” Babe said. “He was killed in a raft. You know, they used to take logs down the river. They’s big rafts, trees tied together. And he was killed that way. He was killed on a raft.”

Babe told me more about Josie Cline — some very peculiar details.

“Josie collected toll up there, and when I’d go across, I had to pay, too. It didn’t make any difference to her: she’s gonna get three cents some way or other. But she was really manly. She wore men’s shoes and everything.”

So she wore a long dress all the time?

“Oh yeah,” Babe said. “She was really an old-fashioned woman.”

Charlotte said, “She looked like a man, didn’t she, Babe?”

I asked Babe what tunes she and Mont played and he said, “Oh, God, ‘Sourwood Mountain’ and everything. No, they could really knock it off now, both of them.”

We went to Grace’s briefly before heading back to Ashland. I was under the impression that Grace might have confused Ed with Mont Spaulding, although she had claimed to know about Ed’s banjo-picking friend, Johnny Hager.

“Yeah, he played the banjo with her,” she had said. “He was a little man. He was with them. They was two or three people traveled with them.”

In Search of Ed Haley 136

28 Friday Jun 2013

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The next day, Lawrence, Pat, and I drove up the Tug Fork to see 80-year-old Grace Marcum in Kermit, West Virginia. I was hoping for more information on the Muncy family, who may have been connected genealogically to Haley. It was a long drive through Wayne County up the Big Sandy Valley on Route 52. There was nothing. Then we came to Fort Gay, West Virginia, an interestingly-named town at the mouth of the Tug Fork. A little further south was some of the emptiest country I have ever seen — just the Tug and occasionally the old N&W Railroad. We finally reached the village of Crum, then crossed into Mingo County and to the old railroad town of Kermit. It was completely dead, with just a shell of a strip of old businesses. Across the river was Warfield, Kentucky.

Once we located Grace, I asked her if she had ever heard of Milt Haley.

“They called him ‘Milty,’ didn’t they?” she said. “Yeah, that’s what I heard him called.”

What about Ed Haley?

“He used to play the fiddle for us down there at the square dance,” Grace said. “Daddy built a big hotel and he’d have square dances downstairs in that big dining room. He used to play the fiddle for us down there. Him and Josie Cline and her brother Mont Spaulding was awful good friends. We’d give them twenty-five dollars a night, my daddy. They played at Warfield a lot. Across the river there. Some of her people lived there, some of Josie’s people. I don’t know who it was.”

At that point, Lawrence said, “We used to ride the N&W out of Kenova up the Tug Fork here up to Williamson and all through there. And he’d play music at some of the hotels and at the courthouse and places like that up at Williamson. Coming back, he’d usually stop here and see these Muncys and we’d stay, maybe, overnight with them.”

Grace seemed to know exactly who Lawrence was talking about.

“That was Rush and Loosh and Old Man Sammy. Yeah, I can remember. Dad sold the store out to Uncle Sammy, and he run the business there a long time. Dad got paint poison, and we liked to lost him. Rush lived in Kenova for years, but his wife died and he come up here and stayed with Loosh. Rush was the oldest one.”

Lawrence said, “Well, that’s what my dad used to do for a living was to go around and play during court days. He might stay in Williamson as long as they had a court session a going. And then come back through here and stop and see — I didn’t know that they’s his kinfolk — the Muncys was any kin to him. I’ve heard him talk about Mont Spaulding.”

So wait a minute. Ed played music with someone named Mont Spaulding and Josie Cline?

“Yeah, well, Ed come in ever once in a while, but Ed was getting pretty old,” Grace said. “And he stayed with Josie and them. Wherever they played, he went with ’em. Pretty nice old man. Well, him and Loosh Muncy and Rush Muncy was close. Now, they didn’t only play for Dad. They played for other people. Let’s see, Thursday night and Saturday night down here, and then they’d go to Borderland and play up there on Thursday and Friday nights. They made it good. Let’s see, Mont Spaulding, and a Haley and Josie Cline. Them three was the ones that… I paid them off myself. I know.”

In Search of Ed Haley 116

24 Friday May 2013

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For reasons I can’t quite explain, although perhaps related to my belief in genetic memory, Ed Haley’s genealogy remained a real source of interest to me. I knew virtually nothing about his father’s background, although I had a strong suspicion that Milt Haley’s roots were somewhere along the Tug Fork at the West Virginia-Kentucky border — that same section of country made famous by the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Taking a tip from Pat Haley, I called Grace Marcum, a woman of advanced age who was somewhat of an authority on the old families in her section of the Tug Valley. I first asked Grace if she remembered a fiddler named Ed Haley.

“Oh, I did know Ed Haley years ago when I was a girl,” she said. “He played a fiddle and he was blind. He had a sister named Josie and she married a Cline and he stayed with her.”

What?

“Oh, Lord,” Grace laughed. “I was just a young girl. I’m 80 years old now.”

I said to Grace, “Now, we’d understood that the Muncys were related to the Haleys,” and she said, “They was. Ed visited Loosh and his wife pretty often. He stayed with Loosh a while and then he stayed with Rush a while. They was old Uncle Sammy Muncy’s boys. They used to live here. My daddy sold him the store. He bought our grocery store out, Loosh did. Yeah, they always kept a grocery store a going, both of them did.”