Later that summer, I met Lawrence Haley at the home of his oldest son, Steve Haley, in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Steve was a music enthusiast and computer expert. Lawrence graciously loaned me the four Junius Martin records, which contained his father’s signature tune, “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom”. I asked him about “Poplar Bluff,” one of the tunes on the records, and wondered if it was connected to the small Missouri town by that name. Lawrence said he didn’t know but that it sounded like Pop was mad when he was playing it on the record.

     “Well, he was either mad or they had taken some strong drink with them and Pop had got into that pretty heavy,” he said.

     I said, “What about a tune like ‘Stonewall Jackson’?”

     “No, he was playing fine music there,” he said. “I don’t think when these records was made at home he had a drop to drink. But I’ll tell you John, he done an exceptional job then because before I went into the service he would shake his left hand trying to get some of the numbness out and I guess that was from a heart problem right there. If he had any decay in his muscle reaction, it didn’t show too much. Of course, he had to go downhill at that age from what he used to be when he was a young man.”

     I played a tune for Lawrence that was unnamed on the records, then said, “This guy I know, Bruce Greene, he collected a lot of stuff, and I played it for him over the telephone and he said, ‘Oh, that’s ‘Indian Squaw’. But then it could have had another name. Like that ‘Yellow Barber’ tune that your dad plays, they call that ‘Arthur Berry’.”

     Lawrence said, “I don’t think he called that ‘Indian Squaw’. I never heard anybody request it. Pop played a piece of music called ‘Indian Nation’.”

     I’d been listening to Ed’s recordings a lot in the last few months and was focused on how he got a “real swing” in his music.

     Lawrence agreed, “That’s what I say. That’s what I was trying to tell you. When Pop was playing and enjoying it, he put a lot of drive in his music. You could see it. You could watch him and just see that he was enjoying it.”

     I asked if Ed played with his whole body and Lawrence said, “Well, yeah he’d do a little, maybe, dance on his chair.”

     Would he ever come up off his chair?

     “No, no, not like that. But you could tell that when he was playing with somebody that fit in with his style or if his accompaniment was doing their job right then he always enjoyed it.”

     Now what would his feet be doing?

     “Well, he’d just be patting his foot or his heel one or the other, most of the time. Not too loud. It was a subdued type of enjoyment, but you could see the drive that he was putting into it. I mean, he could slur a bow and pull a bow and put different pressures on the strings and you’d know that he was enjoying it, or I felt that he was.”

     I played a lot of Ed’s tunes for Lawrence, hoping to jar some of his memories. When I played “Ida Red”, he said his father used to sing, “Ida Red, Ida Red. I’m in love with Ida Red.”

     I told him I loved “Half Past Four”.

     “That’s one of my favorite tunes of all time,” I said. “I get to playing that and I can’t stop playing that tune. Now, that’s one he wrote, isn’t it?”

     Lawrence said, “Yeah, it seems to me like my mother told us that one time. That one of us, I’m not for sure which one it was, but we were delivered at about that time in the morning and Pop had been up all night, I guess. He just sat down and started playing because he was happy he had another boy, I guess. Or it might have been the girl, I don’t know.”