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Parkersburg Landing 37

24 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     A little later, Ugee saw Ed and Ella at Spencer, the county seat of Roane County.

     “I lived three miles below Spencer one year and come up to town to get some groceries or something and Ed and Ella was there at the courthouse playing music. Well I went over to talk to Ed and Ella. Nothing else would do but for us to go down to eat at the hotel. Well, there was just a whole bunch of big shots over for that stock sale and Roane County was a Republican county. And they put us up to eat. That’s when they had that WPA and were giving out rations, like meat. My son Harold was up at the end of the table and they said, ‘Well, what do you want?’ He said, ‘I think I’ll have some of that Roosevelt dog meat.’ Aw, you ought to heard them good ole Republicans get up and just clap their hands. ‘Oh, that’s the smartest little boy I ever seen,’ he said and throwed him a dollar. Ed just throwed back his head. I can see him now – ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! That wasn’t a Republican said that, though.’ Me and Ella laughed about that.”

     In later years, Ugee’s brother Harvey took Ed and Ella to Akron, Ohio where he worked at the B.F. Goodrich factory. Ugee said, “Ed drawed such a big crowd at the B.F. Goodrich they passed a law that people had to keep moving on the streets. Harvey got so mad. At Goodyear, it was the same way. People couldn’t get by. Traffic was that bad.”

     I tried to explain to Ugee what I had learned about Haley’s fiddling and she said, “He was one of the smoothest fiddlers I ever heard. He’d put his fiddle right along here — he didn’t put it under his chin — and if somebody’d make him mad when they’d ask him to play something he’d almost make that fiddle insult that person. I don’t know how he’d do it, but I’ll tell you what: he could almost insult you with it. He’d make it squawl at them and squeal at them. Just like that ‘Wild Hogs in the Red Brush’ — the way he’d hit that fiddle somehow or other it’d sound just like hogs squealing.”

     I played some of Ed’s recordings for Ugee, who quickly pointed out that they didn’t compare to hearing him in person.

     “I’d give anything in the world if they could get some of Ed’s music out,” she said. “Now I had a nephew that went down to Kentucky after World War II and got two or three records of Ed’s. He give them five dollars. I tried to buy one off of him and he said, ‘I wouldn’t take a million dollars for them.’ That’s just how much we thought of Ed and Ella and them.”

     More Ed Haley records?

     “My nephew’s dead but his son is living in Parkersburg and I don’t know whether he’s throwed them away or what he’s done with them,” Ugee said. “They shouldn’t be scratched up. They took care of them.”

     Ugee said her nephew was James Russell Shaver, who lived just off of 7th Avenue.

     Turning my thoughts to music, I got my fiddle out to probe Ugee’s mind about Ed’s technique. She said, “Him and Dad both — that wrist done the work for them.”

     Did he always sit down when he played?

     “Most of the time. He could stand up and play but he didn’t like to.”

     Did he pat his foot pretty hard when he played?

     “Patted this one,” Ugee said. “The other one came down like you’re dancing. Whenever he began to pat that foot you could say he was bringing out some good music somewhere.”

     I asked if fiddlers ever questioned Ed about how to play and she said, “Well he wouldn’t a showed one how to play. He learned it like I did — the hard way — just fooling with the fiddle.”

     I told Ugee, “Now Lawrence said Ed played the banjo,” and she said, “Ed could play a guitar like crazy, too. He could play any kind of string music. Now Dad could thump a banjo a little but he wasn’t what you call a banjo player. Ed could play a mandolin, too. He could play a guitar, too. There’s where Ralph learned to play a guitar — Ed learned him.”

     I told her about working on Ed’s music with Lawrence and about my theory regarding genetic memory and she said, “I don’t think I ever seen Lawrence even pick up a music box and try to play anything,” kind of dismissing the entire notion. She didn’t know much about Ralph’s musical ability. “I never was around him too much — just there at home,” she said. “He played with his pick or fingers either one.”

     She was aware that Ella had Ralph before she married Ed.

     “I forget how old he was when Ed and Ella got married but he’s just a half-brother to them.”

     I asked Ugee if Ella ever talked about her first husband and she said, “No. They always made out like Ralph was Ed’s boy. Ed just called him his boy.”

     I was very curious to see what Haley tunes Ugee might remember.

     “I can remember a lot of his tunes,” she said, “but I can’t sing them any more: ‘Sourwood Mountain’, ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘Wild Hogs in the Red Brush’. He played one — ‘The blue-eyed rabbit’s gone away. The blue-eyed rabbit’s gone to stay.’ Probably old fiddle tunes, all of them. You couldn’t mention one of them he couldn’t play. ‘Marching Through Georgia’, ‘Red Wing’. ‘Old Jimmy Johnson’ — you’ve heard that. ‘Old Jimmy Johnson, bring your jug around the hill. If you don’t have a jug, bring a ten dollar bill.'”

     I asked if her father and Ed played most of the same tunes and she said, “Oh, yeah. Dad knowed some that Ed didn’t but Ed would learn them when he’d get in there, and if Ed knowed some, why Dad’d learn them, too.”

Parkersburg Landing 36

22 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     Ugee said Ed seldom had a fiddle case with him when he traveled into Calhoun County, West Virginia.

     “Most of the time Ed had his fiddle in a twenty-four pound flour poke,” she said. “Sometimes he’d put it under his coat and sometimes up under his arm — just whichever way he felt best about it. He was very careful with it under there. Dad told him one time, ‘Why don’t you get a case so you can carry that bow without tearing it up all the time?’ Ed said he didn’t want to bother with carrying that case in his hand. Some times he might take a notion to stop and play some music somewhere on the road.”

     At that instant, I had this image of Ed being so attached to his fiddle, with such an addiction, that the two were virtually inseparable. To not even want to put it away in a case made me think he always had it in his hands, feeling it, tinkering with it, trying new ways to make it work — all the time. You know, a person can get really attached to feeling an object — a ball or a pen — to where it doesn’t seem comfortable to not have it in hand. I imagine for a blind person this feeling is most intense. There’s a real comfort level to consider. This fiddle would’ve been his entire life — his passion, his breadbasket, his ticket to daily comforts and a better life in general. Then, I also pictured horrible images of him stumbling or even falling with it in his hands or tucked under his coat as he scooted along bumpy country roads.

     Ugee said Ed ordered his strings from “Sears & Roebuck and places like that. You could buy strings out in them country stores. Used to be you could buy them all in a drug store.”

     How did he get his bows haired?

     “Horse’s tail. Dad haired it for him.”

     Ugee said Ed and Laury played music at little towns called Rosedale, Grantsville and Webster Springs. I asked if Ed put a box or cup out to catch money and she said, “Oh, no. Maybe Dad would put a cigar box down. When Ed was some place and Dad was around, he’d just step up after they’d get to playing and Dad’d say, ‘If you fellers like that how about putting some money in this cigar box? This man’s got six kids. Don’t make him play for nothing’.”

     Ugee had faint memories of Ed fiddling in contests with her father. One time, she said, he lost a contest in Charleston to an Indian — no doubt Natchez the Indian, the famous show fiddler. “Ed got so mad at hisself,” Ugee said, “he just about blowed up over it because he knowed the feller couldn’t play but they give it to him. He was the world champion fiddler but he couldn’t play. Ed said, ‘It’s already cut and dried.’ Ed cut a shine and said that his music wasn’t worth a damn. You never heard such cussing.”

     The first time Ugee saw Ella, she was pregnant with Lawrence (circa 1927). At that time, Ella did not play the mandolin — an important thing to note considering how it was so prominently featured on the home recordings of the mid-40s.

     “Now Ella, when she first come in there, she played the accordion. Dad told Ed, he said, ‘I don’t like the accordion. It drowns out your music. I’d ruther hear the fiddle.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you teach her to play the guitar or the mandolin?’ Ed laughed. He said, ‘Hell, you can’t teach her nothing.’ Ella — I can see her shut her eyes yet — said, ‘Laury, don’t you like the accordion?’ He said, ‘Oh, I like it. Ella, you’re the best in the world, but I like string music.’ Next time she come back, she was playing mandolin. Ed learned her how to second and buddy she could keep time with it, too. Dad said, ‘I like that a whole lot better, just hearing that time.'”

     Ugee said, “Well, they had Lawrence and they named him after Dad. Then when they come back they had a little girl and they named her Monnie after my mother, Minnie. Ella wrote and told Mom, ‘Well, I had my baby and it’s a girl. Instead of calling her Minnie, I’m calling her Monnie, but it’s still your namesake.”

     I wondered if Ed and Ella played at courthouses in that part of West Virginia and Ugee said, “Yes, yes. They played at every courthouse there was in West Virginia down there: Grantsville, Clay County, Glenville and back through that way. Gassaway, West Virginia. Sutton, West Virginia. Just any place around — all the churches and all the schoolhouses. The old Roane County Courthouse in Spencer, it used to have great big shade trees. Then they had the stock market up on the Spencer Hill back towards Arnoldsburg and Ed and them’d go over there. And they had a boarding house just before you crossed the bridge — state hospital’s across over there — and then there’s the big Miller Hotel and everybody went in there to eat. And they’d be over there playing music and people would take Ed and Ella down there to eat.”

     Ugee said Ed and Ella were regulars at Arnoldsburg, a little town north of the Hicks home on Route 33 in Calhoun County. It was the first of many stories where she became the hero of her own narrative.

     “My brother, Harvey, he took me down to Arnoldsburg and Ed and Ella was playing music. They had a platform to dance on and Dad was down there. Harvey said, ‘Well, let’s sit back over here and listen to them a while.’ There was some girls trying to dance. They wasn’t keeping time. You could tell right then that Ed didn’t like the noise they were making. They was some way about twisting his shoulders that he didn’t like something that was going on. I looked at Harold and said, ‘He’s gonna quit playing in a little bit.’ Me and him sat over there in the car and was laughing about it. And Ed and them wasn’t making very much money there at the time.

     “So Dad happened to see us over there. He come over and said, ‘Won’t you go over and dance some?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go over and dance.’ He went back and he told Uncle Jerry — that was Aunt Susan’s man — he said, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll say something like, I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Jerry said, ‘You give me ten dollars and I’ll put it in the box.’ Uncle Jerry said, ‘I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Ed perked up like that — he’d give ten dollars too almost to hear me dance. And old Carey Smith, I never will forget it. Carey and old John both was there and they had money. ‘Well,’ Carey said, ‘I’d give a twenty-dollar bill to see Ugee Hicks come in there on that board and show them girls a few things.’ I just walked over to Uncle Jerry and I said, ‘Uncle Jerry, just put your ten where your mouth is.’ And I looked down at Carey Smith and I said, ‘Carey, you put your twenty where your mouth is. Throw it in that cigar box.’

     “Well, Ed went to playing ‘Carroll County Blues’. I had a pair of shoes on that had like a wooden heel on them. I hit that floor and I wanna tell you right now, you oughta heard Ed play. He just brightened up so. I don’t think I ever heard him play it better in my life. And Uncle Jerry turned around to old John, he said, ‘Well, you better put your twenty in here.’ Well, Ed made fifty dollars. Old Ed and Ella, you know they had a family. I was a pretty good dancer then. Them two girls quit. One girl stepped back and said, ‘Well, she can’t do the Charleston.'”

     Ugee told me more about the pact made between her father and Ed in the early thirties.

     “Now they made that pact a long time ago and they renewed it when Ed was back again. Dad told him he wanted him to play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’ and he said, ‘I don’t care what you play before, fiddling pieces or anything, but when you play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’, that’s when I’ll meet my Lord.’ And he said, ‘I’ll be a laying there in that grave until you sing that.'”

     Ed asked Laury to play “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” and a few fiddle tunes at his funeral.

     “I’ll lay there in that grave and won’t hear nothing,” Laury joked.

     Ed was “kindly acting a fool” about it too and told him to let Ugee sing since he was such a horrible singer.

     “Laury, we’re getting a little serious with this stuff,” Ed finally said. “I don’t know whether I can play anything or not.”

     “I know,” Laury said. “I don’t know whether I can sing over you, either.”

     Ugee said her father died of leukemia and stomach cancer in January of 1937 at the age of 56 years. About a month later, Ed made it to Calhoun County and played “When Our Lord Shall Come Again” at his grave. The famous Ohio River flood of ’37 delayed his trip. According to one publication, the flood crested in Ashland at 74.3 feet — nearly 20 feet above flood stage. It took one month and a half to play out, leaving residents with a large cleanup effort that lasted for six months.

     “Ed went up to the grave — it’s right up on the hill from the house — and he stayed and played music all day,” Ugee said. “He played fast fiddle tunes and he played slow ones and then he’d sing. That evening, back at the house, nobody said a thing. You coulda dropped a pin in our house. Ed just come down on the fiddle and went to playing that ‘Carroll County Blues’ and I just jumped up in the floor and went to dancing. I said, ‘Well, if my dad was a living, that’s what he’d wanted me to do because I can’t hold my feet.’ Ed told me the next day, ‘If you hadn’t done that I’d a choked to death right there.’ Ella said, ‘When you hit that floor I knowed you was gonna be all right.'”

In Search of Ed Haley 35

21 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     A few weeks later, I met Ugee Postalwait at her home in Akron, Ohio. An energetic, feisty woman with a band-aid on her nose, she didn’t look nearly as old as she said she was (eighty-something). She was very anxious to talk about Ed Haley and her memories seemed sharper than when I’d first called her. She bragged about him right away.

     “He had the brain of music,” she said. “He’s one of the best I ever heard. You could name a tune and if he didn’t know it and you sang it to him one time he knowed it then, and when you heard it the next time he’d blow your stack.”

     “Now they is some people’ll tell you my dad was better — Laury Hicks,” she continued, wasting no time in bragging on her father. “He and Ed was about the same age. Both born in about 1880.”

     I asked Ugee to recall her childhood, when she first saw Ed Haley.

     “The first time I ever seen Ed Haley, I was about five years old,” she said. “Dick Joblin told him that he wanted him to hear a boy that he knowed played music and he brought him there to Dad. Ed was about — oh, he must’ve been around twenty maybe, something like that. He was a young man. Dick had my dad to play the fiddle and he played three pieces: ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and another’n I can’t remember right now and ‘Sally Goodin’. Ed said, ‘If that next’n had come up as strong as the first few I heard, I’d never pulled my bow across that fiddle as long as I lived.’ And Dad at the time had his first fiddle. My dad made his first fiddle out of a cigar box and that’s what he learned on and he had that up till I was about ten or twelve years old.”

     Ugee said, “Then the next time I seen Ed, he come there with John Hager.”

     I asked her how Ed looked and she said he had on a suit and plug hat and had his fiddle in a flour sack.

     “They stayed all winter, and they left on the first day of spring,” she said. “I’ll never forget that. There was a little narrow country road and as long as I live I’ll always see Ed, and Johnny leading him around a mud hole. We went out on the bank and watched them as they left and I stood there and cried after him and just cut a shine. Well, Ed then sent back a card — I think I still got it. ‘I love your wife, but oh your kids’ — from White Sulphur Springs.”

     I asked Ugee if she had seen the picture of Ed and Johnny at White Sulphur Springs.

     “Oh, yeah, I got that someplace in a box with a bunch of my pictures,” she said, before correcting herself. “Well, I think I give Larry all the pictures I had of Ed and Ella.”

     When I pulled out the one of Ed and Johnny, she said, “Yeah, that’s John Hager. He was a little fella. That banjo had the longest neck I ever seen.”

    She then pointed to Ed and said, “That looks just exactly like him. He wore dark glasses then. After he got married he stopped wearing dark glasses. Ed was six foot or something like that. Well Dad was a real little skinny guy like Ed Haley when he was young. He weighed about 144 pounds and then he had pneumonia fever and come near to dying. When he got over that, he gained weight. Went up to 175 pounds. But he weighed about 200 pounds. Dad was tall.”

     Ugee said Ed stopped wearing his derby and gained a little weight after marrying Ella. I was surprised to hear her describe him as a “little skinny guy” but she insisted, “Yeah, looked like you put a pair of britches up on a fence rail. Ed said to me one day, ‘Ugee, can you make a shirt?’ I said, ‘Well sure I can make a shirt.’ Well, he come back from the store with material and I made him three shirts. He laughed about it. He said, ‘I want long tails. They won’t slip out of my pants.'”

     Ugee said, “Yeah, I’ve seen these pictures.”

     “This one,” she said, pointing to the picture of Ed used on the cover of Parkersburg Landing, “I don’t remember ever seeing that one of Ed. He looks to me like he’s been on a drunk.”

     Ugee tried to describe the way things were when she was a girl in Calhoun County.

     “When I was growing up and in the cornfield hoeing corn, you could hear singing on the mountains,” she said. “There was music in that country and very few people didn’t play some kind of music. My brother Russell played the banjo. My brother Shirley played the guitar and would’ve made a good fiddle player if he’d went ahead at it. I used to pick up the fiddle and see-saw a little bit. I can’t any more. We had a string band at our house, you might say. Mom played the organ and I went to playing the guitar. Anyway, they was nobody that come in that country that played the fiddle within thirty, forty or fifty miles away that wouldn’t come to our place and play music.”

     The Hicks home took on a party atmosphere when Haley arrived.

     “When Ed Haley was in the country, they come from miles around to our house,” Ugee said. “Dad would get out and tell everybody that Ed was there or Ed was gonna be there a certain day. They’d come through the day. Everybody did. Dad and them would play music all day — half a night.”

     Ugee said she used to get up around two o’clock in the morning to see who’d be eating breakfast in a few hours.

     Some of her happiest memories were of Haley’s visits to her father’s home.

     “Dad’d go out there on the porch and if Ed was a playing music and if I was in the kitchen a cooking he’d go out and tell Ed to play ‘Carroll County Blues’,” she said. “Oh, I’d come out of that kitchen just a hitting that floor and a dancing all the way out there on the porch. I’d say, ‘Ed, don’t do that. You’ll not get no dinner ’cause I can’t hold my feet when you play that.’ Every time he played that, I’d dance. And Dad, when he played ‘Sally Goodin’, that’s when I’d dance for him. Mom didn’t want me to dance. She tried to keep me from it but I’d go out under them old oak trees out there on them old flat rocks and just dance, you know.”

     I asked how far the Hicks home was from Harts Creek and Ugee said, “I would say that’s pretty close to a hundred mile. I never was in around Logan. I always wanted to go because Nora and Aunt Rosie lived up there. Dad and the boys, they used to go see them.” Aunt Rosie, she said, was Bill Day’s wife, while Nora was her daughter. I never knew the Days lived around Logan, West Virginia.

Parkersburg Landing 34

20 Thursday Dec 2012

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     By some accounts, Dr. Lawrence Hicks was Ed Haley’s best friend. Hicks was a well-known fiddler who practiced veterinary medicine in Calhoun County, West Virginia. Ed thought enough of Hicks to name his youngest son after him and, according to Parkersburg Landing, came to play the fiddle at his grave when he died in 1937. With Lawrence Haley’s encouragement, I telephoned Ugee Postalwait, a widow of advanced age and the only daughter of Dr. Hicks. Ugee (pronounced “you-gee”) was a resident of Akron, Ohio — one of those industrial towns flooded by job-seeking mountaineers some four decades ago.

     “I’m a friend of Lawrence Haley’s in Ashland and I’m very much interested in his father, Ed Haley,” I told her. “I was just visiting with Lawrence and he said you knew him real well. I was wondering if you would tell me about him.”

     “Well, I don’t know what you want me to tell you about,” Ugee said. “My dad and him was two of the finest fiddlers I ever heard. My dad’s name was Laury Hicks. Well, Lawrence was his name but they called him Laury. A lot of them called him Dr. L.A. He was a veterinarian, but he was a fine fiddler. Him and Ed were very close friends for years and years — ever since I was a little girl. They was both born in 1880. They loved each other. And Mom and Ella got along the same way. Mom was born in 1882. She lived to be a hundred years old. She played the organ. She was a good singer.”

     I said, “Now, there’s a story on that album where Ed went to this grave and played over it. Was that your dad?”

     “Yes,” she said. “They was talking one time, whichever one died first the other one was supposed to play the fiddle at their funeral. Dad requested that he play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’ and said that he wouldn’t meet his Lord in the air until Ed played. Dad died on the 18th day of January in ’37 but Kentucky and Ashland was under water. The water was up so high in ’37 that Ed and Ella couldn’t get there until after that and they played the song that dad requested.”

     I asked Ugee where all that went down and she said, “Dad’s buried up there at the home place on Route 16 in Calhoun County between Chloe and Stinson — as you come up from Arnoldsburg. Him and Mom and my brothers.”

     Calhoun County, I discovered, is a rural spot wedged in the backcountry between the Little Kanawha and Elk rivers northeast of Charleston, the state capitol. It is some 75 miles away from Haley’s birthplace on Harts Creek, at least as the crow flies. In Ed Haley’s time, it was a real hot bed of musicians.

     I wondered if Laury Hicks made any recordings. No, Ugee said, although his fiddle was still around. She gave it to Harold Postalwait, her son in Rogersville, Alabama.

     “He just had it refinished and everything,” she said.

     Ugee’s memories were warming up: “Ed and Ella and all the family used to come stay at our home — not for days — but for maybe months. We had some beautiful music there. I tell you, they ain’t nothing that I’ve ever heard on the TV or any place else to beat Ed Haley and my dad playing the fiddle. Ed Haley was one of the best I ever heard. Well, I thought my dad was too, but Ed was smoother. I’m always glad to talk about Ed Haley. He’s the only one that I ever heard where my dad would play and he’d second on the fiddle. Like, you’re singing a song and somebody singing alto behind it.”

     I told Ugee what Lawrence said about Ed being able to play the banjo and she agreed. “Ed could play a guitar like crazy, too. There’s where Ralph learned to play a guitar — Ed learned him. And Ed could play a mandolin, too. He could play any kind of music, anything that had a string. Now Dad could thump a banjo a little but he wasn’t what you’d call a banjo player.”

     Ugee said, “I wish you coulda been around through that country back when I was a girl a growing up so you coulda heard the music that was in that country. They really had good musicians. Rector Hicks, he was a cousin of mine, born and raised right across the hill. That was Clay Hicks’ boy. He used to come over and Dad would learn him to play. He lived across the hill on White Oak and there’s where Ed and Ella went all the time to visit.”

     I wondered if Rector was still around and she said no — that he had died a few years ago in 1989. She promised to talk with his widow in Akron, who supposedly had recordings of his music. Maybe such recordings would provide clues about Ed’s fiddling.

     I asked Ugee if she ever met John Hager, the banjo-player shown with Ed in the White Sulphur Springs photograph.

     “Oh, I sure did,” she said. “Played the banjo. They stayed at our house one whole winter, Ed and John, and then the next time that Ed come back he had a fella playing the guitar with him. I can’t think of his name but I can see his face. Ed was a tall slender fella then.”

     I invited Ugee to my upcoming show in Akron but all I could get out of her was, “I’m always glad to talk about Ed Haley. And Lawrence, you can’t meet a nicer person. He was named after my dad. And his wife is an awful nice person. I hope I can get down to see them this year. Nice talking to you because nobody loves to watch you any more than I do on TV.”

In Search of Ed Haley 33

18 Tuesday Dec 2012

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Ashland, Kentucky — originally named Poage Settlement but renamed “Ashland” in 1854 in honor of Henry Clay’s home — was a thriving spot of business activity when Ed Haley settled there after the Great War. It was an “iron and steel town” free of labor troubles with untapped natural resources situated at the intersection of the National Dixie Highway and the Midland Trail and accessed by at least five railroads. Its primary business was the Open Hearth Furnace Company, which according to a 1917 business directory, was the “largest in the world.” It also had the largest fire brick plant and the largest tannery and leather company in the world. By 1920, its population was 15,000 — almost twice what it had been in 1910.

In 1923, the American Rolling Mill Company (later Armco Steel Corporation) located in the western section of Ashland and constructed the world’s first continuous sheet mill. This new technology was revolutionary: it created thousands of jobs and improved the quality of sheet metal while also reducing its cost so that average Americans could afford refrigerators and other modern conveniences. Shortly thereafter, in what one local history referred to as “the greatest single event in Ashland’s history,” American Rolling Mill Company acquired Ashland Steel Company and the Norton Iron Works. In 1924, Ashland Oil & Refining Company was formed, helping to fuel an economic and population explosion, and the Sanitary Milk Company built a new plant at 34th and Winchester. The following year, Ashland Culvert Works located in town and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway built a new passenger station. At that time, the population was estimated at 29,000.

During the early twenties, Ed and Ella Haley lived at “Frogtown” in West Ashland, a somewhat low-income area near the Armco plant. In 1920, Ed’s oldest son, Sherman Luther Haley, was born on March 17. He died, according to Kentucky death records, on April 5, not quite one month old. In the census for that year, Ed was listed as a thirty-five-year-old married musician. Ella was listed as thirty years old. Her son Ralph was not listed in census records with them, indicating that he was perhaps with the Trumbos in Morehead. In a 1924 business directory, Ed’s address was given as 618 ½ West Greenup Avenue. Today, this spot is at a floodwall near the city mall and a music store-turned-Chinese restaurant.

In those days, Ashland was not just an industrial site — it also favored the arts and recreation. The eastern edge of town offered a fifty-acre amusement park with a concert hall and dancing pavilion, as well as boating and swimming facilities. There was a YMCA and five theatres and “moving picture houses”, as well as a racetrack and a yearly agricultural fair. Its local high school, the Ashland Tomcats, was the national basketball champion in 1928, having edged Canton, Illinois, 15-10. Ashland seems to have retained its zest for the arts. Today it offers a beautiful park in the center of town, a community college, the Paramount Arts Center, a library, and a museum.

Home Alone

18 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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“This has been a very nice day,” Pearl wrote on Saturday in the spring or summer. “I have been at home all day by my self. They all have been gone for the longest time. I guess I would have had to stayed the whole time by my self if it hadn’t been for a girl friend who dropped in for a few minutes chat. She has gone and I have been dreaming of my love and his sweet looks when another face broke in on my meditation and said, ‘I see [name omitted] is back again.’ I asked, ‘Where is he at?’ She said, ‘I seen him out at the store. He’s a lot better looking than he used to be.’ But I never got a glimpse of him at all.”

“Our company began to come in,” Pearl wrote the following day, a Sunday. “Cora was primping up to go out with some of them. I was laying on the bed lost in deep thoughts of my afflictions. That caused me to be so sorrowful and sad, for I couldn’t go with them. I was nursing my misery to its fullest heights when some one came in the next room. All at once a calmness came over me. I was thinking of my sweet lipped honey and wishing he was here. But I felt his presence before he entered the room. I was so astonished and dumbfounded that I couldn’t speak for several seconds when he smiled one of his smiles and said, ‘Why hello, Pearl. How are you?’ I hardly remember what I said for I was still under the shock of it all, for this was the first time I had seen him since I discovered I loved him so dearly. I know I blushed from my neck to the roots of my hair. I was so overjoyed and thankful for his return that I hardly knew what to do. Aw shucks, what could I do? I couldn’t do any thing — only lay there and smile too myself. They all left out and he stayed on. But he didn’t stay in there for long where I was, but sit in the next room nursing his misery too, I guess. But I’m not telling what it was and he wouldn’t eat no dinner and stayed till late in the evening and then was gone and left me to suffer it out by my self. No one ever guessed that I too suffered like others do. I don’t guess he ever dreamed I could love him but I do just the same and I mean that he shall know by and by.”

Parkersburg Landing 32

17 Monday Dec 2012

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     I was elated the entire trip home. As soon as I got back in Nashville, I called Dr. Wolfe and said, “I don’t even know where to begin to start telling you everything. I’ve got records and I got leads on where the rest of the recordings are. They just took me in and everything and as I got ready to go they gave me one of his canes for a souvenir. I’ve held one of his fiddles in my hand and looked at it. Now the other thing that Lawrence let me bring back are his reel-to-reel dubs of everything the Library of Congress has. There’s a bunch of tunes on there we haven’t heard: ‘Sourwood Mountain’ and ‘Dora Dean’.

     “Yesterday we went up to Harts Creek in West Virginia, his birthplace. He’s a West Virginian; he’s not a Kentuckian. And in fact, Lawrence, because of the way his dad was treated when he was alive around Ashland, says he prefers to think of him as being a West Virginian. Lawrence, being the youngest of the five brothers, he’s kind of the keeper of the flame more or less. I think being around him I really get a flavor of what the old man was like. Even when we went up into Harts Creek, why the old-timers up there said he talked just like Ed.”

     Dr. Wolfe asked me what my intentions were and I said, “I think what it amounts to is doing everything we can to preserve the music and the history because the story is incredible.”

     I wasted little time in listening to all of Ed’s recordings on a reel-to-reel player borrowed from Doug Dillard. It was an incredible experience. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I immediately focused in on Ed’s recording of “Brownlow’s Dream”, the tune Roxie Mullins said was Milt Haley’s last tune. It was an amazing four part version of a tune I had learned from Elmer Bird called “Jimmy Johnson”. Lawrence had recalled his father singing, “Old Jimmy Johnson bring your jug around the hill. If you can’t bring your jug, bring your still if you will.” Not long after going through the reels, I took them to Bruce Nemerov at the Center for Popular Culture in Murfreesboro. I had promised Lawrence I would get him good copies.

     A few weeks later, Dr. Wolfe called me with news of an old West Virginia ballad that mentioned the name of Milt Haley. It was titled “A West-Virginia Feud Song” and published in Professor J.H. Cox’s Folk-Songs of the South (1924). T.M. Martin of Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, informed Cox about the tune in 1916, while S.S. Workman of Seebert, West Virginia, was the source for events surrounding it.

     “The fight, out of which this song grew, occurred, as near as he could remember, in 1890, at the house of George Fries, eleven miles east of Hamlin, Lincoln County, and the trial took place at Hamlin,” Cox wrote. “The trouble between the factions was of long standing. The McCoy mentioned was a close relative of the McCoys that fought with the Hatfields. George Pack helped Mr. Workman get this song together. They never saw it in print.”

     Events chronicled in the song lyrics seemed to be about Ed’s father, who was reportedly killed with a McCoy, but the account was so confusing that I really wasn’t sure.

Come all you men and ladies, and fathers and mothers too;

I’ll relate to you the history of the Lincoln County crew;

Concerning bloody rowing, and a many a threatening deed;

Pray lend me your attention, and remember how it reads.

It was all in the month of August, all on a very fine day,

Ale Brumfield he got wounded, they say by Milt Haley;

But Brumfield he recovered; he says it was not so,

He says it was McCoy that fired that fatal shot.

Two months have come and passed, now those men have met at last,

Have met at George Fries’ house, at George Fries’ house at last;

McCoy and Milt Haley, it’s through the yard did walk,

They seemed to be uneasy, with no one wished to talk.

They went into the house, sit down by the fire,

But little did they think they had met their fatal hour.

As the mob came rushing on them, the ladies left the room;

A ball from some man’s pistol lay McCoy in his tomb.

They shot and killed Boney Lukes, a sober and innocent man,

And left his wife and children to do the best they can;

They wounded old Ran Sawyers, although his life was save[d];

He seems to shun the drugshops, since he stood so near the grave.

Tom Feril was soon arrested and confined in jail;

He was put in jail in Hamlin to bravely stand his trial;

The Butchers threatened to lynch him, and that was all his fears;

The trial day it came on, Tom Feril he came clear.

There is poor old Perries Brumfield, he died among the rest;

He got three balls shot through him, they went through his breast.

The death of poor old Parris so lately has been done,

They say it was a hired deed, it was done by his son.

So go tell the nation around you it will never, never cease;

I would give this whole world around me to reach my home in peace;

In the bottom of a whiskey glass there is a lurking devil dwells,

It burns the breath of those who drink it and sends their souls to hell.

In Search of Ed Haley 31

16 Sunday Dec 2012

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Back in Ashland, Lawrence and I told Pat all about our trip to Harts Creek. We had some great photographs — including the one of Ed’s mother — and all kinds of new information. One of the first things Lawrence did was joke Pat about seeing “that funny boy” who nearly scared her to death forty years ago. I told her about Milt Haley’s murder, the possibility of Milt having been a fiddler and about our interview with Roxie Mullins. Lawrence liked the story about his father breaking a fiddle over someone’s head, although it kind of bothered me to think he would do such a thing.

At some point during the evening, Pat suggested showing me Ella’s postcards, but Lawrence quickly dismissed the idea. I could tell there was something in those postcards he didn’t want me to see, which of course only peaked my curiosity. It was clear by his negative response, though, that the issue was closed so I didn’t mention it again.

Instead, I pelted him with very specific questions about his father. I wanted to know how Ed Haley felt about different types of music.

Did your dad like the Blues? I asked.

“I guess he liked, uh, Joplin,” Lawrence said. “He liked a lot of that ragtime. ‘Sugar Foot Rag’, he liked that.”

What about something like Hank Williams?

“No, I don’t think he cared too much for that.”

Otis Redding?

“Well, he might have liked some of it.”

How about Dixieland Jazz, somebody like Louis Armstrong?

“No, not too much of that.”

How about bluegrass?

“No, he didn’t like that.”

How about Arthur Smith?

“That was a fiddler, and he had nothing for him, I reckon.”

Clayton McMichen?

“Well, I never have heard him mention him.”

How about Georgia Slim Rutland?

“I really can’t remember him ever mentioning that guy, either.”

Did he ever know about Benny Thomasson or Major Franklin or any of those Texas fiddle players?

“John, I wouldn’t say one way or the other,” Lawrence finally said. “It’s just like you keep asking me, did he play this tune, did he play that tune? I guess my best answer whenever you started that shoulda been what didn’t he play in the way of this old-time music. And that’s the same way, who didn’t he know if they was into that and they was around this area he probably found out about them.”

Early the next morning, Lawrence and I went to see Ed and Ella’s graves in Ashland. Along the way, I asked him if he remembered all the places where his father had lived in town.

“Aw, we lived in half a dozen different places,” he said. “All we did was rent. We lived in a couple down on Greenup Avenue, 10th Street, 22nd Street. Then we lived in one on Halbert and about three different ones on 45th Street and one up on 37th Street. That’s about it.”

None of Ed’s former dwellings were still standing.

Lawrence told me about the time his brother Clyde almost got married: “That’s one of those deals where I told you he was afraid of women. He was courting a lady up in Detroit or somewhere and she told my sister-in-law, Patsy — Jack’s wife — said, ‘He run off and left me practically at the alter. We had made all the plans and everything.’ Next thing we knew, he was working on a platform out in the Gulf of Mexico out of Louisiana. I don’t know where he was when Mom passed away.”

After we got back to the house, Lawrence explained why he’d ruled out showing me his mother’s postcards the night before.

“Some of the old postcards that Mom used to receive kinda had a flavor of real broken love,” he said.

They also revealed that Ralph Haley actually belonged to Ella by a previous marriage.

“I don’t know what his name was, her first husband,” Lawrence said. “Apparently it was somebody that she met either in school or after she come out of school and went back to Morehead. I think Ralph was born around 1914, ’15, somewhere along in there, ’16. He was approximately ten years older than me, twelve at the most.”

For the first time, I thought, Lawrence was opening up about his mother. He said she used to type letters to her friends.

“She had a friend, I guess she must have been pretty well Irish. Her first name was Bridget. I don’t remember her last name. She never married. She went into a home and kept people up at Hamilton, Ohio. Every time we went to Cincinnati, Mom wanted to go see her.”

I listened quietly before saying, “I wonder what happened to your mom’s letters? I bet they would tell a lot of history.”

Pat said, “They probably would but it would mostly be my mother-in-law’s. You know, her life.”

I said, “But women invariably talk about their husbands a lot,” and Lawrence agreed.

“Women can pass along more information between them in five minutes than two men can all day long,” he said.

Still, he never offered to show the cards so I just kind of left it at that.

Just before I headed back to Nashville, Lawrence reached me his father’s walking stick. “Here’s something I think you’d like to have,” he said. He also loaned me the four Library of Congress reel-to-reel tapes, containing over 100 recordings.

Parkersburg Landing 30

15 Saturday Dec 2012

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     It was clear to Lawrence and I that Roxie really knew her stuff. Her memories went back to the Bull Moose era — some twenty years before Lawrence’s — and while they were a little hazy they were clearer than anything else we had heard up to that point. I think Lawrence was satisfied with Roxie’s stories but maybe a little intimidated because she just knew things about his father that went beyond his years. He really wanted to keep everything we heard about his dad in this certain context and someone like Roxie could really just carry it outside of his realm of knowledge.

     “John keeps asking me about my dad,” he said. “I told him I couldn’t tell him too much about my dad, because half of his life was over before I was ever born.”

     That got Roxie going again.

     “All of his fun days was all over. I know he played music right on, but I mean all of his fun — when he married, he laid down part of it.”

     Roxie caught Lawrence and I off-guard when she said Ed tried to get a local preacher to baptize him one time. “He joined the church once down on the hill with Cecil. And Uncle Charley Curry said, ‘Ed, will you lay down your music?’ and Ed said, ‘No, Uncle Charley. That’s the only way I’ve got to live is my music, but I can just play sacred songs, good songs.’ And Uncle Charley said, ‘Now listen, you’re drunk. You go off and get sober and come back to me tonight. I’ll take you in but I can’t take you in like you are.’ Sure did. Ed shook hands with him but I don’t guess he ever went back.”

     Lawrence said, “Well, that’s news to me. I’m not sure he was ever baptized. The only baptism he got was Milt Haley’s baptism, and that didn’t amount to much.”

     That got us to talking about Ed’s father again. I really wanted to know why he was killed, but Roxie had no idea.

     “I don’t know why they killed him, son. They was just all into it. Now, Aunt Liza coulda told you all about it.”

     She looked at Lawrence and said, “You’re like me. You waited too long to come to talk to any of his people to find out anything about it. All the old people’s dead, you see, and gone. My mother, she was a Hager, and her mother went to the Western States and died there and was buried on the banks of the Wabash River. Uncle John told us — he was with her. He said she just lived there six months till she died. I know who my grandmother was — she was a Baisden — but I don’t know a thing on earth about my grandmother, and I don’t know nothing about Joe — that’s my grandpa — nothing about who he was, who his brothers was. Daddy died in ’40 and my mother died in ’42. I’m the only one that’s living. I can’t go ask nobody nothing. People never ask nobody nothing when they’re young.”

     Lawrence agreed, “That’s right. That’s exactly why I didn’t find anything out. You’re just young, happy to be alive.”

     Roxie’s mind was still on her father, Ticky George Adams.

     “My dad could play the accordion,” she said. “He could play ‘The Golden Slipper’ and he could play ‘John Morgan’. He could play ‘John Henry’. He could play just anything he wanted to play and how he learned it I just don’t know. And ‘Old Joe Clark’, that’s another one he could play. ‘Nelly Gray’, that’s another one he played. He could make them ring.”

     I asked Roxie if Ticky George ever played with Ed.

     “No, he never played with Ed. He wouldn’t let Ed hear him play, I guess. He could really play and sing. He had a song he sung. ‘Nothing Between My Soul and Heaven’ is the name of the song. They was four verses to that and buddy he could sing every word of that, and how he learnt that I don’t know. He couldn’t read. He didn’t know his letters.”

     Roxie told us about her uncle Peter, saying, “Uncle Peter, you know, was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards. When he bought him a pair of shoes, he had to cut the toe off here and sew it up, and his foot turned back in here.”

     I said to her, “And that’s the man that raised up Ed Haley?” and she said, “Yeah, he helped raise him. He stayed with Uncle Peter’s fellers and Grandma and Grandpa Jackson. See, she was married twice. When John Adams was killed, she married Andrew Jackson Mullins, and he kept Ed a long time, him and her. And he stayed with us. He just stayed with first one and then another. Wherever he wanted to go, he went. He was just his own boss.”

     Okay, so the Jackson Mullins I’d heard about from Bum was Ed’s grandfather and the John Adams involved in Weddie Mullins’ death must have been a Jr.

     I asked Roxie if she knew how old Ed was when he stayed with his grandparents and she said, “Well, when he was with Grandpa and Grandma Jackson, he was a young man. I guess he was twenty years old, maybe more. Grandpa and Grandma kept him a long time, and then he stayed with Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza. And he stayed with us some every now and then. He come and stayed with us two or three days at a time — with John and the boys. He musta left here about the age of thirty and went to Ashland, Kentucky. West Greenup, Kentucky, is where I wrote to them. I wrote to Ralph, Ralph wrote to me. Man he was smart, I’ll tell you that. Take anything you wanted to ask him about the books.”

     Roxie bragged on how smart Ella was, saying she tried to get her to move to Kentucky with the Haleys.

     “She graduated from college, she told us. She said The Pied Piper of Hamlin – they’s eight pages of it, on both sides. She’d beg me and Annie to go home with her and said she would learn us to play the piano. Man she could make that harmonica… Listen, she could put it in her mouth and she had things fastened under here. She didn’t have to have her hands on it. Man she’d just run that mouth over that the best you ever heard in your life. She played that mandolin right along with her fingers and then had that harp in her mouth.”

     Right before Lawrence and I left Roxie’s, she asked my name again and said she’d be watching for me on Hee Haw. She said Roy Clark used to come through “back when he was a chunk of a boy,” but Violet said she was confused — that it had been Roy Acuff.

     “That was back when he traveled through here some. He had some people or something that lived up on Buck Fork.”

     To say that Lawrence and I were blown away by our experience with Roxie would be a huge understatement. Lawrence had never heard anything about his grandfather being murdered. Maybe Ed had wanted to distance his kids from that part of his painful past on Harts Creek.

In Search of Ed Haley 29

14 Friday Dec 2012

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     Roxie wasn’t sure how Ed learned to play the fiddle.

     “It was just gifted to him, I guess. Lord man, he could make that fiddle talk. He had one song he sung, I’d give anything in the world to know it. If I could remember now… Man, it was really pretty. People’d ask him every now and then to play it but man listen, he got mad if you asked him to play again something when he got tired. He’d get tired. He’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ He’d jump up man and maybe get a knife man and go to quarreling with a knife. Yes, sir. He told me, he’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ And your mommy man she stayed with us some.”

     I asked Roxie if she remembered Haley playing at any dances on Harts Creek and she said, “Well, I don’t know. We never had many dances around here nowhere. He always played away from here. He went several places — big dances, you know — dance halls and played. We had a few little dances here, but he never was at them.”

     Roxie remembered Ed playing “Blackberry Blossom”.

     “Yeah, Lord he could play that, and he could play anything on earth you named to him. Anything. He played the ‘Brownlow’s Dream’. I could pick it on a banjo when I was young, but I ain’t picked none in a long time, honey.”

     I offered Roxie my banjo to see if she could play out any of “Brownlow’s Dream” (I’d never heard of it), but she said, “I belong to the church now and I don’t fool with no banjo or nothing like that.”

     I asked if she remembered Ed playing the banjo and she said, “I never did see Ed play no banjo. Uncle John Hager’s the one played the banjo. He run around with Ed a long time. I’ve got his picture a sitting in there. He was funnier than a monkey.”

     I asked Roxie more about Haley’s tunes.

     “Ed would play ‘Old Joe Clark’, you know, and pluck up on them strings. He had one he played he called ‘Devil in the Yearlings’. I don’t know what it was, but boy he could pluck up on them strings and Ralph would jump up. That little boy’d hop up and dance. Man he beat anything I ever seen in my life a dancing. Ralph was about eight years old or ten when they was at our house — Ed and his wife. First time we ever seen her. And they stayed two or three nights with us then they went to Uncle Peter’s and stayed all night. And that woman really had them trained. She had a whistle she could blow. Didn’t matter where they was at buddy, they’d come up in line.”

     I asked if Ed played “Ragtime Annie” and Roxie said, “‘Ragtime Annie’ — I heard Bernie Adams talk about that, but I don’t know whether Ed played that or not. Can you play ‘Red Wing’? That’s one of his tunes. ‘Blue-Dressed Girl’. He had something another about ‘Blue-Eyed Beauty’. Aw, he played all kinds of tunes. He’d tell us the names.”

     Talking about Ed’s tunes caused Roxie to say, “‘Brownlow’s Dream’ — it was the last tune his daddy ever played on the fiddle. Ed told us that. Right down there in Hugh Dingess’ house they was kept upstairs till they took him to kill him. French Bryant was the man that was in it — he’s dead. They said they was thirty of them, man, a whole mob of them that killed him. They was afraid of him, you see, because he had a pretty bad name.”

     I asked Roxie how Ed’s father was killed and she said, “Beat them to death, I reckon, ’cause they said the chickens was running through the yard and a pecking their brains laying in the yard. That’s what people told us children when we was little.”

     Listening to Roxie tell all these tales found me wondering about her life. I asked if she’d lived “here” — meaning Harts Creek — all of her life and she said, “No, Lord, no. We’ve lived different places. We lived across the creek there over yonder on that bank. George Baisden’s home, I bought there and lived there awhile. Moved out here on a point and the State came in and told me they’d have to condemn me if I didn’t sell to them and move out. Well, I just sold it to them and bought this then. When Floyd left me — he left me in 1940 — I been a widow woman since that. I’ll soon be 86. I didn’t have no divorce from him, and I got his railroad retirement. That’s all we had to live on. He’s been dead now — he died in ’86 — and his woman he left here with’s been dead fifteen year or sixteen, about eighteen. She didn’t last very long. I told them the Lord don’t let things prosper like people thinks they will. The Lord has blessed me a long time to live a man’s life and a woman’s life, too. I’ve raised three children myself and helped Violet raise her three.”

     At that point, I heard Violet singing to Lawrence off in the corner. She said it was one of Ed’s tunes, “The Drunkard’s Hell”, then sang it again for me, this time with Roxie:

     I started out one stormy night

     To see my poor neglected wife.

     I found her weeping by her bed

     Because her only babe was dead. 

     I started out one stormy night.

     I thought I saw an awful sight.

     The lightning flashed, the thunder rolled

     Upon the poor old drunkard’s soul.

     Roxie stopped and said, “We can’t remember it. You might find that in libraries in books or something another but honey we don’t know it. It’s been fifty or sixty years since he sung that to us.”