Tag Archives: Imogene Haley

In Search of Ed Haley 94

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Ed Haley, Music

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Not too long after talking with Patsy, her son Scott sent me a copy of Ed’s genealogy, most of which came directly from Ed and Ella. “James Edward Haley was born in August and was the son of Milt and Imogene (Mullins) Haley,” the notes began. “He died February 4, 1951 in Ashland, KY. He married Martha Ella Trumbo, a daughter of William A. and Laura Belle (Whitt) Payne Trumbo. She was born July 14, 1888 and died November 26, 1954 in Cleveland, OH. At the time of their marriage, Ella had one child from a previous relationship: Ralph A. Payne who married Margaret Ryan and who died on May 22, 1947.”

Patsy listed Milt Haley’s parents as Benjamin Haley and Nellie Muncy, and Emma Jean (Imogene) Haley’s parents as Andrew Jackson Mullins and Chloe Ann Gore.

There was detailed information on Ed and Ella’s children.

“Sherman Luther Haley, the oldest, died as an infant. Clyde Frederick Haley was born on June 13, 1921 and never married. Noah Earl Haley was born on October 26, 1922 and married Janet J. Fried in September of 1951. Allie Jackson Haley was born on April 6, 1924. He married Patsy J. Cox on October 25, 1946 and died on March 23, 1982. Lawrence Alfred Haley was born on January 8, 1928. He married Patricia M. Hulse in February of 1949. Monnie May Haley was born on May 5, 1930 and married in 1945 to Wilson Mullins.”

In Search of Ed Haley 85

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Harts, John Hartford

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I returned to Nashville talking not so much about new musical developments but rambling on to my wife about murders and the people I’d met in Harts. I spent a lot of time studying over Joe’s photographs, especially the faded family group shot. One of the boys in the picture was propped inside a young woman’s arms and appeared very much to be blind. Was it Ed and his mother? Unfortunately, since the woman was almost completely faded away I couldn’t make a positive identification of her, even when I compared it to the photo of Emma Jean found by Lawrence and I on our first trip to Harts.

There was another interesting development: when I removed the picture of Bill and Peter Mullins from its frame, another equally large picture of the “old couple” kind of popped out from behind it. That made three pictures of those folks and it sure seemed logical to me that Joe Mullins would’ve had three pictures of his grandparents — meaning Ed’s grandparents — and not of an uncle and an aunt.

I sent copies of Joe’s old pictures to Turley and Violet Adams to see if they could show them around for identification. A few weeks later, we spoke over the telephone and they said Liza McKenzie had fingered Ed as the child to the right in the faded group picture. She also said the old folks in the back row were Jackson Mullins and his wife, Chloe.

In Search of Ed Haley 83

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Green Shoal, Lincoln County Feud, Spottswood

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We found Bum on our way up the hollow and went to sit on his porch with his aunt, Liza McKenzie, two of his sisters, Alice and Dicy — and of course Shermie. As soon as Liza figured out who we were she looked at Lawrence and said he was just a small boy the last time she’d seen him.

“Yeah, I guess around 1940 or ’41 was the last time I come to this area,” Lawrence said.

Liza said, “Well, I lived in Kentucky about sixty years. Perry County, up in Hazard.”

I said to her, “Is that where Milt Haley was from?” and she said, “I don’t know but now Ed Haley was borned and raised right around here. When he was a boy, he got up on top of that house down there where Aunt Mag used to live — in that old two-story house — and rolled off in a box. Mother said, ‘Lord, Ed, are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, God no. It’s give me eyesight.’ He said he jarred his eyesight back.”

I liked Liza right away.

I asked her if she had any pictures and she said, “Loretta’s mother had all the pictures of Ed Haley I ever did know. They used to have a picture down there at Loretta’s of Ed’s mother. She was a pretty woman.”

She looked at Clifton and said, “Clif, I believe your mother had a picture of Ed Haley that was made down there at the old home where he was born and raised. Down there where Aunt Mag used to live. I know they had them.”

Clifton remembered it.

“Yeah, they was sitting out in the yard,” he said. “They was together. She was in the chair and he was standing. He didn’t have no pants on.”

Clifton said, “Yeah, you’re right. They was a picture down there. But I looked; they was so many pictures in that box.”

     Box of pictures? I thought.

Before I could ask about them, Clifton said, “There’s one down there faded out. It’s in a big frame. I got it in another building.”

He told me, “I can show them to ya.”

About that time, Cas Baisden came up to the porch. Bum said he was Liza’s 83-year-old twin brother. I asked Cas if he remembered Ed and he said, “I knowed him, yeah. He was raised up here. Old man Peter lived down at the mouth of the holler and his boy lived up the road here and old man Ed’d go up there and he’d come down that road a running and jumping just like he could see and cut the awfulest shine that ever was.”

Lawrence joked, “That’s probably how Clyde got to be the way he was.”

Cas said, “Yeah, I guess Clyde took after him. Clyde went out here and got down in a well once and they had the awfulest time that ever was getting him out. Way back in top of a mountain.”

I asked Cas about the first time he ever saw Ed and he said, “It’s been many a year ago. He stayed down here, him and his wife and them. They’d play music and drink and fight and scratch with one another and them boys was so mean… He’d get so drunk he couldn’t walk.”

Bum knew that Ed was real “easy to get mad about music,” but said he could get him to play nearly anything he wanted because Ed liked him. He’d ask Ed to play something like “John Henry” and he’d say, “Are you sure that’s what you want me to play? You know, I was just thinking about playing that.” If Ed didn’t like someone Bum said he’d “goof around” and not play for them.

Things kinda tapered off after that. Nobody knew anything about Ed having any brothers. Cas had heard about Ed’s father, who he thought was named Green.

“You know, he got killed when I was a little fella, I guess,” Cas said. “His name was Green. They took him over yonder on Green Shoal, they said, and killed him. Walked him down here and up Smoke House and over and down Piney and across the river.”

I asked if Lawrence looked like Ed and Liza said, “Yes, he does. Ed was a bigger man than he is. Ed was a big man.”

But Lawrence looks like Ed in the face?

“Yeah, he looks like him all over.”

Cas said, “Ed was a taller man. I guess he takes after his mother. She’s a little short woman.”

Lawrence agreed: “Yeah, she was about five feet tall — not much bigger than Aunt Liza.”

In Search of Ed Haley 72

24 Sunday Feb 2013

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We all met up with Mona later in the day. She acted surprised that I was even interested in seeing her again, joking, “I’m good for something, aren’t I?” She was extremely talkative and almost immediately took over the conversation in a way that gave me the impression she really knew a great deal about Ed and Ella’s music. It was quite a different presentation than my first meeting with her.

“See my brothers don’t know about music like I know about music,” she said right away. “They know the tunes and they know the keys and stuff, but I don’t think they listened like I did. I paid attention to Pop’s music because I love music. I always loved music.”

She told Lawrence, “You don’t have the ear for it like I do.”

It was the first time I had heard someone be so candid with Lawrence. He seemed a little put off by it, muttering, “Probably not.”

We told Mona about talking with Bob Adkins and she said, “Pop’s mother was supposed to had the whole side of her face blown away. Now whether she was killed or not, I don’t know. That happened on Harts Creek and that’s what made Milt Haley get in with Green McCoy ’cause one of the Hatfields shot my dad’s mother’s face away. Side of her face. Well now, that’s how I understood it. But I’ve heard it said about that sinkhole that fills up with blood where that Milt Haley and Green McCoy was beat to death — buried in the same grave — and every time it rains, the grave fills up with blood.”

Noah said of Milt, “Well, ain’t he the guy that shot the person that shot Pop’s mom in the face? I thought Pop’s dad shot and killed the guy that shot his mother in the face.”

Mona wasn’t sure about that but said, “I know that Pop said that if he could see, he would get the guy that hurt his mother. Shot her. Her name was Emma Jean.”

Mona was sure the measles had caused her father to go blind, not Milt or ice water.

“No,” she said emphatically, “Ice water wouldn’t make you go blind. He had the measles.”

She said Ed started playing the fiddle when he was small and never talked about learning from anyone.

“Did you know that he started out on a cornstalk homemade fiddle?” she asked me. “I heard that his uncle or somebody up in the hills made him a cornstalk fiddle. Musta been Uncle Peter, I don’t know. Uncle Peter was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards.”

Noah said, “He was a mean one, too.”

Mona knew little else about Ed’s life on Harts Creek.

“I don’t know if I told you about him talking about… As a young boy he was sitting on one of those log fences that goes this way — zig-zag, I call it — and it was a bull pasture inside. And he always carried a pistol with him. For what, I don’t know. It was a bull pasture fence he was sitting on and he was playing his little cornstalk fiddle and somebody come back behind him and was playing a joke on him by acting like a bull — you know, making noises like a bull. So Pop pulled that pistol out and shot and missed him by about an inch.”

Mona was quick to mention Ella, pointing out that “she figures in a lot of this, too.” I agreed, of course, but hadn’t been able to find out much about her from Lawrence, who seemed to keep his memories of her to himself. Every time Pat brought her name up, he said things like, “John doesn’t want to hear about Mom — he wants to know about Pop.” He always said it in a straightforward way that I knew to basically avoid the subject, as did Pat.

Mona said her parents met when Ella came to one of Ed’s “concerts”.

“I remember a lot of things about Mom,” she said. “Me and Mom was close. She walked around to feel if there was dirt on the floor — to see if it was clean — and if it wasn’t heads would roll. And she could cook. I remember back, I guess, during the Depression, her making lard cans full of soup so she could feed the neighbors and she had big bread pans full of cornbread for the dogs. And she could type as good as any typist.”

Mona looked at Lawrence and said, “Remember that whistle she had for us? It was like a calliope whistle. It was plastic or tin or something. And every one of us had a different tune. Each one of us knew our tunes. Different note.”

Mona’s pride in Ed and Ella seemed a little more on-the-surface than what I had detected with Lawrence.

“If there was a movie made, then there should’ve been one made about that — two blind people raising kids,” she said. “I’m just in awe of them and how they took care of all of us kids. They kept food and they kept shelter for us and we never went hungry. And they kept clothes on us. And I just don’t know how they done it. We always had a stable home. They always kept us occupied. We’d sit around in the wintertime and they’d give us soda crackers and apples and tell us to take a bite of one of them and then try to say a tongue twister.”

Mona said, “And we’re all reasonably intelligent,” although she jokingly pointed out that there were “some rogues in the family.”

Noah smiled and said, “I don’t know but one rogue.”

Mona knew exactly who he meant, so she told me, “That’s my other brother Clyde he’s talking about. He’s a rogue, but he’s all right.”

She said she was probably the real rogue of the family.

“Mom was real strict with me, but I was pretty head-strong,” she said. “I was rougher than all the boys put together, I reckon. At least that’s what they told me.”

Bob Adkins Interview, Part 1 (1993)

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Hamlin, Harts, Huntington, Lincoln County Feud

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The next day, Lawrence and I decided to go see 89-year-old Bob Adkins in Hamlin, West Virginia. In a recent Goldenseal article, Bob had given his biography, including his family’s connection to the story of Milt’s murder. Since reading his narrative, I’d been anxious to ask him about Milt, as well as to confirm or disprove my suspicion that his father’s first wife Emma Jane Hager was the same person as Ed’s mother.

To get to Bob’s house, we took Route 10 out of Huntington to Lincoln County. We turned off onto Route 3 just inside the county line at West Hamlin, then drove on for about ten minutes, crossed a hill and cruised into Hamlin — Lincoln County’s seat of government. Bob Adkins’ nice two-story house sat just past a block of small struggling businesses and through the only red light in town. We found Bob out back relaxing on a patio near a flower garden in full bloom.

After all the introductions, I mentioned my theory about Ed’s mother, which Bob shot out of the water right away. He was positive that Emma Jane Hager was not the same person as Emma Haley.

“No, Emma Jane Hager was old man Philip Hager’s daughter,” Bob said. “Dad got her from Griffithsville, 10 miles toward Charleston. Dad come down there and stole her.”

Bob knew all about Milt’s death but stressed that what he knew about it was hear-say, that he didn’t want to get sued and that we couldn’t take his word as gospel because there was “so dern many of ’em a shootin’ and a bangin’ around amongst each other” in Harts that he sometimes got his stories confused. Maybe Bob did have a foggy memory, as he claimed, but I found him to be a walking — or rather, sitting — encyclopedia of Harts Creek murders.

“I was born and raised up there until I was nineteen years old, but I was never afraid,” Bob said. “I walked all hours of the night and everything and do as I please, but I always tended to my business, you know. Kin to most of them. I never bothered nobody. Nobody never bothered me, but that doesn’t say they wouldn’t shoot you. Well, all you had to do was tend to your own business.”

Bob eased into the story of Milt’s death by giving Lawrence and I some background on the Brumfields. He knew a lot about them because Hollena Brumfield, the woman Milt supposedly shot, was his mother’s aunt and “about half way raised her.” She was a Dingess prior to marrying Al Brumfield.

“Now those Dingesses up there, I never knew of them to bother anybody much,” Bob said of his kinfolk. “Some of the older ones shot and banged around a little bit. But look out for them Brumfields. They was into it all the time. If they couldn’t get anybody else to shoot, they’d shoot theirselves — their own people.”

Al Brumfield’s father Paris was the most notorious of the old Brumfields.

“Well, one thing, he killed an old pack peddler up there at Hart, took his stuff and threw him in the river,” Bob said of the Brumfield patriarch. “And he killed another man, too. I forget the other fellow’s name. Son, he was a mean old man, I’ll tell you that. Why, he’d kill anybody. He lived about three quarters of a mile from the mouth of the creek down the river there in at the end of a bottom, see?”

Bob kind of chuckled.

“Yeah, killed that old pack peddler,” he said. “That’s what they said he did. I don’t know. He was a mean old devil. And boy, he’d killed two men.”

I wanted to know more about the Brumfields since they seemed to have been so wrapped up in the story of Milt Haley.

“What happened to Paris Brumfield?” I found myself asking.

“I tell you, old Paris, he got what was coming to him,” Bob said. “He was as mean as a snake and he would beat up on his wife every time he got drunk. And Paris’ wife got loose from him and she came down to her son Charley’s for protection. Charley was a grown man and was married and had a family and he lived down the road a quarter of a mile. Charley told her to come on in the house and there’d be nobody to bother her there and he told her to stay back in the room and he would take care of it. Old Paris, he was drunk and he didn’t get exactly where she was and he finally figured out where she was and old Paris come down there to get his wife. When he come down, Charley, his son, was setting on the porch with a Winchester across his lap. A Winchester is a high-powered gun, you know? And that day and time, they had steps that came up on this side of the fence and a platform at the top of the fence and you walked across the platform and down the steps again. That kept the gates shut so that the cattle and stuff couldn’t come into the yard. Well, he got up on that fence and Charley was setting on the porch with that Winchester. He said, ‘Now, Paw don’t you step across that fence. If you step across that fence, I’m going to kill you.’ And Paris quarreled and he fussed and he cussed and he carried on. That was his wife and if he wanted to whip her, he could whip her. He could do as he pleased. He was going to take his wife home. Charley said, ‘Now, Paw. You have beat up on my mother your last time. You’re not going to bother Mother anymore. If you cross that step, I am going to kill you.’ And he kept that up for a good little while there. ‘Ah, you wouldn’t shoot your own father.’ Drunk, you know? And Charley said, ‘You step your foot over that fence, I will.’ Paris was a little shaky of it even if he was drunk. Well, after a while he said, ‘I am coming to get her,’ and when he stepped over that fence, old Charley shot him dead as a doornail.”

You mean he killed his own father?

“His own father,” Bob said. “He killed him. That got rid of that old rascal. And that ended that story. They never did even get indicted for that or nothing. Everybody kept their mouth shut and nobody didn’t blame Charley for it because old Paris had beat up on his mother, you know? Everyone was glad to get rid of him.”

Parkersburg Landing 27

11 Tuesday Dec 2012

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     From Enslow’s, Lawrence and I drove out of Trace Fork and up Harts Creek to find the home of Turley’s aunt, Roxie Mullins. We stopped to see Louie Mullins, a grandson to Uncle Peter, who said Roxie lived just up the creek and to the right, kinda down under the road. We thanked him for directions and drove on until we turned off onto a rough driveway with jutting rocks and an intimidating grade leading down to a small wooden dwelling with a chicken house built almost against it. We had found Roxie’s.

     At the front door, Roxie and her daughter Violet greeted us and told us to come on inside. As we made our way, Lawrence motioned toward me and told Roxie, “This man would like to talk to you for a few minutes about my dad if you can tell him anything. He wants to know from me and I tell him that I don’t know anything about Ed Haley.”

     Violet said, “Sit down over there on the couch Mommy and he can sit down with you and talk to you and that way you can hear him.”

     I planted myself beside of Roxie — a tiny wisp of a woman weighing no more than ninety-five pounds who was dressed in an old-timey brown dress with a white butterfly collar.

     I told her, “I just want to know everything I can find out about Ed Haley,” and, thinking that I was Lawrence, she began to talk to me in a high-pitched, thick mountain brogue.

     “Well honey, I don’t know too much about him. I just know he was Ed Haley. And Emmy Mullins, she was my daddy’s half-sister. And Milt Haley married Emmy Mullins and she and him was Ed’s father.”

     I asked Roxie if Emmy had any children aside from Ed and she said, “I don’t know as she had any other child. I reckon that’s the only one they had. If they ever had any more I never heard nothing about them. Milt Haley was his daddy. They was Emmy and Weddie and Peter was my daddy’s half-brothers and sisters. And Emmy was Ed’s mother.”

     Roxie told a slightly different version of the story about Haley’s blindness than what I had heard from Lawrence.

     “When he was a little boy, they said it took some kind of a fever. I don’t know whether it was the typhoid fever, brain fever or what. And said its daddy took it to the creek and busted the ice and put it under the ice and that made him go blind. That’s how come him to be blind. They wasn’t no doctors then. We never heard tell of a doctor till I was grown. And he had such a fever, he thought that’d kill his fever, you see, and it went to its head, you see, and put his eyes out.”

     Lawrence didn’t hesitate.

     “I get different flavors why Milton Haley did this to Ed,” he said. “I get the flavor that he did it because he was trying to stop a whiny kid from crying continually. You think he did it because he was trying to break his fever?”

     Violet said, “That’s what we always heard. My grandmother always told he had a fever.”

     Lawrence said, “That’s a better explanation,” seemingly preferring that version of the tale to that of his own.

     Roxie said, “There is men does their children like that. I don’t think he’d a done that. I don’t know.”

     Lawrence said to Roxie, “You know, the only thing I could get from Aunt Liza about my grandfather was that he come from across the mountain. He was a stranger here in this area until he met Emma, my grandmother. Can you tell me anything about that?”

     She said, “I don’t know a thing in the world about him.”

     I asked if he was a musician and she said, “I don’t know about that. Ed was a real musician. I don’t know whether your grandfather was but he was awful bad to drink they said and he kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door they said. People was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill people before they did kill him.”

     I’d never heard that Ed’s father was killed, so I asked Roxie if she knew who killed him.

     “I don’t know that,” she said quickly. “Whether the Brumfields killed him or the Conleys… I know the Conleys killed John Brumfield, Cecil’s daddy. My sister’s husband’s daddy. And then they shot Hollene Brumfield. She was on behind her husband. Shot her through the jaw, and that hole was in her jaw when she died. Some of them killed Milt then I think. Milt Haley, he was took… Now you’re getting me into it just right. Him and McCoy was captured and took in a house ’round here over on Smoke House where Sallie Dingess’ home is. They was took in there and put upstairs and kept till supper. And when they got their supper ready, they brought them down to eat their supper and Milt looked over at McCoy or McCoy looked over at Milt and said, ‘Eat a good supper, Milt.’ Said, ‘This is the last supper you’re gonna ever eat.’ They kept them there at that house and they give them their supper and they played their last tune on their fiddle, they said, and they took them to Chapmansville and killed them. And Grandma’s the one told me this.”

     I was blown away. So was it Ed’s father or this McCoy who played the fiddle before being killed?

     “Milt, I guess. I never did see him. I was born before he was killed, but I was little. And they said when they took them in the house to kill them, they told everybody to go out. And they was a little girl or a little boy one — I forget which Grandma said — hid in behind the stove and they killed them men and throwed them out in the yard and that little young’n run out right over the top of them and run and hid and got away.”

     We told Roxie what little we had heard about Emma’s murder at the mouth of Harts Creek and how we had no idea about Milt’s murder. She had never heard of Emma’s murder but seemed sure that Haley and McCoy were killed together.

     “They said Grandma went to see them put away,” she said. “They was both buried in one casket — their caskets right side by side in one grave, I mean. Grandma went and seen them bury them.”

     While trying to digest Roxie’s story about Milt Haley, I asked if she knew anything about the rest of Ed’s family — starting with his mother, Emma. Roxie said Emma died young — “she died before I’s ever born, honey,” which was 1905. She didn’t know of Ed having any brothers or sisters but said, “Now Uncle John Adams, he had a house full of children. He was Grandma’s child but he was them boys’ half-brother. My daddy knowed a whole lot about Ed. He traveled around a whole lot with Ed. And Uncle John Hager, he traveled with Ed and made music. But now Milt… You see we didn’t know nothing about him. We was all little when Milt was killed.”

In Search of Ed Haley 22

08 Saturday Dec 2012

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Early the next morning, Lawrence and I boarded my Cadillac and drove out of Ashland across the Big Sandy River into West Virginia. We drove past little towns named Kenova and Ceredo on I-64 then turned off onto Route 10 just south of Huntington. For the next hour, we weaved our way on this curvy, two-lane road toward Harts, cruising past small settlements named Salt Rock, West Hamlin, Pleasant View, Branchland, Midkiff and Ranger — all situated on the Guyandotte River. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we saw a tiny green and white sign planted to the right of the road reading “Harts, Unincorporated.” Just past it was a beautiful two-story white home, which Lawrence quickly pointed out as the place where Ed’s mother was murdered in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Excited, I quickly pulled over and took a picture, then took off in a cloud of gravel and dust.

Lawrence and I turned right onto a narrow paved road and snaked our way up Harts Creek, bypassing a high school, trailers, Depression-era framed houses and newer brick homes. It was beautiful country. Cold weather was barely gone and the hillsides were a faint blush of green buds. Lawrence motioned toward the creek — which was up somewhat due to spring rains — and told again how difficult it was to get up Harts Creek in his younger days.

“Biggest part of the time, you was down in the creek bed there, if the weather was right. If it was times like this you had to take to the hillside but the road usually followed the creek bed. It seemed like it took us all day walking up here, but they didn’t have the roadway up on the side of the hill like this.”

After a ride of some fifteen minutes, we reached Trace Fork, the place where Ed Haley was born over one hundred years ago. We drove a short distance up the branch to the site of Peter Mullins’ cabin, which had burned or been torn down about fifteen years earlier. Lawrence pointed out the only remaining relics from the original farm: a lonely tree and an old smokehouse.

After taking in the sights and smells, we went to see Joe Mullins, who lived in a small white house just down the bottom. We first met Joe’s daughters, Connie and Loretta, who said Joe had gone to Chapmanville and would probably be out for most of the day. Lawrence introduced himself as “Ed Haley’s son,” which caused Connie to giggle and say, “Oh, yeah. Don’t we have a picture of him?”

Loretta said, “We got a lot of pictures.”

“The old fiddle,” Connie said. “Remember the old fiddle that used to be up there in that old house?”

What old house?

“That old smokehouse up there at the old house,” Connie said. “There was an old fiddle up in the top of it.”

There was more giggling, as if the two had just shared a secret joke.

I said to Connie, “You don’t think you could find that do you, just to see it?”

She said, “No, I doubt it.”

Loretta said, “We could probably find the picture.”

Boy that would be great.

“I don’t know about right this minute. How long are you gonna be around?”

“Long enough for you to find that picture,” I said.

The next thing I knew, Connie walked us to Uncle Peter Mullins’ old smokehouse and flung open a door. I took a few steps inside — past old furniture and piles of God-knows-what — and quickly spotted a decorative metal lid with Ed and Johnny Hager’s picture on it. In the picture, a copy of which I had first seen at Lawrence’s, Haley was slim and decked out in a suit with a derby and dark glasses. Hager stood beside him with a banjo. Lawrence said it was taken at White Sulphur Springs in eastern West Virginia.

At some point, Connie showed us a large, framed portrait of a woman she identified as Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley — the same picture Pat Haley had seen on her visit to Harts Creek several years ago. Connie said Lawrence could have both pictures.

In Search of Ed Haley 14

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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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.

In Search of Ed Haley 12

30 Friday Nov 2012

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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.”