About that time, we loaded up in my car and headed to the old Hicks homeplace in Calhoun County. On the way, we stopped at a plain brick building situated at the mouth of Stinson Creek. Wilson said it was the location of an old tavern called “Copperhead Junction” — one of the roughest places around in Ed’s time.

“I would’ve rather went to Vietnam than in there,” Wilson said.

Ugee Postalwait later told me that it was called the “Bloody Bucket” — a scene of excessive drinking, fighting, and shootings — and partly inspired a tune Ed played called “The Mouth of Stinson”.

“Tom Carpenter and French played that,” Wilson said. “John McCune was supposed to have composed it. They said John wouldn’t work a lick at nothing. All he ever did was fiddle. In the old days when they were logging that country they had a picnic at the mouth of Stinson. Old Harmon Carpenter was there that day. They had some musicians there. One of these fellows was a Hamrick and one was a Cheneth. They was loggers, lumberjacks, bull of the woods — strong men. They got to wrestling. I don’t know if they were drinking or not. They weighed over 200 pounds apiece. They wrestled three or four hours; finally they just quit. The next day this Cheneth got sick — evidently pulled something inside. That night he died. It was a sad time. That’s how the ‘Mouth of Stinson’ started.”

The Laury Hicks place was just a short distance away from Stinson. It was so overgrown and snaky-looking that we had to settle for just staring at it up the hill from the road. Just up through the weeds, we knew, was the family cemetery where Ed had played at Laury’s grave in the winter of 1937.

“Laury Hicks was a good rough fiddler,” Wilson said. “The first time Ed come over there nobody could take Hicks on the ‘Blackberry Blossom’ or the ‘Arkansas Traveler’. Ed said, ‘Wilson, I heard that feller fiddling when I come up the road. By God, I thought I was up against it. I thought I’d done come to the wrong place. But after he played them two tunes, I seen I was all right.'”

Hearing that was a little surprising based on what I’d heard from Ugee Postalwait about Ed and Laury playing tunes together almost note for note.

But Wilson was sure about it.

“John, it’d sound like shit. Now that’d be just like me playing against Ed Haley. That’d be the biggest joke in the world.”

From there, Wilson, Kim, Steve and I went to a nearby hollow and talked on the porch with ninety-six-year-old Ivy (Postalwait) Helmick, a tiny, skinny lady with silver hair and a black cat planted on her lap. Her daughter Maxine remembered Ed coming around and keeping everyone up playing music.

We drove on down the road and turned up Wilson’s Branch to visit Jesse Hicks, Laury’s daughter-in-law who lived in a nice wooden house. We sat with her on the porch for a few minutes before a man stopped and hollered at us from his car in the road. He said he was Jarvis Hicks, Jesse’s grandson, and it was clear that he was wondering who all the strangers were hanging out on his grandmother’s porch. We walked down and told him who we were and what we were doing and said he’d heard that Ed and his great-grandfather Hicks made a deal that whoever lived longer would sit on the other’s coffin and play the fiddle. Jarvis got out of his car at that point, mentioning something about having one of Ed’s records (a “great big record on fast speed”), which sounded suspiciously like Parkersburg Landing. Unfortunately, I never got to find out because he seemed unwilling to let us listen to it. After some small talk, he said he was in a hurry to “go eat an elk from Wyoming,” and raced away.