Tag Archives: John Hartford

Interview with James Davis of Harts, WV (1997)

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Harts, Lincoln County Feud

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That evening, Brandon and I met up with Billy Adkins and went to see James Davis on West Fork. James lived on Spring Branch of West Fork, a little hollow just across the creek from Iris Williams. A few years back, his older brother Charlie had told Brandon about seeing Ed win a twenty dollar gold piece in a contest at the old Chapmanville High School.

We found the eighty-something-year-old James laying on the couch with a little fuzzy dog crawling all over him like a monkey. He said he didn’t remember Ed, so I mentioned how he was Milt Haley’s son, which got an immediate reaction. He had heard the story of Milt’s death from Cat Fry, although he didn’t immediately offer up any details. Actually, James was hesitant to talk about the 1889 murders — almost as if the participants were still around and living next door. His answers to our questions were very evasive.

We learned from James that it was Bill Fowler (not John Runyon or Ben Adams) who hired Milt and Green to ambush Al. It was all over competition between businesses. Fowler was a saloon operator and a gristmill operator, while Brumfield ran a log boom.

“They was all there making money,” he said. “You know how that stirs up trouble. Some a making a little more money than others. They was bucking one another, like money men does.”

Milt and Green ambushed Al and Hollena one Sunday as they rode down the creek on a single horse after a visit with Henderson Dingess. In the attack, Mr. Brumfield was shot through the arm, while his wife was shot in the face. Milt and Green were soon captured in Kentucky by the Adkinses and Brumfields, who held them them at Fry. Neither man would admit to anything so John Brumfield shot one of them in the head. He reputedly put his toe at the hole and said, “I put a bullet right there.”

Brumfield was himself shot in the head a few years later.

French Bryant, “who was pretty hard to handle,” was also involved in the killings.

Afterwards, people were afraid to touch Milt’s and Green’s bodies until Ben Walker allowed them to be buried on his property. The whole event “shook people up pretty bad.” Fowler sold out at the mouth of Harts and moved away.

In Search of Ed Haley 354

16 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Lincoln County Feud, Warren

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Cas knew that Ed sold his homeplace at the mouth of Jonas Branch to Ewell Mullins. He said it originally stood below a big sugar tree in the bottom above Uncle Peter’s. (It was moved on logs.) It was a “little old two-room plank house” consisting of the “eating room,” which had a flat-rock chimney in the back with a fireplace and a “sleeping room.”

Cas best described the kitchen, which was just “out at the back” of the house.

“They wasn’t no floor in it,” he said. “It just sat on the ground. It was the length of the house — I guess maybe about eight feet wide — and they cooked out there in that. They cooked out there, packed it in, and set it on the table and they eat and everything in the same house. I’ve seen that old woman, Ewell’s wife, put fence rails in the stove — had a cook stove — and she’d stick them in there and set a chair on them till they burnt up to where they wouldn’t fall out. Me and her old man and his brother, we’d go up on that cliff and drag wood down that creek and the snow knee deep.”

Brandon asked Cas about the fate of Ewell’s house and he said they first enlarged it.

“We moved an old storehouse we had down the field there out there and put it beside of it,” he said. “It was there when the old man Ewell died ’cause the old storehouse had a crack up over the bed and his mother come in there and she was whining about that. Man, the snow’d blow in at him.”

Cas continued, “Then we turned around and tore that down and built this other to it. Tore that other’n down and built it back, too.”

He said the newer home was built on the same spot as the old one but it didn’t resemble it in any way.

Based on this testimony, we concluded that Ewell’s original home was truly gone.

Speaking of Uncle Peter, Brandon asked about him.

“Ah, he was a tomcat now, that old man was,” Cas said. “He was crippled in one foot and he walked on the back of it. Had his shoe made turned back. Prohibition men would come in and… I’ve seen him down there right below where Kate lived — he’d go out and hit that cliff. He’d get them bushes and swing up and go right up over them cliffs. He was bad to drink in his last few years. Well, they all the time made liquor and fooled with it. Finally got to drinking the stuff.”

Cas said Peter was bad to fight if provoked but Aunt Liza “was just like all other old women. She was a good old woman. She just stood and cooked.”

Cas thought that Ed’s mother was related to Uncle Peter, but wasn’t sure how.

“Wasn’t his dad named Milt Haley?” he asked.

Yeah.

“Well, you know they killed him down there around Green Shoal,” he said. “I heard somebody not too long ago a talking about them taking them over there and hanging them. I never did know too much about it. Nobody never talked too much about things back then.”

Cas had also heard about Ben Adams but didn’t know of his involvement in the 1889 troubles. He said Ben was a “pretty mean fellow” who lived in a log cabin still standing just up the creek.

“He had some kind of a brewery up here,” Cas said. “They had it built back in the bank. Sold booze there. Bootleg joint. I don’t know if all the old rocks and things is gone from there or not. He lived on Trace when he killed Jim Martin.”

Part of Ben’s old mill-dam was reportedly still visible in the creek at the Greasy George Adams place.

Cas told us again about Weddie Mullins’s death at Dingess, West Virginia. Weddie was an uncle to Ed Haley.

“I never did know too much about it,” he said. “We was little when that happened, I guess. Him and some of them Dingesses got into it and they shot and killed Weddie. And old man John Adams went down and looked at him, said, ‘What do you think about him?’ ‘Oh, I believe he’ll make it.’ Said he just hoisted that pistol, brother, and shot him right in the head and killed him. Said, ‘I know he won’t make it now.'”

This “old man John Adams” was Emma Haley’s half-brother, “John Frock.”

Cas said John could be ruthless.

“His wife was a coming out the gate and he shot her in the head and killed her,” he said. “Shot her whole head off. He was a little feller. He lived right there where Louie and them lived.”

Cas didn’t know what that killing was over.

“Back here at one time it was dangerous to even stick your head out of the door, son,” he said. “Why, everybody packed guns. Anybody’d kill you.”

The jockey grounds were rough places.

“A fella tried to run a horse over me up there at the mouth of Buck Fork and Billie Brumfield laid a pistol between his eyes and said, ‘You run that horse over him, you’ll never run it over nobody else.’ I believe it was before he killed his daddy.”

Cas said Dump Farley was at a jockey ground one time “right down under the hill from where Bill Thompson lived in that cornfield playing poker and he shot the corn all down. Talk about fellers a rolling behind the stumps and things.”

In Search of Ed Haley 353

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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

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Early the next morning, Brandon and I arrived on the bus in Harts and drove to see Cas Baisden, who we spotted in a porch swing up main Harts Creek, just above the mouth of Smoke House Fork. It was a pastoral scene: a somewhat old farmhouse, several chickens in the yard and a few cattle in the distance who’d done a marvelous job of clearing the mountainside just back of the place. As we pulled up to the house, I realized that it was built fairly high off of the ground — probably as a precaution against flooding. Cas just kind of stared down at us as we unloaded from the car.

Once he figured out who we were, he invited us in to the living room. There we learned that Cas was eighty-seven years old and had spent his whole life on Harts Creek.

“I was born in 1910,” he said. “The only five years I was gone from here was when I was in the Army. I left here the second day of April ’42. I spent five year in the Air Force. Never was off the ground.”

Wow — I had to ask, “What is the secret to living so long?”

“Working, working, buddy,” Cas said. “I work ever day a little bit. I wish you’d a seen the coal and stuff I packed in this morning. I got two calves down there and chickens and cats and dogs. I live on tobacco, Cheerios, and milk.”

Ever drink any whiskey?

“Barrels of it,” he said. “It’s been ten or twelve years since I quit fooling with drinking. Yeah, I went up here and joined the church and things. A fella never knows what he misses when he gets in a church. I used to be rougher’n a cob.”

Cas was partly raised by Uncle Peter Mullins, so he remembered Ed Haley well.

“He’d come up there to Peter’s and just go from house to house playing music and eating,” he said. “He used to go up to Ewell’s — I guess where he was raised — and come down that road just a running and hollering and whooping and cutting the awfulest shine that ever was and you wouldn’t a thought he could a stayed in that road. I don’t know how he done it, but he’d take spells like that. If he got a hold of you with a knife, though, he was dangerous. Hang on you and cut as long as they’s a thread on you. Him and that old woman, they’d get drunk and they’d fight up there. You know, it’s a wonder they hadn’t a killed one another. I believe they did try to cut one another up there at old man Peter’s one time.”

What about the Haley kids?

“Why them young’ns would do anything,” Cas said. “Clyde went out here where Robert Martin used to live on that mountain and went down in the well and they had a time a getting him out. And up here a little bit was a big sycamore and he was up in there and we’d throw rocks at him, son, and if we’d a hit him and knocked him out of there he’d been killed. I believe Clyde was the meanest one among them, I don’t know.”

I asked Cas if he ever played music and he said, “Nah, I done well to call hogs. But now Ed was about as good a fiddler as they was. Nobody could play better than Ed. He could play anything on earth he wanted to play.”

Cas had memories of Ed playing at Uncle Peter’s, either outside for small crowds or inside for “big dances” before “they finally broke up and quit.” The old dances started about the “edge of dark” and people would just “jump around — most people never could dance” – until sun-up. There was no trouble — just “fiddle, dance, drink” — although a person had to watch out for what Cas called the “old hedgehogs.”

I asked him if Ed ever drank much at the dances and he said, “Sure. He’d get to drinking and have more fun than the one’s a dancing.”

When Ed wasn’t around to play dances on Trace, Robert Martin would show up and fiddle tunes like “Cacklin’ Hen”. Martin had the first radio “that was ever in this country” so people went to his house “out on the mountain” and listened to it until “way late in the night.”

In Search of Ed Haley 352

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Chapmanville, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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The next day, Brandon and I got Mona to ride around town and show us some of the places where Ed played, as well as where he’d made the home recordings on 17th Street. In the car, she tried to recount the places the family had lived since her birth at Horse Branch in 1930.

The first place she remembered was an old brown house built on a slope at Halbert Street. This was the place where Ralph built the trap door.

When Mona was seven or eight years old, the family moved to 337 37th Street.

When she was about thirteen, they moved to 105 17th Street. She lived there in 1944 when she married Wilson Mullins and moved away to Chapmanville, near Harts. After her divorce, she moved back to 17th Street. At that time, Ed was separated from Ella and living in West Virginia.

For a brief spell, the Haleys lived at 5210 45th Street. Rosie Day lived nearby in a basement apartment.

Around 1948, the family moved to 1040 Greenup Avenue. Mona lived there when she married Kenny Smith and moved to South Point, Ohio.

Around 1950, Ed, Ella, Lawrence, Pat, and little Ralph moved to 2144 Greenup Avenue. Jack and Patsy lived there for a while because Patsy — who was pregnant with twins — wanted to be near the hospital. It was there that Ed passed away in February of 1951.

Thereafter, Ella stayed intermittently with Lawrence and Pat in Ashland or with Jack and Patsy in Cleveland until her death in 1954.

Brandon and I drove Mona around town later and she pointed out the sight of the Catlettsburg stock sale, where she remembered Ed making “good money” around 1935-36. She also directed us to at least three different locations of Jean Thomas’ “Wee House in the Wood.” One was remodeled into an office building and used by the county board of education, while another was out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere on a wooden stage in a valley surrounded by tall grass. Brandon and I thought this latter location was almost surreal, like something out of a weird dream.

Later at dinner, Mona told us what happened to her records.

“I sent Clyde some records when he was in San Quentin, California but he never brought them back with him,” she said.

I told her that some guy named Junius Martin had brought Lawrence some of Ed’s recordings and she said, “Seems like Junius Martin was one of Pop’s drinking buddies. I thought his name was Julius.”

In Search of Ed Haley 351

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford

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Early in December, Brandon and I met at Pat Haley’s. All of our excitement focused on the upcoming meeting with Owsley’s forensic team, although it wasn’t long until we were in the familiar routine of asking Pat and Mona questions. Mostly they spoke of Ralph, a key player in Ed’s story. It was Ralph who recorded Ed’s and Ella’s music. Pat said Patsy knew a lot about Ralph, so she called her in Cleveland.

Patsy said Ralph was a nice and intelligent person.

“All the kids looked up to him when they were growing up,” she said.

As far as Patsy knew, Ralph never had any contact with his real father but he did take the last name of Payne when he was older.

Around 1936, Ralph married Margaret Ryan, an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Cincinnati girl. The newlyweds took up residence with Ed and Ella, and Ralph stopped drinking (at his wife’s insistence). Margaret remained living with the Haleys during the war, when Ralph was overseas fighting the Japanese.

During the war, Ralph had an affair with a Filipino woman named Celeste, who Pat said bore him a son. Mona thought he actually married Celeste. According to her, his plan was to “set” Margaret up after the war, divorce her and return to his Filipino bride. He had Celeste’s name tattooed on his body. When he returned home from the war, he told Margaret, when she saw his tattoo, that Celeste had been the name of his ship. Ralph and Margaret soon left Ashland and moved to Cincinnati.

It was around that time that Patsy came into the family. She said she married Jack in California on October 25, 1946 and met Ed the following Thanksgiving in Ashland. She and Jack moved in with him for three months at 105 17th Street. Mona, Wilson Mullins, and little Ralph were also living there at the time. Jack only stayed for about three months because he couldn’t find work. Patsy said they moved out near Ralph in Cincinnati. Ella’s brother Allie Trumbo lived there, as did several of her close friends. Mona and her family soon followed them there and found an apartment in the same building.

Mona said Ralph’s thoughts were with Celeste: he was in the process of getting Margaret “set up” when tragedy intervened.

One Sunday in May of 1947, Jack, Patsy, Ralph, Margaret, Mona, Wilson, and little Ralph went fishing at a park about 25 miles outside of Cincinnati. At some point, Patsy said Ralph and Mona began talking about hanging upside down in a nearby tree. Mona climbed up the tree and Patsy took her picture. Then Ralph got in the tree and fell. As he lay on the ground, he told his family that his neck was broken and requested that they put a board under him until the doctors could arrive. Ralph was taken to a hospital where he told Ella, “When I bite down on the ice it makes a musical tone in my head.”

On Thursday, May 22, 1947, Ralph died at the age of 34. The family was afraid that Ella might hear of his death over the radio. She was staying at Mona’s apartment at the time.

On May 24 — Mona’s birthday — Ralph was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery near Cincinnati. Patsy said Ed never made it to Ralph’s funeral, nor did Lawrence, who was in the service in Florida but Mona remembered that Lawrence was there on emergency leave. Someone played “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”, Ralph’s favorite hymn.

Celeste later wrote Ella, mentioning how her son had an ear problem. When the family wrote to tell her of Ralph’s death, she figured they were making it up just so she would stop writing.

We figured that Ralph was Mona’s favorite brother since she had named her oldest son after him, but she said Jack was her favorite brother because he had taken up for her the most. She said Ella had been the one who named her son after Ralph. She also spoke highly of Noah, who contracted malaria and saw a lot of combat during World War II.

“Noah was good to send things home to Mom and Pop during the war,” Mona said. “And when he came home he laid carpet and fixed doorbells did things like that for Mom there at 17th Street.”

Noah went to Cleveland around 1950. Pat said Noah’s wife was a high-strung person. Their daughter Rosemary killed herself when she was eighteen. She wanted to get married but her mother protested, so she went into her brother’s room and shot herself in the head. In later years, Noah and Janet divorced. Pat said Noah’s son Jimmy really did a good job of looking after them. Janet died several years ago.

In Search of Ed Haley 350

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Lincoln County Feud, Music

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After the contest, we all gathered at Pat Haley’s. The dining room table was crammed with food and the refrigerator was stuffed with every conceivable drink. People filled the downstairs rooms, many even spilling out onto the front and back porches. Once the kitchen was cleared, I got my fiddle and planted myself in a hard-back chair near Clyde and Noah. I immediately gave Mona a mandolin I’d brought so she could second me with those haunting “Ella chords.” Ugee perched nearby us in a chair where she hollered out the names of tunes and lyrics and even danced when she got too excited. We kept the music going, while Pat served up the food.

There were some new musical developments, little comments here and there that were important to know. When I played “Salt River”, for instance, Mona said it was the same tune as “Shove That Hog’s Foot”. She sang:

Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed,

Further in the bed, further in the bed.

Shove that hog’s foot further in the bed,

Katy, won’t you listen to me now?

Ugee said Ed had a way of making his fiddle sound like moonshine pouring from a jug when he played “Jimmy Johnson Bring Your Jug Around the Hill”. It took me a while to figure out what she meant by that.

As music filled the kitchen, Brandon was busy with Jimmy McCoy in the TV room. Jimmy knew very little about Green’s death, although he’d heard that the Brumfields killed him because they were jealous of his music. At some point, we got Jimmy to sit for pictures with all of Ed’s grandsons, mimicking the Milt and Green picture. Everyone did it, even those who weren’t really sure why they were sitting with a stranger crossing their legs and gripping invisible jacket cuffs.

I headed back to Nasvhille the next day but Brandon went to Harts with Jimmy, where he and Billy Adkins showed him the local sites…including the Haley-McCoy grave. Brandon figured it was the first time any of the McCoys had been to the grave in at least 45 years.

A month or so later, Brandon received a letter from Doug Owsley regarding the exhumation of the Haley-McCoy grave.

“Thanks for the McCoy family permissions for the excavations at the Haley/McCoy Burial Site,” it partly read. “I think that it will be advisable for me to make a short trip to West Virginia in advance of the arrival of the field crew to meet you and Mr. Hartford and to make a quick survey of the site area.”

A few letters and telephone calls later, we learned from Owsley that he wouldn’t be able to make the preliminary trip to Harts. However, he was sending two associates, who we were to meet at the Harts Fas Chek.

In Search of Ed Haley 349

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

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In September, Brandon and I met in Ashland for the “Second Annual Ed Haley Memorial Fiddle Festival.” Before the contest, we talked with Mona, who’d written down the words to three of Ed’s old songs on yellow notebook paper. It was the first time I’d seen any lyrics for “Good Old Country Town Where I Was Born”:

Oh, the days are sad and the nights are long

And the whole wide world is going wrong

And it’s all because I’m far away from home.

When I bow my head and close my eyes

It’s then I stop and realize:

Oh, what a fool I was to ever roam.

There’s a long, long trail a winding

To a land that’s fair and bright.

It’s a trail I’m always finding

When I go to sleep at night.

I dream of climbing up the hills

Where I used to hear those whippoorwills

In the good old country town where I was born.

I tried to figure out just what it’s all about,

Why I ever left home.

I got a notion in my head

The old hometown was most too dead.

I learned a thing or two

As you’re a bound to do

When you’re a roaming around.

I made up my mind right now

I’d soon be homeward bound.

Oh the sun shines brighter every day

And the breezes blow your blues away

In the good old country town I’m longing for.

It’s a place where clothes don’t make the man

And they mean it when they shake your hand

And a stranger won’t be turned from any door.

It’s a land of milk and honey

Where the folks are on the square.

Though they don’t have lots of money

You’re always welcome there.

I know I’m just a small town guy

But I’m going back to live and die

In the good old country town where I was born.

When I get off at the station

And I see those happy smiles,

I can tell the whole creation

I would walk a thousand miles

Just to be back there where the skies are blue

And to know my friends are always true

In that good old country town where I was born.

That afternoon, everyone headed to the contest, which was held in a downtown auditorium. There were a lot of familiar faces. J.P. Fraley and Bobby Taylor were judges. Contest organizers seated the Haley family at the front of the crowd. Mixed among the family were Brandon, Ugee Postalwait, Harold Postalwait, and Jimmy McCoy, a great-grandson of Green McCoy.

In Search of Ed Haley 348

02 Saturday Aug 2014

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That night, I left Harts and headed toward Nashville, where I soon called Robert Ellis, a Logan County man who supposedly had some Haley records.

“Ed used to play some music with my oldest brother that passed away in January,” Robert said. “He’d been to our house a lot of times, where we lived here in Chapmanville, and I’d heard him play a lot on the streets in Logan and around through the county here in different places. He was a good fiddler. One of the best.”

I asked Robert if he was a musician and he said he used to be but gave it up after a hand injury during World War II. He was pretty sure he had some of Ed’s records.

“I believe I do,” he said. “One or two of his records. My grandmother used to buy them here in Logan at the old Grimes Music Store in Logan.”

I never heard anything about Ed selling records like that…but who knows?

Robert surprised me when he started talking about Milt Haley’s murder.

“About where Milt and Green McCoy were buried down there at Harts Creek, a feller told me some time ago that it was there at Low Gap,” he said. “How come me to know about that, we used to do military funerals a lot and we had a flag-raising at that Walker Cemetery there. I asked this feller if we were close to where those men were buried. He said, ‘Yeah, right back up yonder those fellers are buried.’ And this Carver that was with us that day, his grandfather was in with the ones that buried these people.”

Robert heard about the Haley-McCoy murders from his grandmother.

“These Brumfields, they killed these fellers and left them in a big two-story house there at the mouth of Green Shoal,” Robert said. “That two-story house is torn down now. Somebody was supposed to be left to guard them and they all got drunk and carousing around, so someone slipped in — so my grandmother told me — and chopped the boys up with an axe. Some of them found out about it and they said, ‘These men’s gotta be buried.’ So some of the Brumfields — at that time they was a lot of them down in there and they were tough — and they said, ‘Leave them where they’re at.’ This Carver, his grandfather said, ‘We’re gonna bury them. That’s all I’m gonna say and I’ve told you we’re gonna bury them.’ So them Brumfields evidently knew him and wouldn’t bother him and they went up there and buried those boys.”

In Search of Ed Haley 347

01 Friday Aug 2014

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

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After a few minutes of downplaying his ability, Charlie had his wife fetch his fiddle from inside the house. With some hesitation, he put it against his chest and took off on “The Fun’s All Over”.

After he’d finished, I asked him if Ed played with the fiddle at his chest and he said no — he put it under his chin.

Charlie played some more for us: “Birdie”, “Stagolee”, “Twinkle Little Star”, and “I Don’t Love Nobody”.

He seemed a little displeased with his playing, remarking, “Boys when your fingers stop working like they used to, you don’t do as you want to. You do as you can.”

Brandon asked Charlie, “Do you remember how Ed pulled his bow when he played?”

“He held it like that toward the middle and just shoved it,” Charlie said. “He played a long stroke. When he’d be playing a long stroke, I’d be a playing a short stroke and every now and then you’d see him turn his head around and listen to ya. If you missed a note, buddy, he called you down right there. ‘That ain’t right,’ he’d say. ‘That ain’t right.’ Man, he’d sit in playing ‘er again just like a housefire.”

I asked, “When Ed would play a tune, how long would he play it for?”

“He’d play as long as they’d dance,” he said.

Would he play it for fifteen minutes?

“No, hell, he’d play for an hour at a time,” Charlie said. “After he finished a tune, he’d hit another’n.”

I wondered if Ed ever played “Down Yonder”.

“Yeah, I’ve heard him play it,” Charlie said. “He played everything in the world, Ed did.”

What if someone asked him to play something he didn’t like?

“He’d shake his head no and he’d play something else,” Charlie said. “That’s just the way he was…he was a stubborn old man. He had one he played he called ‘Handsome Molly’.”

“That’s almost ‘Goin’ Across the Sea’,” I said. “Did Ed play ‘Goin’ Across the Sea’?”

Charlie said, “Yeah, that old woman would sing it.”

I got out my fiddle, hoping to get Charlie’s memory working on more of Ed’s tunes. I played “Blackberry Blossom” and “Brushy Fork of John’s Creek” with little response other than, “Yep, those are some of old man Ed’s tunes.”

Then, when I played “Hell Among the Yearlings”, Charlie caught me off guard by saying, “That’s called ‘Pickin’ on the Log’.”

At that juncture, he took hold of his fiddle and played “Arkansas Traveler” and “Billy in the Lowground”.

I could tell he was loosening up, so I got him to play “Warfield”. It was about the same thing as the Carter Family’s “Dixie Darling”, to which it would be real easy to sing:

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Goodbye girls, we’re goin’ to Warfield.

Naugatuck’s gone dry.

It was great to watch Charlie because he was the first active fiddler I’d met on Harts Creek.

During our visit, Brandon and I were able to formulate some idea of Charlie’s background. He was born in 1923. His father Charlie, Sr. went by the nickname of “Goo” to distinguish him from his uncle Charlie Conley — the one who’d killed John Brumfield in 1900. Charlie’s earliest memories of fiddling were of watching his father play “some” on old tunes like “Drunken Hiccups”. He also remembered Dood Dalton.

“Yeah, I’ve heard him play,” he said. “I don’t know how good he was, but I’ve heard him jiggle around on the fiddle. He used to come up home. I was raised right up in the head of this creek up here. Him and my daddy was double first cousins and my daddy had an old fiddle. They’d get it out and they’d play on it half of the night — first one and then another playing on it — but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they was playing.”

Charlie didn’t know that his great-grandfather Wog Dalton had been a fiddler.

Charlie told us a little bit about his early efforts at fiddling.

“My daddy had that old fiddle and I heard him fool with it so much I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll just see if I can do anything with it.’ And I started fooling with it and the more I fooled with it the more I wanted to fool with it and I just got to where I could play it a little bit.”

Charlie got good enough to fiddle for dances all over Logan County, sometimes getting as much as fifty dollars a night at Black Bottom in Logan.

“You had to duck and dodge beer bottles all night,” he said. “Man, it was the roughest place I ever seen in my life. They’d get their guts cut out, brains knocked out with beer bottles and everything.”

It sounded a lot like my early days back home.

I asked Charlie how he met Ed and he said, “I got acquainted with him up there at Logan when him and his wife played under that mulberry tree there at that old courthouse. And I’d hear about him playing square dances. I was playing over there at this place one time — he was there. This guy had got him to come there and play, too. He just sit down there, buddy, and we set in playing. We fiddled to daylight. People a dancing, I’m telling you the truth, the dust was a rolling off the floor.”

Charlie said the last dance he remembered on Harts Creek was in 1947.

In Search of Ed Haley 345

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

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A few days later, Brandon and I loaded up the bus and headed to Harts where we arrived about midnight and parked at the Fas Chek. The next morning, we drove to Trace Fork to scope out the hollow. Initially, we stopped to see Von Tomblin, Ewell Mullins’ daughter, who lived next door to “Ed Haley’s place.” Von said she thought the back part of her father’s house was original; we were welcome to walk over and check it out.

“Just be sure and watch for snakes,” she said.

We trudged over through the field to the maroon house where we cluelessly looked at it.

Eventually, Brandon pointed down the bottom to the site of Uncle Peter’s place at the mouth of Jonas Branch. A few minutes later, as we sat in a swing under a tree at Uncle Peter’s place, taking in the sights and smells, Clifton Mullins came walking up with a big grin on his face, decked out in a Hank Williams, Jr. T-shirt. We told him we were trying to figure out just how old Ewell’s house was and he suggested that we walk up the hollow and ask Bum about it.

In no time whatsoever, we were on the porch with Bum, Shermie, and two sisters named Alice and Dicy. We had a very confusing — but potentially crucial — conversation about Ewell’s place:

Brandon: Now Ewell had an older home before that one, didn’t he?

Bum: They built onto it, what they done.

Brandon: Which is the old part?

Bum: The back part again’ the hill.

Brandon: Now, Ewell bought that place off of Ed.

Bum: Well now, Ewell built the front part. But the log house that was here, Ed or some of them built it. Some of his people. Older house there. If I ain’t badly mistaken, it was a log house. Got different grooves on it now than what it was.

Brandon: Was you ever in the old place?

Bum: Yeah. Had four or five rooms.

Brandon: When did Ewell tear it down?

Bum’s sister: I think all they tore down was the kitchen part to it.

Brandon: So part of Ewell’s house is the old place?

Bum: They took out the back here again’ the hill.

Brandon: Is part of the old log home still there?

Bum: It’s covered up now.

Brandon: But they’s log under that?

Bum: Yeah, I think it is.

We eventually headed down the hollow to Clifton’s, where his sister Connie showed us more family photographs. Clifton showed us his storage building, which featured Aunt Liza’s beautiful spinning wheel on piles of bags and boxes. Brandon and I agreed right then and there that we would give just about anything to have it. For all we knew, Liza had used it to make or mend Ed’s clothes when he was a boy.

In Search of Ed Haley 344

26 Saturday Jul 2014

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Around that time, Brandon and I received confirmation from Doug Owsley at the Smithsonian that he was interested in exhuming the Haley-McCoy grave. Doug gave us instructions on what we needed to do before his office could actually become involved — most importantly, to get permission from the state authorities, as well as from Milt’s and Green’s descendants. We felt pretty good about our chances of getting support from the family but weren’t sure what to expect from “officials.” For some guidance in that department, we called Bobby Taylor and Deborah Basham at the Cultural Center in Charleston, who told us all about exhumation law and codes in West Virginia. They felt, considering the interest of the Smithsonian, that we would have no trouble on the bureaucratic end of things.

Meanwhile, Rounder Records was in the final stages of releasing a two-CD set of Ed’s recordings called Forked Deer. The sound quality was incredible on the re-masters although to the uninitiated ear some of the music still sounded like it was coming from behind a waterfall in a cellophane factory. In addition to Forked Deer, Rounder was slated to release two more CDs of Ed’s music under the title of Grey Eagle in the near future.

I was very excited about all of these tunes getting out because I had fantasies of some “young Turk” fiddler getting a hold of them and really doing some damage.

In July, I called Pat Haley to tell her about the CDs, but we ended up talking more about her memories of Ed.

“I know when we lived in 1040 Greenup — when I first came over here — Pop would play very little. Only if he was drinking and maybe Mona would get him to play. I never knew of Pop ever playing sober. I didn’t hear Pop play too much but then his drinking days were just about over. But Mom would play. They had a mandolin and might have been a banjo and Mom would play a little bit. I didn’t know their brother, Ralph. He passed away, I believe, in ’46 or ’47 and I didn’t come into the family until ’48 — when I met Larry — but we married in ’49.”

Pat and I talked more about Ed’s 1951 death.

“Larry and I lived with Mom and Pop on 2144 Greenup Avenue and little Ralph lived with us,” she said. “Clyde had just come home from San Quentin, and a couple of months before Pop died Patsy was due to have Scott and so she moved into the house with us. Her and Jack had the front living room as their bedroom so that Patsy could be close to the hospital. Scott was born January 4th. My Stephen was born January 27th. We were all in the same house when Pop died. But about three days before Pop died, Clyde decided to rob his mother and came in in the middle of the night and stole her sweeper and radio while we were sleeping and he was picked up by the police and he was in jail when his daddy died. He didn’t get to come to his daddy’s funeral. His mother’s either, actually. He was in a Michigan prison when his momma died.”

In Search of Ed Haley 343

25 Friday Jul 2014

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Not long after visiting Ugee, I received some great information in the mail regarding Rector Hicks, a fiddler and nephew to Ed’s friend Laury Hicks. Rector grew up watching his uncle Laury play the fiddle.

“Rector was born out in the country around Chloe, Calhoun County, West Virginia, in 1914,” Joe LaRose wrote in Traditional Music and Dance in Northeast Ohio (March 1985). “His father was a good mouth harp player, but no one else in his family played music. Rector learned from fiddlers who lived in his area, beginning to play the instrument when he was around ten years old. Rector learned a lot from time spent with a distant cousin, Laury Hicks, a generation older than Rector and one of the foremost fiddlers in the area. ‘I don’t know of a fiddle player, really, that played like him. Ed Haley said Laury was the best fiddler he ever heard on the old time tunes, you know, and old fast ones. Hisself, he said that. And I always thought he was.'”

While at Laury’s, Rector Hicks also had the opportunity to see Ed.

“He was hard to figure out,” Rector told LaRose. “When I was around him most I didn’t know too much about fiddling, and a lot of that stuff I could pick up now if I was around him. How he got all that in there with his bow like he did you’d never believe it. He just set there this way (passes the length of the bow back and forth across the strings) but everything seemed like it just come in there. If you’d hear him play… Now that record, that’s not Ed Haley. That’s him, but that’s no good. You don’t get a lot of what he puts in. But he puts every note in that thing. His left hand, his fingers just flew. But his right hand… He just set there and his fiddle laid on his arm, set there and rocked. That’s the way he played. All them fastest tunes he played, didn’t seem like he put any of the bow in hardly. But it was all in there.”

Rector seemed to idolize Haley, at least according to Kerry Blech, a fiddling buff and friend of mine.

“Rector, when he was a teenager, had saved up some money and got him a pretty good fiddle and when Ed would come and stay at Laury’s house Rector would always come over,” Kerry wrote. “For a couple of years, Ed would tease him and say, ‘Well, I really like that fiddle you got, Rector. We should swap.’ And once he did and went off and played in some other town, then came back through about a week later and got his fiddle back. Rector said he was just really thrilled to’ve had Ed’s fiddle for even a week.”

As Rector got older and learned more about the fiddle, he really patterned after Haley’s style.

“Rector’s approach to playing has much in common with Haley’s,” LaRose wrote of Hicks. “Like Haley, Rector holds his fiddle against his upper arm and chest and supports it with his wrist (he does not rock the fiddle under the bow, though, like Haley did.) Rector uses a variety of bow strokes. Like Haley, he uses the length of the bow, sometimes playing a passage of several notes with one long stroke, deftly rocking the bow as he plays. He will accent the melody at chosen times with short, quick strokes. Rather than overlay the melody with a patterned or constant bow rhythm as some dance-oriented fiddlers do, Rector adapts his bowing to the melody of the particular tune he’s playing. Much of the lilt and movement of his tunes is built into the sequence of notes played with his left hand.”

Rector apparently kept in touch with Ed’s family, who he sometimes visited long after Haley’s death, and was very disappointed with the quality of fiddling on the Parkersburg Landing album.

“When I met Rector in the mid-70s, the Haley LP had just come out and Rector called me up to tell me it was awful,” Kerry wrote. “He said it was not representative of the man’s genius. He told me that he knew the man, and although many years had passed, the Haley genius was still in his mind’s eye. He also said that there were many other home recordings beyond what Gus Meade had copied. He said that Haley’s children had split up the recordings, that Lawrence had a number of them, and that a daughter, who lived in the Akron-Canton area, had over a hundred of them, and that Rector occasionally went over there and listened. He said that the family was irritated by how the Rounder record came to be and did not want to be involved with any of us city folk any more, afraid that someone would exploit their father’s music.”

At that time in his life, Rector mostly played Tommy Jarrell tunes but also several Ed Haley tunes, like “Birdie”, “Sugar in the Morning” (“Banjo Tramp”), “Ragpicker Bill”, “Black Sheep”, and “Staggerlee”.

In Search of Ed Haley 342

24 Thursday Jul 2014

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Just before Brandon and I left, Ugee told us about the last time she saw Ed. It was the late 1940s and he lived on 45th Street in Ashland. Aunt Rosie Day made the trip with her, but warned her that the chances of hearing any music were slim because Ed and Ella had played little music since Ralph’s death.

“Oh, well,” Ugee told her. “They’ll play for me or I’ll tear his house down.”

She could tell upon arriving at the Haley home, though, that Ed and Ella were “different people.” When she asked to hear some music, Ella said, “We ain’t got nothing to sing about anymore.” Aunt Rosie kinda took the hint, saying to Ugee, “Well, we better go home now.” But Ugee refused, saying, “No, I’m staying all night. The fight’s on.”

Ella tried to appease her by getting out the homemade records (which were already scratched up), but Ugee said, “Ed, you’re talking to the wrong woman. You’re going to play music tonight or we’re gonna break your music box. Now get your fiddle and get your mandolin and let’s hear some music. The fight’s on.”

She said Ed threw his head back and laughed with a “big chaw of tobacco” in his mouth, then said, “I reckon we might as well play for her. She ain’t gonna shut her mouth till we do.”

Ugee admitted that she “was really carrying on awful.” When Ed started playing, “he played some of the saddest things that I ever heard. You know, he was down in the dumps – and Ella, too. It didn’t even sound like them. I let them play three or four and I said, ‘Now I’m tired of that stuff.  I don’t like that stuff.’ That ain’t music at all.’ It didn’t sound like them. I said, ‘Now, I want some music.’”

Ed whispered to Ella, “Watch this,” then went all out for “Calhoun County Blues”. Ugee took off dancing and Ed “got to laughing” and then fiddled up a storm.

“That’s the first time they’s been any laughing and going on in this house since Ralph died,” Ella said.

A little later, “Ed said he was getting sleepy. He was wanting to go to bed, but he didn’t want to go to bed and leave me and Ella setting up in there. He kept saying, ‘Well ain’t you fellers getting tired?’ I said, ‘No we ain’t a bit tired.’ And I’d punch Ella. I said, ‘Not a bit in the world.’ Ed said, ‘Ugee you ain’t got any more sense than you ever had.’ And I said, ‘Well, you don’t act like you know too much, either.’ Well, we got in there and went to bed and we laid there and talked and carried on and laughed. I was sleeping with Ella and he was over in the other bed. He said, ‘Now I’m a going to sleep.’ I said, ‘Well, quit your laughing then.’ He said, ‘I wish you’d shut your mouth.’ Well Mom came down the next day from up in Calhoun County. I didn’t tell them she was a coming. You ought to have heard Ed and them tell how I came down there and picked on them. Mom said, ‘You ought to run her off.’ He said, ‘I tried to but she didn’t have sense enough to leave.’ And then he got to playing some music. And I said, ‘He don’t know how to play. He’s lost all of his touch. And Ella, she can’t play the mandolin,’ and all that kind of stuff with them. And Ella said, ‘You know we haven’t played any since Ralph died.’”

Ugee’s visit apparently cheered Ed and Ella up, because they tried to get her to stay all summer. Ed told her, “That’s what we need down here,” but she teased them about being “dead people” and said she’d never do it.

In Search of Ed Haley 341

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

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Ugee said, “I never will forget the first time I seen Ella. I’d fixed cabbage for supper — big head of cabbage. Next morning, Ed said, ‘Where’s the cabbage?’ I said, ‘Well you don’t want cabbage for breakfast.’ ‘Oh,’ Ella said, ‘We love cabbage for breakfast.’ I went and got that cabbage and heated it up. I wish you’d a seen her eating that cabbage. I didn’t know anyone ate cabbage for breakfast. I was a fixing eggs and bacon.”

Brandon asked about Ella’s appearance.

“Ella wasn’t no bad looking woman at all,” Ugee said. “She was a nice looking woman, I thought. When I seen her, she had had three kids and she was a little heavier then. She kept herself nice-looking. She liked to wear nice dresses and she liked to wear hose. You’d be surprised to see her wash them kids and clean them. Now really you would. She’d pick them kids up and say, ‘Come here, you’ve got a dirty face.’ How she knowed they had a dirty face, I don’t know.”

I asked Ugee if Ed ever got into any fights, because his face looked lop-sided in one of his pictures.

“Aw, he’s fell a lot of times,” she said. “I’ve seen his boy Clyde and that Ralph — wasn’t his son, but he called him his son — I’ve seen them lead him across logs and let him fall down and laugh about it. Yeah, they didn’t care for doing anything like that. No wonder when he’d get up, if he could get to one of them, he’d whoop one of them. They was into everything. I never seen Lawrence or Jack either one into anything. But you turned Ralph or Clyde loose anyplace, they might ‘weigh’ chickens and kill your chickens. Maybe put a string around their neck and hold them up and maybe kill two or three hens — choke them to death. Why, Ed’d get mad. Ella would, too, over things like that. She’d say, ‘My, my, my.’ They’d run in and grab their purse and take their money. Ella’d buy anything they wanted.”

Even though Ed’s kids treated him rough, Ugee said he “liked to joke and talk and laugh. I never seen Ed Haley mad but once in my life. Me and him almost fit, too, that time. He whooped Clyde. He oughta whipped Clyde but not like he did. Clyde aimed to jerk him off the porch. If he had, he’d a killed him. And he jerked his belt off and he went to whooping Clyde. And he was whooping hard. He was trying to beat him to death. I walked out on the porch and said, ‘That’s enough, Ed.’ And he said, ‘Damn him. He tried to kill me.’ I grabbed a hold of the belt. He said, ‘Ugee, let loose of it.’ I said, ‘I ain’t letting loose of it. You’ve whooped him enough and I don’t want to see no more of that. While I’m living, don’t you ever hit one of them kids with a belt. I don’t allow that.’ He said, ‘I’ll whip them with a belt when I’m damn good and ready.’ I said, ‘You’ll not whip them here — not like that.’ I mean, he was beating him.”

Brandon asked if the other boys were mean to Ed or ever got whipped and Ugee said, “Clyde’s the only one I ever seen him whoop. They was about to send him to reform school — stealing, I think. He musta been about fourteen years old. That there Ralph, he was ornerier than… That Ralph even shot hisself with a gun to see how it’d feel to be shot. That was up where we lived. My mother doctored him. Mona, she was ornery. She’d steal off her mom. Take stuff out and destroy it. She was pretty as she could be. She’d just look at you as if to say, ‘I’ll do as I please.’ Ed swore she was just like her aunt on her mother’s side. And Noah was sneaking — dangerous sneaking. He was into everything and he’d lie. Noah was awful bad about gambling.”

Ugee really contrasted Ralph, Clyde, Noah, and Mona with Jack and Lawrence.

“Jack and Lawrence was gentlemen,” she said. “None of them come up with Lawrence, far as I’m concerned. He would lead his mom and dad anyplace. I can see how careful he was. That little hand of his leading his mother around this mud hole, ’round this log and stuff. Really, I’m not taking up for him because he’s dead or anything like that. I always called him ‘my little boy.’ He was always littler than the rest of them.”

In Search of Ed Haley 340

21 Monday Jul 2014

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I asked Ugee if Laury ever listened to the Grand Ole Opry and she said, “Yes. He got to hear it the year before he died. He got a radio. Let’s see, what is his name? George Hayes. We had Hayeses that lived down at Arnoldsburg. And he brought Dad up a little radio when Dad was down sick.”

Now, did Ed Haley ever hear the Grand Ole Opry?

“Oh, yes. He heard it down in Kentucky.”

Did he like it?

“No. He went to Cincinnati one time. They was a gonna make records — him and Ella — but they wanted to pick out the one for him to play. Nobody done him that a way. So he said, ‘I’ll pick my own.’ He went to Nashville once. I don’t know as he went to the Grand Ole Opry but he went to Nashville. Somebody drove him, took him down. But when he found out what they done, he didn’t have no use for that.”

Ugee made it clear that she had missed out on most of Ed’s wild times. She knew nothing about his running around with people like Doc White or chasing women. She did say he was bad about telling “dirty jokes.”

“Many a time he’s told me, ‘All right, Ugee. You better get in the kitchen. I’m gonna tell a dirty joke.’ And he’d tell some kind and you could hear the crowd out there just a dying over it. Ella’d say, ‘Mmm, I’ll go to the kitchen, too.'”

I asked Ugee about Ed’s drinking and she told the story again about her brother Harvey giving him drinks to play “Sweet Florena”. She sang some of it for me:

Oncest I bought your clothes, sweet Florena.

Oncest I bought your clothes, sweet Florene

Oncest I bought your clothes but now I ain’t got no dough

And I have to travel on, sweet Florene.

After finishing that verse, Ugee said, “That’s part of the song. And Ella didn’t like to hear that song. I think it reminded her of some of his old girlfriends or something. And she didn’t like for him to play ‘Buttermilk Mountain’, either. He’d throw back his head and laugh. She’d say, ‘Don’t play that thing. I don’t want to hear that thing.’ But she’d second it. She’d draw her eyes close together.”

Brandon asked Ugee about her aunt Rosie Hicks, who was Laury’s sister and a close friend to the Haley family. She said Aunt Rosie was working in Ed’s home in Catlettsburg when she met Blind Bill Day (her sixth husband) during the early years of the Depression. It was a rocky marriage, according to Rosie’s only child, Nora (Davis) Martin.

“I was gonna tell you about him hitting Aunt Rosie,” Ugee said. “He came through the house and Aunt Rosie was upstairs quilting and all at once — Nora said she was in the kitchen cooking — and she heard the awfulest noise a coming down the stairs and said, ‘Mommy had old Bill Day by the leg and was bringing him bumpety-bump down the stairs, dragging him. Got him in the kitchen. He just walked up and hit her with that left hand right in the mouth. She just jerked his britches off of him and started to sit his bare hind-end on the cook stove — and it red hot.’ And Nora said, ‘Oh, Mommy, don’t do that. You’ll kill him.’ She said, ‘That’s what I’m a trying to do.’ And she grabbed her mother and him both and jerked them away from there.”

Ugee was more complimentary of Day’s colleague, Jean Thomas.

“I’ve got cards from her and letters and pictures,” she said. “I’ve been to her house — stayed all night with her. She was nice. She was too good to Bill Day. She spent money on him and give him the name of Jilson Setters. Sent him to England and he played for the queen over there.”

Brandon wondered if Bill Day was a very good fiddler.

“Well, I’m gonna tell ya, I stayed all night with Aunt Rosie and Bill Day one time,” Ugee said. “They lived on 45th Street in Ashland, Kentucky. My brother took me and my mom down there and he hadn’t seen Aunt Rosie for a long time. She’d married again and she lived down there in Ashland, Kentucky. And we aimed to see Ed and Ella, but they was in Cincinnati playing music. That’s who we went to see. So Harvey, he filled hisself up with beer. That’s the first time I ever seen a quart bottle of beer. Anyway, we went up there to hear Uncle Bill play. Harvey laid down on the bed like he was sick. He wasn’t sick: he wanted me just to listen to that fellow play that fiddle. He knowed I’d get sick of it. And he played that song about the Shanghai rooster. I never got so tired in my life of hearing anything as I did that. He only played three pieces. Harvey laid there, he’d say, ‘Play that again. I love it.’ And I had to sit there and listen to it, ’cause I didn’t want to embarrass him by getting up and walking out. I walked over to Harvey and I said, ‘You’re not sick and you’re not tired, so you get up.’ Said, ‘Ugee, I’ve got an awful headache. I drove all the way down here.’ I said, ‘That bottle that you drank give you the headache, so you get up and you listen to your Uncle Bill.’ He went to the toilet. I said, ‘I’m telling you right now — you’re gonna listen to Uncle Bill if I have to listen to him.’ Harvey said, ‘I’m not listening to him no longer. I’ve heard all I want to hear of Uncle Bill.’ I got Harvey up and then I run and jumped in the bed and I covered my head up with a pillow. But we stayed all night and Aunt Rosie went home with us. She told him she’s a going up to Nora’s, but she went to Calhoun with us in the car, and I reckon while she’s gone old Bill tore up the house. I don’t think they lived together very long after that ’cause it wasn’t very long till she come back home. It was home there at my dad’s.”

Brandon asked if Day ever played with Ed in Calhoun County and Ugee said, “Oh, no. If he had, Dad woulda kicked him out.”

Okay, I thought: so Laury had no tolerance for lesser fiddlers. What about Ed?

“Ed Haley, if somebody was playing a piece of music and they wasn’t hitting it right, he’d stick his hands in his pockets and say, ‘Goddamn, goddamn,'” Ugee said. “Dad’d say, ‘Boy, ain’t he good?’ Ed would cuss a blue streak. Then after the man was gone, whoever it was, Dad and Ed would go to mocking him. Dad and Ed Haley was like brothers. They loved each other. Ella and Mom, too. Jack was the baby the first time I seen Ed after he was married. They was expecting Lawrence, so they named him after my dad. Then when she had Mona, why instead of calling her Minnie, she named her after Mom.”

In Search of Ed Haley 339

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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As Ugee spoke about her life, I pulled out the Laury Hicks fiddle and began to play. For Ugee, hearing it painted pictures and conjured up images from long ago. Her eyes teared up, full of emotion and melancholy.

“I never thought I’d hear Dad’s fiddle played again,” she said, after I played one tune.

For the next half-hour, I played for her, intermittently asking things like, “Did you ever hear Ed play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’?”

“I certainly have.”

What about “Dixie”?

“Oh my god, yes. Him and Dad both played ‘Dixie’.”

Did they play “West Fork Gals”?

“Oh, yeah. I don’t think they was any fiddling pieces back then they didn’t know.”

Before putting the fiddle back in the case, I asked what Ed did when he needed repairs on his fiddles.

“They didn’t work on their fiddles very much,” Ugee said. “They kept their fiddles in good shape. I’ve seen Dad string the bow hair off a horse’s tail. Seen him do that a many a time. He’d string up the bows for Ed, too. Dad could do all of that.”

Did Ed trade fiddles a lot?

“Oh, yeah. Anybody that came along. He’s been there with three or four. He used to come and try to trade some of them off to Dad. Sometimes Dad’d trade with him, sometimes he didn’t. I’ve seen my dad have as high as seven fiddles.”

I showed Ed’s fiddle to Ugee and she said, “Ed Haley got that fiddle from Dad. Ed traded him a real dark-looking fiddle. Ed got my guitar, too. He wanted it for Ralph.”

Brandon asked Ugee about her father’s background, a very important thing considering his strong presence in Ed’s life. She said he was born in 1880 to Washington and Elizabeth (McCune) Hicks in Calhoun County.

“Well, he come very near to getting killed when he was young,” she said. “Perry Meadows stabbed him seven times with a knife right around the heart in a fight. They didn’t think he’d live at all. He told Perry if he lived, ‘I’ll get you.’ He liked to beat Perry to death after he got older. Old Mrs. Meadows was gonna indict Dad over it it but Dad rode a pony horse and went with Ab Moss’ mother to Mount Airy, North Carolina. Back then, they wasn’t no roads — just trails. Took his big dog with him named Ring. He come very near to beating Perry to death, though, I guess. They was friends afterwards. Perry lived down the road just about half a mile below us. Dad never cared that much about Perry but he treated him right.”

Ugee spoke little about Laury’s bachelor days but implied that his musical skill and talent at square dancing made him popular with the ladies.

“They wouldn’t have a square dance in the country without having Laury Hicks,” she bragged.

She felt Laury inherited his musical talent from his mother’s side of the family, the McCunes. Laury’s uncle Jim McCune, who lived at the infamous “Booger Hole,” had musical children: John was a good fiddler on two or three tunes, while Jasper was the best banjoist in the area. Another son Tom “could play the banjo, but he was the best whistler I ever heard in my life. Dad give him a dollar a day to come up and whistle for him when he was bad sick.”

“All them McCunes could play music and they could dance, too,” Ugee said, before adding that they were mostly known as singers.

In 1904, Laury married Minnie Shaver. Because he was so close to his mother (he was her “favorite”), he remained living at home with his new bride. Years later, he played his fiddle and sang for his mother at her deathbed. Ugee sang all she could remember of the song:

There was an old man, he had a wooden leg.

He had no tobaccer but tobaccer he’d beg.”

“That was Grandpap Hicks’ favorite and the night that Granny died in 1923 I was putting her to bed and he was just see-sawing on the fiddle. She said ‘Laury, play your dad’s tune,’ and he said, ‘Oh Mam, I have to change the key.’ She said, ‘Don’t make no difference. Play Wash’s piece.’ I never will forget: I went to the kitchen and he was playing that and he hollered, ‘Hey, Ugee! Come here quick!’ And I come back in and seen they was something wrong with Granny. And I run and aimed to work with her…she was gone.”

Ugee couldn’t remember the title of her grandfather’s favorite tune, nor any more words to it, but Brandon later found those lyrics in a song recorded by Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers called “Hinkey Dinkey Dee”.

In Search of Ed Haley 338

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Calhoun County, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music, Roane County

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On April 12, 1997, Brandon and I went to see Ugee Postalwait in Rogersville, Alabama. For the most part, she repeated a lot of the same stories I’d heard before, maybe with a new detail or two here and there. We began with her memories of Ed and Johnny Hager, who came to her father’s house around 1913. Brandon asked her specific questions about Johnny, which caused her to say: “He was a little short fella, slender. He was a nice person. Well-mannered. He was a good banjo-player. John Hager was a good friend of Dad and Mom’s both — all of us. Us kids, too. He used to write Mom and Dad. He wrote them from Webster Springs and he wrote them from Greenbrier. Different places where he was at. John wrote a letter back home and said he quit traveling with Ed ’cause Ed drank. He couldn’t take it. I’ve often wondered and studied about what become of him.”

Later, Ed sometimes came with a guitar player, but Ugee couldn’t recall his name.

Brandon was curious to know how far Ed traveled with his music, so he asked if Ed and Ella ever played around Parkersburg.

“I’m pretty sure they have,” Ugee said, “and Marietta, too. Harvey took them up to Akron to play music and they crowded that street so bad up there that they passed a law up there, you couldn’t stand on the corner and play music any more. They wouldn’t allow them to stand on the street. They had to move. See, they was such a crowd got around them.”

I asked, “How much do you reckon Ed would take in of a night?”

Ugee said, “I have seen Ed and Ella take in as much as a hundred dollars right there in Spencer.”

Wow, were they using a cup or a hat to collect money?

“They never used no cup. Just sit a box down or hat down and people come through and throwed money in it. Anyone that come along and dropped money in there, they’d play just the same.”

Would he play me anything I’d ask for?

“Why sure. He’d play it for you and then maybe if you asked for it again he might play you something else and call it that. He didn’t care to rename songs, like ‘Soldiers Joy’. He might call that ‘Runnin’ the Soldier’ or ‘Runnin’ the Track’ or something like that.”

I reminded Ugee that she heard Ed say he just picked up a fiddle and started playing it when he was small and she said, “Oh, yeah. He’d sit in the floor and play on that fiddle. Somebody brought something in that had two strings on it. He wasn’t very old. Just barely a walking, he said. Just like him a talking to me one time, telling me about his dad. Telling about them a lynching him. He said, ‘Goddamn him, they oughta lynched him.’ And I never asked him why. Why would a man say that about his dad? Maybe he was thinking about that man putting him in that barrel of water and causing him to be blind. But Ella’s eyes, they was ate out with blue vitriol.”

Ugee fully believed that measles had caused Ed’s blindness because they almost “put her blind,” too, when she was a girl.

“I must have been about five years old,” she said. “Well, Ed musta been there, too. Musta been the same year he was there that I had the measles and I went blind in my eyes. Couldn’t see nothing for three or four days. Had Granny’s bed set up by the side of the fireplace. I remember that instead of springs, it had rope. And Christmas time come up. And Dad, he played Santa Claus, I reckon. He got me jellybeans. I couldn’t see nothing for two or three weeks. I didn’t think I’d ever see again. Back then, they called them the ‘big’ measles and the ‘little’ measles. The big ones, they called the German measles. And I had them bad. Harvey come around — he was older than I was — he’d say, ‘You stink’, ’cause he could smell that fever on me.”

Brandon asked Ugee what year she was born in, to kind of help us better understand the time frame of her memories.

“I was born in 1907,” she said. “I got married in 1924. I left and went to Akron, but we come back ever month for a long time. If we knowed Ed was a coming in, we was there. I moved back in 1930. We lived on the farm until 1941. Then we went to a farm at the mouth of Stinson.”

At some point, Ugee moved back to Akron, where she lived when I first met her in 1991.