Tag Archives: John Hartford

In Search of Ed Haley 273

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Culture of Honor, Ed Haley, Harts, Lincoln County Feud

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When we got back to Billy’s, we were amazed to find that he’d made contact with Green McCoy’s family. He showed us telephone numbers for two of Green’s grandsons, Ralph McCoy and Luther McCoy, as well as for Spicie McCoy’s daughter, Daisy (Fry) Ross.

I dialed up Ralph McCoy in Marango, Ohio, and explained who I was and what I was doing, then asked about Green McCoy’s murder.

“I’m 72 years old but a lot of that went on before I was born,” he said. “I’ve had two or three strokes and sometimes my memory’s gone. From the way I understood it, it was a Brumfield that killed my grandfather. There was something going on — I don’t know what the feud was about. See, I know nothing first-hand. My dad was born in 1888 and my dad was I think about two years old when his dad was murdered. My grandmother told me this part of it: that her and my dad and somebody else, I believe… My grandmother’s name was Spicie McCoy. I guess my grandfather put her on a raft or something and pushed her out in the river and told her to get out of there, to just keep on going and be quiet about it. She was pregnant for Uncle Green. Then after my grandfather got killed she married Goble Fry and then I think they came on down into Wayne County, which was around Stiltner and East Lynn and in that area.”

I asked Ralph if he knew anything about Green McCoy being a musician and he said, “Yes, very much. I’d say he was just like my dad, Sherman McCoy. He played anything that had strings on it. My dad and my grandmother, they traveled all over Wayne County playing in a quartet. They called themselves the ‘McCoy Time Singers.’ I did some traveling with them but it was just more or less in the Wayne County area. Logan city, I’ve been down that far with my dad and Grandma.”

So Green McCoy’s son Sherman was a musician, too?

“He did play with some people before he became a Christian and he played in Cleveland over the radio and stuff like that, but I wasn’t living with him then,” Ralph said. “I was living with mother. See, I was brought to Columbus, Ohio, and raised from about nine years old, so I lost track of a lot of them. But I did know he played over the radio in Cleveland and I think Huntington and several different places.”

“Have you talked with Luther McCoy?” Ralph asked.

I told him that we had tried calling Luther first but that he was in bed asleep.

“If you can talk with him, I think you’ll find out he’s probably in the same business you’re in,” Ralph said. “He plays, I think, back-up for several bands. From the way I understand it, he might be out on the West Coast.”

This was all great: our first contact with Green McCoy’s descendants.

In Search of Ed Haley 272

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Music

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The next day, I followed a tip from Billy and Brandon and made the short drive to see Irene Hager and her son Ike at Low Gap in Boone County, West Virginia. Irene was the daughter of Hubert Baisden, a close friend to Johnny Hager, and was the widow of Bernie Hager, Johnny’s nephew. Irene said Johnny used to visit her father at nearby Big Branch when she was a girl. Johnny played the fiddle and banjo and talked frequently about his travels with Ed back in the ’20s and ’30s.

“Ed Haley was an ever day word with Johnny,” Ike said.

Ike said Johnny Hager was most known as a fiddler, not a banjo-picker. He said he “cradled” the fiddle in his arms, never put it under his chin and bowed a lot of long strokes. He was primarily a claw-hammer banjoist but “did have a finger style.” Irene said his favorite song was “Joshua’s Prayer”, while Ike remembered him loving “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown”. He also played “Rosewood Casket”, “Nelly Gray”, “Ballad of Old Number Nine”, “John Hardy”, “In the Pines”, “Cripple Creek”, “Wreck of ’97”, “Mockingbird on the Hill”, and “Little Log Cabin”.

Ike said Johnny taught his father how to play the banjo.

“He wanted a banjo player in the family to play around the houses and the homes with him,” Ike said. “My dad was musically inclined — he could chord a guitar and follow him along on the fiddle and banjo — so he talked Dad into getting a banjo. Dad traded six or seven hens and walked several mile with them hens upside down for this old banjo and Johnny taught him how to play. He picked up on playing pretty fast. I know they used to go over on Big Ugly and play in a school somewhere. Now they was some more boys that played with them. They was Wilcoxes, down on Mud River.”

That evening, I met up with Brandon at Billy Adkins’ house in Harts. Billy said a local man named Roy Dempsey told him earlier that day about having a genuine Ed Haley fiddle. I didn’t have too much time — I was leaving for Nashville later that night — but I wanted to see Roy. Brandon and I drove a little ways up Harts Creek to the Dempsey place, situated on a hill near the mouth of Big Branch. Roy showed us the fiddle, which he said Ed had given to Bernie Adams. Bernie later gave it to Roy’s father-in-law, Robert Adams. It was the first “Ed Haley fiddle” I’d seen on Harts Creek.

In Search of Ed Haley 269

17 Monday Mar 2014

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

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Back in the car, I mentioned to Brandon and Billy that we hadn’t made any real progress on learning what happened to Emma Haley. Billy suggested trying to locate her grave in the old Bob Mullins Cemetery at the mouth of Ticky George Hollow on Harts Creek. He said it was one of the largest and oldest cemeteries in the area. I told him that I was all but sure that Emma was buried in one of the “lost” graves on the hill behind Turley Adams’ house but wouldn’t mind checking it out anyway.

We drove out of Smoke House and up main Harts Creek to the Bob Mullins Cemetery, which was huge and very visible from the road. We parked the car and walked up a steep bank into a large number of gravestones. Some were modern and easily legible but most were of the eroded sandstone vintage with faded writing or completely unmarked. I located one stone with crude writing which read “E MULL BOR 69 FEB ?8 DEC 1 OCT 1899.” It could have easily been Emma Haley — who was born around 1868 and died before 1900. However, Brandon read it as “E MULL19 SEP 188?-1? OCT 1891.” We couldn’t agree on the markings well enough to satisfy ourselves.

As we stood at the “E MULL” grave, Brandon pointed across Harts Creek.

“Greasy George lived over there where that yellow house is,” he said.

He then pointed across Ticky George Hollow to Louie Mullins’ house, saying, “That’s where ‘John Frock’ Adams lived.”

John Frock was Ed Haley’s uncle and a suspect in the Al Brumfield ambush at Thompson Branch.

“Ticky George lived on up in the hollow,” Brandon said.

We walked down the hill to speak with Louie but learned from his wife Eunice Mullins that he’d passed away several years ago. Eunice was a daughter of Greasy George Adams. She said Ed used to play music at her father’s home. She also confirmed that Ewell Mullins, her father-in-law, bought Ed’s property on Trace. He lived there for years and was a storekeeper before moving to the site of her present home, where he operated yet another store. Ed played a few times at this latter location before it was torn down around 1950.

From Eunice’s, we went to Trace Fork to take a closer look at Ed’s old property. Along the way, as we drove by Uncle Peter’s place, we bumped into Sol Bumgarner walking near the road. He invited us up to his house, where we hung out for about half an hour on the porch. I played a few fiddle tunes and asked about people like Uncle Peter, Ben Adams, and Johnny Hager.

Bum said Uncle Peter Mullins lived at the present-day location of a tree and swing near the mouth of the hollow in a home that was part-log. Ben Adams, he said, lived further up Trace and hauled timber out of the creek with six yoke of cattle. He remembered Ed’s friend Johnny Hager standing on his hands and walking all over Trace.

I reminded Bum of an earlier story he told about Ed splintering his fiddle over someone’s head at Belcher’s tavern on Crawley Creek. He really liked that story — which he re-told — before mentioning that Ed composed the tune “Hell Up Coal Hollow” and named it after the Cole Branch of Harts Creek. Cole Branch, Brandon said, was the home of his great-great-grandfather Bill Brumfield who kept the hollow exciting around the turn of the century.

After an hour or so on Trace Fork, we decided to see Oris Vance, an old gentleman on Little Harts Creek who Billy said was knowledgeable about early events in Harts. We drove out of Harts Creek to Route 10, then turned a few minutes later onto Little Harts Creek Road. As we progressed up the creek on a narrow paved road past trailers, chicken coops, and old garages, I noticed how the place quickly opened up into some beautiful scenery with nice two-story brick homes.

In the head of Little Harts Creek, near the Wayne County line, we found Oris walking around outside in his yard. He was a slender, somewhat tall fellow, well-dressed, and obviously intelligent. His grandfather Moses Toney was a brother-in-law to Paris Brumfield. Toney and his family had fled the mouth of Harts Creek due to Brumfield sometime before the 1889 feud.

Oris told us the basic story of Milt Haley’s and Green McCoy’s murders as we knew it up to their incarceration at Green Shoal. He said Hugh Dingess, a grandson to the “old” Hugh Dingess, was his source for the tale. At Green Shoal, one of the prisoners begged the Brumfield gang not to kill him so that he could see his children, but the mob gave no mercy and blew Milt’s and Green’s brains out.

“Cat Fry looked out of a window in the top of the house and saw out into the yard,” Oris said, apparently referencing her view of their grisly corpses.

Oris said he saw Green McCoy’s widow at a singing convention in Chapmanville in the early ’30s. She was an alto singer in a gospel quartet with her guitar-playing son. When Oris saw her, she was sitting with songbooks in her lap near a hotdog sale across the road from the old high school.

In Search of Ed Haley 264

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Around that time, I got my fiddle out to see if I could coax Jake into playing a few tunes. He said he couldn’t play anything — he’d quit years ago.

“I got shot through this shoulder with a high-powered rifle during World War II,” he said. “My fingers is stiff and my arm don’t operate just right. You’ve got to have a good bow hand to play a fiddle. I used to fiddle, but I can’t do no good no more.”

I asked Jake if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “I don’t know — he played so many. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Wild Horse’, ‘The Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Cluck Old Hen’, ‘Casey Jones’. They was all kinds — you could just keep naming them. Never did hear Ed sing.”

Thinking back to those times caused Jake to say, “Dad fiddled with Ed, you know. Dad never did own a fiddle. Ward Brumfield gave him one and he kept it all of his life. My dad used to like one called ‘The Blackberry Blossom’. ‘The Money Musk’ — man, it was a fast tune when he played it. They’d play ‘The Sourwood Mountain’. Pluck that string, you know. Play that ‘Sally Goodin’. Called one ‘Bear Dog’. It was something like ‘Bonaparte’s’, more or less. I used to, when my dad fiddled, get me two sticks this a way and beat on the strings of the fiddle.”

I asked Jake if he ever heard a tune called “Pharaoh’s Dream” or “Getting Off the Raft” and he said, “I’ve heard of ‘Pharaoh’s Dream’ but never heard of ‘Getting Off the Raft’. Can you play that ‘Danced all night with a bottle in my hand. Swing around the corner with the other man?'”

I asked Jake if he knew anything about Ed’s father and he said, “His dad was a mean guy. My dad has told me many times that Ed had the measles when he was a kid and his daddy took him out up here on Rockhouse and stuck him in the creek and that’s what made old man Ed Haley blind. His daddy stuck him in the creek. His daddy was a bad character. They went on a rampage, him and Green McCoy. My daddy knowed them from the beginning. They shot old Aunt Hollene Brumfield with a .30/.30 Winchester and it come out in her mouth. Never killed her. These fellers went to Kentucky — Ed’s daddy and Green McCoy — and they went and got them somewhere and took them up to Green Shoal up in there and massacred them. Someone took them up on the West Fork and buried them kindly up on the side of the hill. They probably just dug a hole and put them in it.”

Jake remembered Hollena Brumfield well.

“She was an old lady that run a store,” he said. “She was bad to drink — fell down a stairway and broke both of her thighs. She couldn’t get around very good. She had a big garden right there where Taylor Brumfield’s wife’s home is and she’d get out there… She’d keep every bum that come along and work them. She was good to them — she’d feed them, you know — and put them out there in that garden. She’d have them take her a chair out there and she’d hobble out there and sit in that chair and watch them work that garden. Boy, I dreaded her. When she’d talk, the spit would work out that hole there.”

Just before we left Jake’s, I asked him if he knew anything about Ed’s death. He basically repeated what Stump had told us earlier.

“I don’t know what happened. They killed him on the Crawley Creek side of the mountain over there. They beat him to death over there in a beer joint called the Cow Shed Inn. Some drunks did it, you know.”

I was flabbergasted. I mean, how could those Dalton boys tell such an off-target story?

In Search of Ed Haley 261

09 Sunday Mar 2014

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Stump said Ed would sometimes talk to him and his brothers.

“Well, his fiddle playing of course was the number one thing he talked about but also his rendezvous, like playing on street corners and beer gardens, and the people he associated with playing music. That’s the type of conversations he would have. He’d tell about some fiddle player maybe dying or something happening to them, and he knew them all over the country. Now he’d been around, old Ed had, buddy. Ed stayed on the road practically.”

What about his children?

“I think he had two or three,” Stump said. “He had one boy come to our house one time and stayed three days with him. That’s the only one of his kids I ever seen. I forget his name. He was older than me. He was turned just like his daddy. You’d never know that the boy’d get into anything but I think he drank some.”

What about Ed’s father? Did he ever talk about his father?

“Yeah, he’s talked about his dad, but I don’t remember the things he said about him. Never heard him mention his mother.”

We tried to prod Stump’s memory by mentioning that Milt was killed at the mouth of Green Shoal.

“Yeah, Milt Haley. My dad knowed all about it. They got chopped up with an axe. Do you know that big two-story house? That’s where it’s supposed to’ve happened at — right along in there somewhere. They was him and one other guy killed — McCoy.”

So what do you know about Ed’s blindness?

“He told me he was blind from the time he was three years old,” Stump said. “His eyes wasn’t like our eyes. His eyeballs — instead of the pupils and stuff — was white. Just very faint, you could see the pupils.”

Ed was very good at compensating for his blindness and was able to use his fingers to identify certain types of fiddles.

“Dad bought me a little Jacob Stainer fiddle one time off of a man by the name of Ward Kinser,” Stump said, elaborating. “Ward was a distant relation of ours, lived up above Logan. He come riding a horse up through there with that fiddle and Dad bought that off of him for five dollars and give it to me. Ed come just not long after we’d bought that fiddle. When Dad went out to the road and got him, he said, ‘Come on Ed, I got a fiddle down here I want you to look at.’ And him blinder than a bat. We went down there and Ed took that fiddle and set it right on his belly and he started at the neck up here, just feeling around it at the keys. He felt all around that fiddle then he turned around to my dad and said, ‘My, my, Dood. That’s the first Jacob Stainer I’ve had in my hand in I don’t know how many years.'”

Stump laughed, “I never will forget that.”

We asked Stump about Ed playing at the old post office/store in Harts.

“Yeah, he played down there,” he confirmed. “He played for money down there. He put out a little old can, I believe it was. He used to play a lot up there at Logan at the courthouse. Now, he had more friends around here, like up on Crawley and up on Big Hart, than just our family. He may stay a month with us and stay sober but then he’d get with a bunch up on Crawley and up in the head of the creek here and you wouldn’t see him for a while. He’d stay up in there drinking. He got killed about half way up Crawley.”

What?

“Now, it was after I come out of the army, I know,” Stump said. “The first part of ’53. They was a beer garden up there, like a two story building — seemed to me like a bunch of Butchers owned that, I’m not sure — and they found him dead at that building up there. Somebody beat him to death. I’ve heard somebody robbed him. They was supposed to been three people done it, but it never did come out. I never heard no names.”

I had to stop Stump and say, “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Ed Haley was murdered on Harts Creek?”

“Yeah,” he said assuredly. “We knew where he was at. He’d been at our house. That’s where he said he was going. Well, he’d been gone awhile, ’cause he’d go up Big Hart, maybe, it might take him maybe a month to get on Crawley up there. They took Ed Haley, buddy, and shipped his body back out of here. He never come back to our house after that.”

Wow…

In Search of Ed Haley 260

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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Brandon asked if Ella ever played with Ed at Dood’s and Stump said, “The only time I ever seen her play was when Ed asked her. I’ve seen her come there and not play. Now, she didn’t play a mandolin like I played or say like Bill Monroe or somebody like that. All she done was just chord the thing. Play the second on the guitar you know and strummed it. She was a quiet person and she was a heavy-built woman. She never had much to say to nobody. She sorta give you the impression that she ‘would rather be somewhere else than where I am now,’ you know.”

Thinking of Ed’s accompaniment, Stump said to me, “You ever hear the name Bernie Adams?”

I had, but didn’t know much about him.

“Bernie Adams was a cousin of mine,” Stump said. “Bernie was born and raised up on Hoover and he was one of the best second guitar players I ever heard pick up a guitar. And all he did was drink. He’d been to Nashville maybe twice, I think. Now when Ed Haley come to our house, the first thing he’d ask Dad, he’d say, ‘Dood, where’s Bernie Adams at?’ Back then, you didn’t have no telephone. Big Hart Road was dirt. We’d take a timber truck and hunt Bernie Adams up and bring him down there. If we found him drunk, we’d bring him down there and he’d sober up. Ed told me, he said, ‘I never played with a man that had the timing that Bernie Adams had with that guitar.’ He was one of the best.”

I asked Stump if Bernie played runs and he said, “He could, but he played a follow-up for their music. And you talk about time.”

Stump didn’t know that Bernie ever played over the radio, but we later heard that he played on Logan radio in the mid-40s with a group called Uncle Harmon and his Fiddlin’ Fools.

Bernie died in 1962.

“They found him dead right at the mouth of Hoover when they went down over that little hill next to the creek,” Stump said. “He’d sat down next to a log and they found him laying beside that log. He drank himself to death. He’d left Earl Tomblin’s beer garden up on Big Hart. Somebody probably picked him up and drove him down there and they found him dead the next morning.”

I asked Stump to describe Ed and he said, “Ed was a pretty big man. I’d say Ed Haley woulda weighed 180-185 pounds and I’d say Ed Haley was 5’11” or 6′, too. I particularly noticed his hands. He had long fingers. And he was a fast walker. Ed Haley was the type of feller that would eat anything you put on the table. He liked to cut his onions up in his beans, buttermilk, cornbread, then rub some bacon in it.”

Did Ed do any kind of chores to help out around the house when he was there?

“No, he was just a guest and that was it. We never asked him to do anything, he never done anything. When he come to our house, other than sleep, 75-percent of our time was playing music.”

I asked Stump if Ed ever came around his father’s home drunk and he said no — Ed was always “very mannerly” at the Dalton home.

“Ed Haley was a fine man, buddy,” he said. “He was my idol. Ed Haley was a pretty smart man. He was good when it come to the Bible — he knowed what to do, you know, and they’d sit there and discuss the Bible, but Ed never would accept the Lord as far as being saved. If anybody could’ve ever got Ed to quit drinking, it woulda been Dad.”

Dood Dalton was a moonshiner in his younger days but gave it up just after Stump’s birth.

“Dad was one of the most well thought of men in this country really, if you want to know the truth about it. Dad made a study of the Bible for 62-and-a-half years.”

In Search of Ed Haley 259

07 Friday Mar 2014

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I got my fiddle out and played for Stump, hoping to generate some detailed memories of what he’d seen Ed and his father do. He watched me play for a while, then said, “You play exactly like the old-time fiddlers played, and I’m gonna tell you why. You’ve got the smoothest bow of anybody I’ve heard in a long time. Now that’s what they strived for, Ed Haley and Dad — them old-time fiddle players. This herky-jerky stuff, they didn’t go for that.”

Brandon asked, “What about Bill Adkins down at Harts? Did he play that style, too?”

Stump said, “He was pretty good. Bill had a little jerk to his. Bill had what I call a stiff wrist. All these players taught themselves. Dad, all of them.”

Dood Dalton, Stump said, started playing the fiddle when he was about six years old. A little later, he played for dances in the town of Dingess and on Mud Fork near Logan.

Brandon asked Stump if he knew the names of any more old fiddlers around Harts.

“My grandpaw, Wog Dalton, he was a fiddle player. One of the best, they said.”

Did Ed Haley know him?

“Ed said there wasn’t a fiddle player in this country could play with Wog Dalton,” Stump said. “Now, I barely can remember him. He was the spitting image of Devil Anse Hatfield.”

Wog was apparently a pretty rough character, too.

“My granddad was playing for a square dance and he and this guy had been into it,” Stump said. “Somebody came in there and told old man Wog, said, ‘Whatcha call it’s out there and he’s gonna cut you with a knife.’ He just kept playing that fiddle and here come this guy through there. He grabbed Granddad Wog and Granddad Wog just pulled his knife out and they just took each other by the hand, son, and started cutting each other.”

Stump laughed and said, “I think Granddad Wog was laid up about two months over that.”

I wanted to know more about Stump’s memories of Ed’s technique and repertoire, so I asked him the same kind of questions I’d asked Lawrence Haley in previous years.

Did Ed hold the fiddle up under his chin or down on his chest?

“He laid his chin right on it, like he was listening to it,” Stump said.

Did you ever see him play standing up, like at a contest?

“No. Now, old man Ed did play in fiddle contests. I know of two. One of them was in Ohio, ’cause he come in our house right after he done it.”

I wondered if Ed sang much.

“I never heard him sing a song in my life. Maybe a verse — just stop along there and sing a verse. Now, him and Dad both would do that. But to put the poetry to it, I never heard him really do that.”

Did he pat his foot a lot when he played?

“He patted both feet,” Stump said. “He’d switch off, and sometimes he’d pat both of them together. He just got himself into it.”

Did Ed ever play tunes in cross key?

“Now that there one I give you, ‘The Lost Indian’, was a cross key,” Stump said. “I remember that real well. That was one of the prettiest fiddle tunes. I asked Dad, ‘How are you tuning that fiddle?’ and he was tuning it in a banjo tuning.”

I asked if Ed traded fiddles much and Stump said, “No, he didn’t do much trading, I don’t think. And a lot of times he’d come without a fiddle. He knowed Dad had fiddles.”

I wondered if Ed brought a different fiddle every time he came to Dood’s and Stump said, “No, he had one fiddle he’d really like. But now, he’d bring an extra one once in a while.”

Stump thought for a second then said, “Now Ed would bring all his bows to Dad, after he’d broke up the hairs in them. Dad had horses, you know, and Dad would re-string that bow.”

How many bows did Ed carry around?

“Well, he’d just have maybe two in his case.”

Did he always have a case?

“No, a lot of times he’d just have a bare fiddle.”

Did you ever see him play anything besides the fiddle?

“I never seen him pick up anything besides a fiddle.”

Brandon asked Stump if he remembered the first time Ed came to see his father.

“I was born in 1929 but he was coming there, I know, in the thirties,” he said.

There were big musical gatherings at the Dalton home in those days.

“I’ve seen people all over the place,” Stump said. “My mother, she had a long table and she would have any kind of meat on that table you wanted to eat, any kind of bread on that table you wanted to eat. We raised all this stuff now. And sometimes you’d feed two tables full of people just through the week. Instead of cooking one pot of beans, she’d cook two. And we raised our own meat. We’d have sheep meat — what they call mutton — and pork and beef. We ground our own meal. The only thing we went to the store for was sugar, salt, and things like that. And I’ve seen people there lined up to eat — just country people gathering to enjoy themselves and that was it.”

Was there any drinking going on?

“Had one incident: this guy, he thought he was mean. My dad had my sister in his lap and we had music a going. This guy shot down in the floor there near my sister. He didn’t last long. Just somebody a drinking.”

In Search of Ed Haley 258

06 Thursday Mar 2014

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Late one October night, I rolled into Harts on the bus. I was full of excitement, having just read an article from Smithsonian magazine about Doug Owsley, one of the top forensic anthropologists in the country. According to the article, Doug had worked with the mass graves in Bosnia, identified some of David Koresh’s charred cult members at Waco, and helped to break the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Wisconsin. He was very interested in historical graves, having exhumed western outlaws, Indians, Civil War soldiers and no telling what else. He was known in some circles as “the Sherlock Holmes of Bones.”

The next morning, I told Brandon I had this idea of contacting Owsley to see if he would exhume the Haley-McCoy grave. He thought for a few seconds, then said it was risky. While he was as curious as I in wanting to know what was “down there,” he wasn’t really sure what we would gain by it. Besides, he said, people might think we were taking things a little too far. He could picture us sitting down to interview someone and all of a sudden they say, “Oh, you’re the guys going around digging people up.” He had a point: I wasn’t even sure what we might gain by exhuming the grave. We tabled the notion until later.

Turning our minds to more pressing thoughts, we decided to visit Stump Dalton at Ferrellsburg. Stump had popped onto my bus during my last trip to Harts and, looking very much like a thin-haired George Jones, said, “My family and Ed Haley was close. If he was in Ohio or somewhere and he come here the first place he come was our house. I knowed of Ed to stay as high as two months around there. We had him a bed all the time.”

Stump was a son of Dood Dalton, Ed’s fiddler-friend on the Big Branch of Harts Creek, as well as a former mandolin player for the Starlight Rambers, a local group featured on Logan radio many years ago. He was 66 years old.

“I’ve actually played with Ed Haley,” Stump had told me.

Brandon and I made the short drive to Ferrellsburg where we pulled the car into a wide spot near the railroad tracks. We walked across Route 10 to Stump’s turquoise-colored house. “Come on in, boys,” Stump said at the door. “I’ll tell you what I can about Ed Haley.” Immediately, as we sat down on couches inside, I asked Stump about his father, who was reportedly a great old-time fiddler and a good friend to Ed Haley.

“They called him Dood Dalton,” Stump said. “His real name was Moses. My dad used to play for a lot of them old-time square dances. Music follows the Daltons. Dad could play anything that had strings on it. He was a number one harp player. He could play anything on the French harp.”

Brandon asked Stump if he remembered any of his father’s tunes and he said, “‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’, ‘Sally Goodin’, ‘Old Joe Clark’, and all that. See, when they would first start playing, Ed would say, ‘Now Dood, I want you to tune that fiddle up and play that ‘Lost Indian’.’ Now they used to take and clamp a little knife on the bridge. It softens that down. Then they would take two little sticks — about the size of straws, you know — and play that ‘Hell Amongst the Yearlings’ and beat on that and man you talk about a tune. Dad would either beat or play it or vice-versa, him or Ed would. That was a favorite tune for them two — that and the ‘Blackberry Blossom’. You know, they revised that ‘Blackberry Blossom’.”

Right away, it sounded a lot like the kind of relationship Ed shared with Laury Hicks, the fiddling veterinarian in Calhoun County.

I told Stump I thought Ed Haley was a master of improvisation and he agreed, saying, “They would play a tune and they’d put their own thing into it, you know. I’ve seen Ed Haley sit down and say, ‘Now Dood, what do you think of this?’ and vice-versa. And they’d sit there all day, all night. They could do about anything they wanted to do with a fiddle, both of them. When they was into fiddle playing, they was into fiddle playing. You didn’t come in there and start a conversation with them.”

I asked Stump if Ed and Dood played at the same time, as he had supposedly done with Hicks, and he said, “Not too much.”

In Search of Ed Haley 246

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, Lincoln County Feud

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Meanwhile, Brandon was in contact with Brady Thompson of Stafford, Virginia. Brady, a grandson of Ben Adams, had also seen the Guyandotte Voice newspaper article. He was sure that his grandpa Ben hired Milt and Green to ambush Al Brumfield because his grandmother — Ben’s last wife — had told him so. They shot at Brumfield but accidentally shot his wife, who rode behind him on a mule. They were eventually captured and chopped to death with axes near the mouth of Harts Creek.

It was in the years after the feud that Ben married Brady’s grandmother.

“My grandmother was an Indian,” Brady said. “Some way she said he took them away from some Indians on Horsepen Mountain and brought them over there when she was about fifteen and when she got about eighteen or nineteen year old he married her. His wife had died. He musta been married three or four times ’cause he musta had 25 or 30 kids.”

Brady didn’t seem to think much of his Grandpa Ben, who taught his sons to be “no good.”

“All they ever done is set around and figure out how to get a big war started between the families,” he said. “They’d kill one another.”

Brady said his Grandpa Ben died at his home on main Harts Creek in 1910 and “was buried up there on Trace.”

Brandon asked if there were any pictures of Adams and he said, “I believe old Harve Adams up on Trace before he died, he had Ben’s picture.”

I gave Brady a call to ask him about Ed and he said, “I was about six or eight years old when I seen Ed Haley. They come to my father’s place, my Uncle George’s place. The kids had brought Ed and his wife in that evening on two mules. A bunch of us kids all slept on the floor and they all drunk and played music all night long. I waked up early that morning — a big frost on — and they was still playing music. I thought that was the best music though I ever heard.”

Ed played a lot with Brady’s banjo-picking uncle George Baisden and occasionally at Ewell Mullins’ store on Trace.

Back in Harts, Brandon and Billy drove up Hoover Fork to see Brady’s younger brother, Alvie Thompson. Alvie was a very dedicated Mormon who’d just moved back to Harts Creek from out West.

“Grandpa Ben Adams was a big, tall ruffian — a rough villain,” Alvie said. “He’d beat his wife with a switch when she’d run off.” Ben lived in the head of Trace and operated a dam on Harts Creek.

Alvie remembered Ed Haley as a short, heavy-set man who visited his Uncle George Baisden as late as 1949-50. Gladys Williamson, Alvie’s 78-year-old sister, said Ed brought two of his sons there and he and Uncle George played music out on the porch or under walnut trees near the barn. Alvie’s father Herbert Thompson sometimes joined in with his banjo as did Ella, who played the guitar and banjo. Alvie recalled Ed playing standard tunes like “Arkansas Traveler”, “Sourwood Mountain” and “Sally Goodin”.

In Search of Ed Haley 238

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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As Brandon and Billy dug up more information in West Virginia, I received a letter in the mail from Louise (Adkins) Johnson of Powderly, Texas. She’d read an article about my Ed Haley search in a now-defunct Chapmanville newspaper called The Guyandotte Voice.

“I was so pleased to hear some one mention Blind Ed & his wife,” Johnson wrote. “I’m 72 yrs. old, was born and raised, in Boone Co. just over the hill from Chapmanville, W.V. My Uncle Simeon Bias & his wife Bertha (Baisden) & my family were (I guess you could say backwood singers & musicians) but Ed & his wife came to my Uncle Sim’s often & everyone played. I remember my brother was 3 1/2 or 4 (he’s 65 now) had the most beautiful blonde curls, & Ed would feel his head and say how pretty he was. They would stay a couple of wks. at a time. If you would contact the older people of Bias Branch in Boone Co. you may be able to find out more about them.”

“Now Johnny Hager lived with my mother & Daddy my sister, my Brother & me all our growing up yrs. @ home,” Louise continued. “He was a handy man, & a fiddle player. I also have his picture. He had no family as my Parents knew of, & he stayed more with us, some time’s a neighbor would need him to come live with them, to build them an out house for them. He was noted for the best out houses, he earned his keep by living with & helping others. A very neat man.”

In Search of Ed Haley 229

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

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The next day, Billy directed Brandon and I up Walker Gap to the old Ben Walker farm. Walker was the man who reportedly organized the Haley-McCoy burial party in 1889. Once there, we found no buildings remaining so we stopped at the family cemetery, which was just off the hill from the Haley-McCoy grave. Ben’s grave was marked by a simple rock.

From there we headed to “Runyon’s Branch,” a small stream emptying into the Guyandotte River just above the mouth of Harts Creek. Supposedly, John Runyon once lived near the mouth of this branch while operating a sawmill at its head. It was a great set-up: Runyon owned his own hollow and could float his timber directly into the Guyan River, thus avoiding Al Brumfield’s boom and tax. Nearby on a bluff was the probable site of his “blind tiger,” where he would’ve had a great view of Brumfield’s timber operations just across the mouth of Harts Creek. At this location, Runyon was surrounded by members of the Adkins family. Some of his neighbors were Burl Adkins (a brother-in-law to Fed Adkins), Mose Adkins (Fed Adkins’ brother), Ben Walker, and Cain Adkins.

In Search of Ed Haley 228

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley

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Bob said the Brumfields left Hugh’s with Milt and Green when they heard about the existence of an Adams mob nearby.

“They took them up over the ridge and down and crossed into Ferrellsburg up at Fry,” he said.

They went to the home of Tucker Fry, who took all of the women away from the place.

“I think maybe they stayed there a day and night or something like that a trying to make them tell who hired them to do that,” Bob said. “They was a trying to get them men to tell who hired them to kill Al Brumfield. And they took one of them outside and lectured him while the other was inside. When they took him back in, they said, ‘He won’t talk.'”

Bob said the mob even took Milt and Green into different rooms trying to get a confession but they just blamed the shooting on each other. Finally, French Bryant “blew Haley’s brains out with a gun.” Burl Farley hollered and everyone shot Haley and McCoy “all to pieces.” Cat Fry, who was about ten years old at the time, hid in a corner or in the fireplace and witnessed their deaths. “It was very cruel,” Bob said.

The mob returned to their homes after killing Milt and Green and it wasn’t long until the “murder house” was burned to the ground so there’d be no evidence against them.

I asked Bob if he remembered the house and he said, “Aunt Cat, she told me it was a two-room log house. One of them old-timers, big ones. They all slept in one room. Big fireplace in the other one. I never was in that house.”

Bob said that hard feelings over the feud lingered for years, especially toward Ben Adams. “After Haley and them was killed, old man Ben Adams never done no good at timber,” he said. “He run a mountain still up there — moonshine — and he had cabins built and he had men there and ever man had a Winchester and you couldn’t do much a bothering him ’cause old man Ben was a mean man.”

So what happened to Ben, we wondered.

“Ben died in 1912,” Bob said rather undramatically, “and was buried up yonder on the hill.”

According to Bob, the 1889 feud eventually ended because most of the participants were related and ultimately wanted to see it put to rest. “Here’s the thing,” Bob said. “The Adamses and Dingesses all married through each other and the Brumfields married into the Dingess clan. Everybody was kindly keeping a steel tongue because they didn’t want no more feuding more’n what they had and they didn’t want the young people to really know anything about it — how cruel it was. Dad up here never would talk about it. Nobody talked. Years and years and years in here it was just gossip. People a talking that didn’t know a thing on earth about it. It was a rumor. Someone would tell one story and someone would tell another.”

Every now and then a bit of the story leaked out, mostly from eyewitness Cat Fry. “Aunt Cat down here, now, was a little eight-year-old girl in the same house when they was killed,” Bob said. “She would very seldom talk about it but once in a while if nobody was around sometimes she’d start off a telling me about it some. She wouldn’t hardly tell you names. Nobody wanted to hear it. They wanted to let it die down and forget all about it.”

Bob remembered French Bryant well. “He was a big 200-pound 6’4″ tall mean man,” Bob said. “He’d carry a pistol on him that hung on his hip — one of these cap ‘n balls. He lived just over the hill up yonder and he made liquor and sold it all the time up that holler. Nobody lived up there. He had two miles of a hollow there to himself and he had a big dapple gray stud horse about fourteen, fifteen hundred pounds. He’d get on that horse and go to Ferrellsburg and if the river wasn’t too big he’d swim him across that river and he’d get him a load of groceries and put them on his back and then swim that horse back.” Bob told Billy, “People didn’t fool with that old man, either. Right when you leave the mouth of Hart and come up there at the schoolhouse — just across the creek starting up West Fork — there was a big house there and old man Ross Fowler lived there. I never did know what Ross done, but old man French went there… They didn’t have no lamp oil, they had pine knots. He took a sack full of pine knots there and set them afire and burnt creation up — burnt them out of house and home. Nobody ever knowed he did it, of course. He was a mean old cuss but he didn’t bother nobody in his last days. He made a little liquor and sold it and that’s the only way the old man could make it.”

Just before we left Bob’s, he told us a very important bit of information about Ed’s relationship with Al Brumfield’s oldest son, Ward. “Like I started to say a while ago, they was a feud between the Brumfields and the McCoys,” he said. “But remember, Ward Brumfield was a very fine man. He was a handsome man. Ward was a wonderful person. He was a first cousin to me and I have to congratulate him. He’d get up and him and Ed Haley’d hug each other and they’d prance and dance on the floor and just love each other. They’d both sit down at the table to eat together. Ward and him forgot all the past. Ward and Ed Haley was good friends.”

In Search of Ed Haley 226

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley

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Billy recommended that we visit Bob Dingess, a man of advanced age who was related to and personally remembered almost everyone in Ed’s story. His father was Dave Dingess, a younger brother to Hollena Brumfield, while his mother was a daughter to Anthony Adams. His first wife was a daughter to Charley Brumfield, while his current wife was Robert Martin’s niece. Bob was a close cousin to Bob Adkins and Joe Adams, as well as many of the Brumfields. He was a fine old man — a retired schoolteacher and elementary principal — who could probably tell us more about Harts Creek history than any one alive.

We drove to Bob’s small white house, which sat just below the mouth of Smoke House on Big Harts Creek, and knocked at his back door, where a nurse met us. She knew Billy and invited us inside, through the kitchen and into a dark stuffy living room. There, we met Bob and his wife. Bob was bundled up in a light black jacket, oblivious to the enormous August heat. A somewhat tall man, he had an alertness to his movements that was surprising and enviable. He was very friendly. We all sat down on couches to talk about Ed Haley. I was sure that Bob’s heater was running; in no time at all, my sinuses were ready to explode.

When Billy told him that we were interested in finding out about Ed Haley, he said, “You have to give me a little time on this. My memory jumps on me. I’m no spring chicken and I have to think.”

But it was obvious that his mind was sharp as a tack when he started telling about his memories of Ed.

“Now Ed Haley, he left here after so long,” Bob said. “He went to Kentucky and he married there. He had a blind woman and she played the mandolin and he played the violin and they had a lot of the meanest boys you ever saw. I first saw him in 1918, during the First World War. Well on Saturday I’d go to Ferrellsburg to haul groceries. That’s the only way to get them. No bridge at Hart. And bless your heart, here that man and them four children come off’n that train, and that old woman, and I got a wagon load of groceries and set them on it and them boys fought and that old man he just slapped and knocked and kicked among them. And the old man, he wouldn’t tell them nothing — he was blind — and she couldn’t tell them nothing, either. And I finally got them up here at the house, and when I got them there Mom made me unload the wagon and says, ‘Get ’em away from here.’ And we took them up yonder to old man John Adams’ then, and let them go. They stayed a month up there.”

I asked how Ed dressed.

“Well, he was all right now, boys,” Bob said. “Don’t worry about him. He took care of everything. He’d laugh and talk, too. You’d think he could see. After you’d get him located and get him in the house, you know, he could get up and walk about through the house.”

Bob didn’t think Ed was the best fiddler he ever heard.

“Nah,” he said. “He couldn’t play this fancy music like Bill Monroe and them played. The old-time fiddle, he was good…old-time music. ‘Comin’ Around the Mountain’. He had a dozen songs.”

Bob said Ed used to play at the old pie suppers on Harts Creek.

“See, I was born in ’04, and I went to these frolics where they had pie suppers and socials and all these gals gathered and these men,” he said. “About every weekend the girls’d go to one home and they’d kill chickens and bake cakes and bake pies and everything and they’d auctioneer them off. If you had a pretty girl, buddy you’d better have a little pocketbook because somebody’s gonna eat with her and knock you out. Mother always give me a little money and I’d just pick me out one and get her. Yeah, planned all week, the girls would. We did that once a week unless they was some special occasion. We’d start at Bill Brumfield’s down yonder. From Bill’s, we’d come to Andy Thompson’s, come from Andy Thompson we went to Rockhouse to Uncle Wash Farley’s. Uncle Sol over here, he wouldn’t let them have it but just once in a while. Mom would let them have it about every three or four months up here. But on up the hollow up yonder it was a regular thing. Them days is gone, though. You couldn’t have that now. No fighting, no quarreling, everybody got along happy.”

I wanted to know more about Ed.

“Ed Haley, here’s what they’d do,” Bob said. “They’d put him and her on a mule and he’d be in front and she’d ride astraddle behind and hold him. And somebody else’d have to carry their musical instruments, see? And when they got them up there then they had to lead them and get them in the house and get them located. And somebody’d slip around and give him a big shot of liquor and her and they’d say, ‘All right, old-man, let ‘er go.’ ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’, boy here she’d go. He’d sing it. He was a good singer. And his old woman, she didn’t look like she was very much, but she was a singer. She was a little woman, blind. But she’d sing right with him. Yeah, ‘Turkey in the Straw’. Ah, that ‘Grapevine twist,’ man, ‘circle eight and all get straight.’ Ah man, them girls had them old rubber-heeled shoes and they’d pop that floor. It was an all-night affair. He’d play a while, then he’d rest a while, then he’d start again. Along about midnight, they’d drink that liquor in them half a gallon jugs. You know, I was a boy and I wasn’t allowed to drink too much but now them old-timers they would drink that liquor. ‘Bout one o’clock, she’d start again, and when the chickens was a crowing and daylight was coming still they were on the floor. They would lay all day and sleep.”