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In Search of Ed Haley 156

23 Friday Aug 2013

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I gave Pat a call to check on Lawrence, who was back at home in Ashland. Pat said Mona had been a frequent visitor since Lawrence’s heart attack and was starting to open up about her painful memories of Ed.

“Mona said her father was the cruelest, most horrible man to her,” Pat said. “Even her mother was not the mother to her that she was to Lawrence. And she said Lawrence was always the favorite. And I said to her, ‘I didn’t see any of the ugliness of your daddy or your mother,’ and Larry has never ever said anything about his father except he’ll tell you he got drunk or he’ll tell you he was mean to Mom once in a while. But he has told me he never did see his father strike his mother. Mona said she has heard them and said the things that her daddy has said to her mother were just too horrible for her to repeat. She used to put her head under the covers to keep from listening. But Larry has none of these memories. Memories he has of his dad were always good memories. But Mona will agree: there was two out of all that were the favorites: the oldest boy Ralph and Lawrence. Mona says she is very sorry that in the last years of her mother’s life she did not help me any more than she did. I was very young when his mother passed away and I had three small children.”

Pat said Lawrence was starting to act a great deal like his mother.

“There is so much that is coming back to me that was exactly like his mother,” she said. “For one thing, when I help him to the bathroom, he takes the same little steps. He goes with his eyes closed most of the time, just like he can’t see. And he’ll sit with his eyes closed. You know there is those little things, like he won’t ever eat with a fork anymore — he eats with a spoon. His mother always did. And he drinks a lot of water, just like she did. There’s just so many of his little mannerisms that remind me so much of his mother. He will call me ‘Mom’ a lot. I don’t know if I told you, but one night he was crying and I went in to him and I said, ‘Honey, what’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘Mommy, rock me. Rock me, Mommy.’ He was back in his childhood and it just breaks your heart John when that happens. He’d been talking, he wanted to go to Morehead.”

There was more bad news for Pat. Her daughter Beverly had recently been diagnosed with cancer.

In Search of Ed Haley 154

20 Tuesday Aug 2013

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Not long after my call to Wilson, I received word from Bruce Nemerov that he’d finished dubbing about a third of Haley’s recordings. He sent me cassette copies, along with an audio log (which gave detailed information about the records). I listened extra close to the Nemerov copies and noticed how Ed’s playing gave the impression of being very notey, as I had originally interpreted it. This was, I determined, somewhat of an illusion.

“I don’t think your dad played as many notes as he sounds like he’s playing,” I said to Lawrence by telephone. “It sounds to me like he’s putting so much into some of those notes that they sound like they’re more than one note.”

Lawrence said, “He might be doing that, I really don’t know. The only thing I’ll go on is what it sounds to me like. I’ve seen and heard some fiddlers that it just seems like they draw a bow completely just to get one little note. Pop could get a dozen or two out of a draw of the bow. It seemed to me like that his fingers was all the time moving. He was probably touching the strings so lightly a lot of people might not have even heard some of the notes. That’s just my speculation. Pop knew how to use that bow to get force whenever he needed it and when to let up on it and to let a general sweet note come through.”

Lawrence continued, “I guess that’s what helped him in his technique that nobody else seemed to a been able to master. They might have been seeing him make the notes, but how he was pressuring the bow they might not have paid that much attention. You would have to have, I guess, a camera of some sort on it so you could go back and study what was done. You’d hear a note then you’d watch the finger and then you’d go back and hear the note and watch the bow. Maybe the little change in the muscles in his fingers or hand or wrist or something. You’d have to watch all of that and just keep going back and just keep going over it and going over it. But he got them in there, I know that. All of them wasn’t exactly crisp and clear. You could probably hear it in some of the records. I wish you’d been able to have met my dad. I think he’d a liked you and I think he’d a taught you all he could — all you was capable of or all he was capable of teaching you anyway.”

Lawrence said, “I don’t know how many fiddlers that I wouldn’t even have an idea of their names that used to come around to watch Pop play. They wasn’t there all the time, I don’t think, for the entertainment. They was there to learn some of the stuff, too. We used to go out on Route 5 about eight or ten miles. They was an old man out there that played and he said, ‘Ed, come see me whenever you can.’ He had a boy that had polio or something — had a short leg. It was a typical Kentucky hillside home. It had a big banistered front porch. And we used to go out there and maybe spend the weekend with these people. They’d just sit out there and play on the front porch. I can’t remember their name. I remember seeing the boy — he was quite a bit older than me at the time. He was almost a full-grown man. He’d walk with his hand on his knee a lot to keep that leg from giving way. That’s about all I can remember. Course I was probably eating better than I was if I had been home. People out in the country like that have usually got a cow and a good garden or good canned stuff anyway. These people were good people. They liked my dad, too.”

I asked Lawrence how things were going in his family and he seemed a little down about Mona and Noah.

“Mona passes our house just about every day — at the foot of the hill down here — and won’t even stop by,” he said. “Noah, whenever he’s in town, he’ll usually stop by. He’s back in Cleveland and got him an apartment and he likes it back up there. See, Noah gets in trouble every now and then; he has to move. I think he gets in gambling debts. He got down in Newport one year — it might have been eight or ten years after he got married — and got down there on a three or four day drinking and gambling spree and they liked to beat him to death down there, I think, ’cause he couldn’t come up with his tab on his gambling. So I think he gets in that condition every now and then and he has to take off somewhere else.”

I asked if Mona was a gambler and Lawrence said, “Now Mona, she goes over in Catlettsburg and she plays Soda Rum or something like that and gambles on that. I quit gambling of all sorts before I was married. Whenever Noah and Clyde and Jack would come around and want to play nickel-and-dime poker, I’d say, ‘Well, Pat will give you a blanket. You guys go right on outside, spread it out on the lawn, and play your nickel-and-dime poker out there.’ I wouldn’t let them play it in the house.”

A few days after speaking with Lawrence, I received word from Pat that he’d suffered a massive heart attack. It came as quite a shock, even though his health had been failing since my last trip to Ashland. Pat said the doctors didn’t give him long to live.

In Search of Ed Haley 153

19 Monday Aug 2013

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I called Wilson Douglas a few weeks later, still blown away by Ed’s incredibly fast fiddling on the Holbrook recordings. I raved about it to Wilson — how it was like a “rush of music” — who showed no surprise that he fiddled with so much of what he called “drive.”

“Now, they’s another tune I thought about that Haley played, he called it ‘Dance Around Molly’,” he said. “My god, Haley could play that. It’s a real good tune. Got a lot of drive about it. ‘They’s so many tunes,’ Ed said, ‘a man can’t learn them all, but I guess he can keep trying.'”

I played Ed’s recording of “Fifteen Days in Georgia” for Wilson and asked him if he played that fast at Laury Hicks’ house.

“About the same, John,” he said. “He was a great hand to play a tune in whatever time it was pitched in. He didn’t overplay his notes. And he played the solid driving note. He didn’t skip over it like skipping over with a motor boat.”

Wilson said one of the tunes that Ed played at Laury Hicks’ grave was “Arkansas Traveler”.

In Search of Ed Haley 152

17 Saturday Aug 2013

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I asked Lawrence about Ed’s friends — if he remembered any of the fiddlers who came to see his father.

“I may have met a bunch of them and seen more than what you’ve got named, but as far as knowing them by name I wouldn’t know them by name,” he said. “And I probably wouldn’t recognize 90-percent of them by sight, either. Well Ed Morrison, I know Pop knew him. I didn’t know he was a fiddler, though. I just knew he was somebody that’d come around Pop every now and then. It slowed down quite a bit in my teenage years when we moved down close to town. Now, I don’t know if that was because of his heart condition or what John, I really don’t know. I think Pop had got a little bit grouchy about some things. If it was somebody he appreciated and liked he might play with them, but a lot of times, ‘I just don’t feel like it.’ If they come, they come to get him to get him to go somewhere. It might be 50 miles away or it might be two houses away. That was usually the way it was.”

I wondered if there was a big difference in Ed’s fiddling as he got older.

“Well, not really too much in his fiddling,” Lawrence said. “You know he’d just get tired. He wouldn’t play quite as much a lot of times. I know the last time we took him anywhere my brother Noah wanted him to play for one of his friend’s wedding. I think it was just get-together afterwards — sort of like a reception — only these kids just had a bunch of friends and some beer and stuff. And Pop sat there and he played and played and played and finally — they was giving him beer, I think — and it must’ve worked on him and he just fell over asleep, almost in a semi-doze. You could talk to him and he’d answer you, but he couldn’t hold a bow up any longer. He just more or less sat there in a sleepy daze. And me and my wife took him home, and that was it. He’d play some, but he wouldn’t play much for anybody after that.”

I asked Lawrence if Ed ever just sat around the house and played by himself and he said, “Well, I’ve seen him do that. He’d sit out on the front porch… There at 17th Street, we had a great wide banister and he’d sit up on that banister and play. It was pretty wide. He’d sit on that banister where he could spit out off a the porch and chew his tobacco and play for his own satisfaction. He might’ve been listening to something on the radio and come out and try it a few times and maybe play something he thought he might’ve got rusty on or some of his own music that he thought he needed to practice up on. I’ve seen him do that maybe for two or three hours at a time. The last time I reckon I seen him out like that, he was playing the banjo, though. He wasn’t playing the fiddle.”

Lawrence reminded me that his father liked to chew tobacco.

“He usually carried a can around the house like a brown coffee can as a spittoon,” he said. “He’d go out to farmers he knew and get him a few leaves of tobacco and make him a few twists, you know. It was twisted up like a double roll and he’d cut him off a piece of that and it just dry as a bone and stick that in his jaw. He always carried a little plug of Brown Mule or something like that to kinda take the dryness out of that twist or put a little sweetening in it or something. He would cut him off a little bit of sweetener and use that dry twist he’d twisted up hisself. In fact, he had a little chest he kept most of his tobacco products in. He might have 50 or 75 twists of tobacco and, you know, other products of tobacco. He smoked a pipe too, so he would have crumbled tobacco in cans and things. And he would put slices of apple — certain types of apple — in with it to kinda flavor it and things, and he kept it all in this one chest he had.”

Wow — I’d never heard or thought about Ed having a chest (or really anything else) before. I asked Lawrence if Ed had many possessions and he said, “Not a great deal, John. Just his clothes and just his violin and just his dinner table and I guess a bed to sleep in. What really would a blind man want other than that? Pop carried a good sharp knife. Did his own honing of his knife and things like that. He would whet it on a concrete banister if he couldn’t find a regular rock. He might’ve had a rock in that chest, I don’t know.”

Back to Ed’s chest — how big was it?

“Ah, it was about the size of an Army footlocker,” Lawrence said. “Just a little bit smaller than that, only it was just made out of wood. It wasn’t made out of plywood. It was made out of tongue-and-groove board. It’s long gone.”

I asked Lawrence how many fiddles his father owned in his life and he said, “I really don’t know. I imagine he had four or five dozen somebody had give him, or he’d bought or ordered. The fancy fiddles with all the inlay and all that stuff, I don’t think he’d a cared for that at all. It wouldn’t a made a bit of sense to him to have that. If he could just get the mellow sound or the sound that he liked out of it… Now, I don’t know whether it was mellow he liked or what. It was kind of a harsh music he played, I guess. I know he could get mellow music whenever he wanted it and he could make a fiddle slur or do whatever he wanted to with it.”

Lawrence paused and said, “I’m trying to tell you: a lot of stuff I don’t know about my dad. About the only thing that I really know, they was no fiddler around this area that could come any ways close to him that I ever heard. Other than that, he got out amongst his friends I guess and he came home with stories to tell and stuff, and I guess he told Mom if she wanted to hear them and if he didn’t want to tell her anything he didn’t tell her anything. Sometimes he’d come home with money, sometimes he might not come home with any money in his pockets.”

In Search of Ed Haley 143

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

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After talking with Ugee, I called Lawrence Haley, who’d been “laid up” since my trip to Ashland. He and I talked more about finding the photograph of Ed and Ella getting ready to play music on the street. In no time at all, he was revealing new details about his father’s “street life,” first telling how he’d get a crowd together.

“He might just bow the fiddle a little bit and get a few sweet notes out of it. Stop. And if it looked too dead to him, he’d just get up and leave. ‘There’s no use of staying here.’ Pop wouldn’t play if it wasn’t something that he knew he could make money at. He wouldn’t get out and work for nickel and dime stuff all day long. Maybe ten, twelve cents an hour, just sitting there playing music, and taking requests or something and sitting on the street. But my mother did. She’d get out… I’ve seen her go in times so cold she’d cut the fingers out of gloves so she could play the mandolin, and have a harp and I know that thing’d almost freeze to her lips in weather like that. But Pop, he wouldn’t do that. Of course, I don’t guess a violin player could do too well outside. His fingers’d get stiff as they could be.”

When Ed wasn’t playing on the street in the winter, he would go inside public buildings.

“Well, I’ve seen them inside the courthouse main lobby some,” Lawrence said of his parents. “They played in theaters. Concourses of train stations, and places like that. Anywhere where they’s a lobby big enough to they didn’t interfere… You know, they could get over out of the way of main traffic flow, of pedestrian traffic. Sometimes they’d let them play and sometimes they wouldn’t. He was pretty well known in some places, and they tolerated him — if they didn’t outright appreciate it. They tolerated it anyway, because they knew that that’s how they had to make their living.”

Lawrence gave me more information on Bake and Lula Lee, the “other” blind husband-wife team working on the streets of Ashland.

“Lula Lee was blind and Bake Lee was blind,” he said. “They lived in Catlettsburg, Lula and Bake did, as long as I can remember. They raised two or three kids. Bake Lee was the flower huckster that Pop got accused of being when he died. ‘The Flower Huckster of Winchester Avenue.’ Lula Lee went to school with my mother at the School for the Blind. She played the mandolin and the harp. She had a harmonica rack. My mother played one like that, too. She did a lot of street work like that on her own, too. Pop might be in Logan, she might be in Gallipolis, Ohio, or Ironton or Portsmouth. And Pop might be off somewhere with a bunch of his cronies learning new music up in West Virginia or Kentucky. If the need for money come up, somebody had to bring it in. We didn’t eat quite as good for a day or two or something, but none of us would ever starve.”

In Search of Ed Haley 139

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Around five o’clock that evening, Bobby Taylor drove over to Lawrence’s from Dunbar, West Virginia. Bobby was a Clark Kessinger protege and friend to Wilson Douglas. We gathered in the kitchen where Bobby got acquainted with Lawrence. He told about the first time he heard Clark Kessinger speak of Ed Haley.

“I was setting there and I was like a sixteen-year-old boy just hanging on his every word. I remember it just as well as if it was yesterday. I asked him who the best fiddler was that he ever heard in his life and he said Eck Robertson was really great on about four pieces. He said Ed Haley was the best fiddler he ever heard because Ed Haley played them all great. And Lefty Shafer’s dad, Von Shafer always thought the two fiddlers who were the best he had ever heard — and he said he wouldn’t turn his hand over for the difference — was Sam Jarvis and Ed Haley.”

Lawrence said, “Well, I’ve heard Pop talk about Jarvis.”

At that point, Bobby showed Lawrence how he thought Sam Jarvis had played — “a lot like Haley: smooth and even” — then said, “But Haley had a little bit more bow motion than Jarvis did.” He played a little bit for Lawrence, showing him what he thought were some of Ed’s “licks.” Lawrence tapped his fingers on the table a few times, then laughed and said, “John, watch him. He can teach you pretty well how my dad played.” He really liked Bobby’s fiddling, which made perfect sense. He had patterned after Kessinger, who patterned after Ed.

For the next hour or so, Bobby and I played a mess of tunes. Bobby’s favorite Haley tune was “Dunbar”, which he’d learned many years ago from the Parkersburg Landing album. For the most part, Lawrence watched us quietly, only periodically commenting on notes or bowing when something sounded or looked familiar. After I played my version of “Shortnin’ Bread”, Lawrence said it sure sounded like one of his father’s tunes. When Bobby played “Soldier’s Joy” he said, “Well, that’s about the way my dad played it. I mean, the notes.”

We seemed to be off on Ed’s bowing, because Lawrence kept reminding us, “Pop ran the bow from one end of the bow to the other.”

Bobby told him, “That’s the way I do if you catch me about two o’clock in the morning warmed up. I use the entire stroke of the bow.”

Occasionally, Bobby would mention old fiddlers around Charleston — Kessinger, Jarvis, Shafer. He seemed to be a big fan of Mike Humphreys, a Depression-era fiddler who turned down an offer by Bill Monroe to become a Bluegrass Boy in 1943 and spent the next twenty years competing in contests against Clark Kessinger. Lawrence said all he remembered about Ed’s trips to Charleston was that a fellow named Ruffner usually guided him around town and that Kessinger was always there watching, listening and trying to copy his father’s style. He must have been really good at it because Ugee Postalwait had said Kessinger “was as near like Ed as any fiddler I ever heard.”

Just before I headed back to Nashville, Lawrence agreed to let me borrow all of Ed’s home recordings and copy them using the latest technology. Considering how Lawrence guarded them through the years, I felt his loaning of them was an overwhelming expression of trust. In a few days, I excitedly took them to Bruce Nemerov at the Center for Popular Culture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. As Bruce “did his thing,” Lawrence, Steve, and I talked about maybe having them cleaned up and released commercially. Lawrence liked the idea of giving any profits from such a project to the Kentucky School for the Blind.

In Search of Ed Haley 138

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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Later that evening, back in Ashland, Lawrence and I talked about Haley’s tunes. Ed told him all about “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

“When the French first went in, they was pushing the Russians pretty hard,” Lawrence said. “The high string going in. The Russians were retreating. When they got to a certain point, the cannons started booming and the Russians started turning the tide on them. Part of the highs, I guess, was the French Napoleon troops coming out in a hurry and the Russians right behind them and then they’d be a spell of like an old dirge or something, like they was coming out defeated. They was slacking off on ’em and letting them retreat back out of there. They knew they wasn’t gonna make it on account of the weather. Just gonna let them freeze to death. Then they’d boom the cannon and push them a little bit faster. Then the dirge come up again. That’s the way Pop kinda explained it to me. He’d say, ‘Now you listen to these cannons boom. The Russians are getting ready to turn the tide on Napoleon’s troops’.”

Lawrence had no idea where Ed heard that story.

“Same way with ‘Lost Indian’,” he said. “It seemed like, the way he explained it, this old Indian would look at something and see a far off peak that he recognized and he’d be happy and hooping and hollering and trying to get over to it and then whenever he’d get over there he would find out it wasn’t the place he thought it was. And he’d sit down and kind of reminisce, I guess, and feel bad towards his self because he wasn’t where he thought he was at so he could get home. He’d stand up and look around again and maybe see another peak or familiar point as being close to his tribe and he’d go to it with a little bit of enthusiasm and glee because he thought he’s getting home and it’d turn out the same way. He wasn’t getting no where. He was still a ‘lost Indian’.”

In Search of Ed Haley 137

29 Saturday Jun 2013

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Charlotte Spaulding, Grace’s daughter, guided Lawrence, Pat, and I to see 81-year-old Babe Hale. I told him about my interest in Ed’s life and he started talking about his Aunt Josie. I showed him one picture of Ed and he said, “That looks just like her almost.” I pulled out Ed’s picture from Parkersburg Landing and he said, “Looks more like Uncle Mont.” I was pretty sure that there was some kind of family connection between Ed and Mont and Josie, especially when Babe said his brother George Hale had went by the nickname of “Milt.” Maybe Josie and Mont were somehow Milt Haley’s children by a previous marriage.

“Josie’s mom and dad are buried down here at Grey Eagle,” Babe said. “He was killed in a raft. You know, they used to take logs down the river. They’s big rafts, trees tied together. And he was killed that way. He was killed on a raft.”

Babe told me more about Josie Cline — some very peculiar details.

“Josie collected toll up there, and when I’d go across, I had to pay, too. It didn’t make any difference to her: she’s gonna get three cents some way or other. But she was really manly. She wore men’s shoes and everything.”

So she wore a long dress all the time?

“Oh yeah,” Babe said. “She was really an old-fashioned woman.”

Charlotte said, “She looked like a man, didn’t she, Babe?”

I asked Babe what tunes she and Mont played and he said, “Oh, God, ‘Sourwood Mountain’ and everything. No, they could really knock it off now, both of them.”

We went to Grace’s briefly before heading back to Ashland. I was under the impression that Grace might have confused Ed with Mont Spaulding, although she had claimed to know about Ed’s banjo-picking friend, Johnny Hager.

“Yeah, he played the banjo with her,” she had said. “He was a little man. He was with them. They was two or three people traveled with them.”

In Search of Ed Haley 134

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

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Later that night, Lawrence, Pat and I looked through a box of family photographs. Most were “modern” pictures featuring side burns, bellbottoms, or trendy 80s sweaters, but there were a few treasures. Early in our dig, I came across an old postcard with Ed, Ella, and Ralph pictured on it. Toward the bottom of the box was a small, dark picture of Ed in between Ella and someone named Margaret Arms. Lawrence said Margaret was Ed’s cousin, originally from around Paintsville, Kentucky, “or somewhere,” who ran a barbershop on Court Street in Cincinnati. Mona later told me that Margaret used the last name of Thomas because she was married to or lived with a man by that name. Margaret used to give her jewelry.

At the bottom of the cardboard box, under the flaps, was a dark, faded picture of Ed and Ella sitting on the street with their instruments. The photo was small and blurred, but I could make out that Ed wore some kind of a billed cap and was getting ready to play a tune.

“Pop looks like he might have been getting ready to play a piece and was letting my mother know without coming right out and saying what piece of music he was gonna play,” Lawrence said of the picture. “He was maybe hitting a lick with the fiddle bow, sort of like a ‘tune-up lick’ or two.”

Lawrence pointed to his mother, who had her right arm behind the mandolin, and said, “They kept a cup on the street in front of them or some kind of place where people could put change and my mother would take that up and she would put it behind her mandolin and count the take for their piece of music. And that’s what she’s doing right there.”

In the photograph, Ed obviously had the fiddle placed against his chest, and it appeared as if he held the bow as far to the end of the frog as possible. I practiced the hold in front of the mirror in the living room, then showed it to Lawrence, who said, “That’s it. That looks right.” I could tell right away this bow hold allowed for greater leverage in playing close to the frog as well as for pulling an extremely long bow. It was very similar to a bow hold I’d learned as a boy from Gene Goforth and Benny Martin, but the emphasis was never as far back as Ed was holding it. In fact, when I first saw this picture I even thought Ed might be holding it by the “frog screw.”

In Search of Ed Haley 132

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

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The next day, Steve and I told Lawrence about our visit with Wilson. He listened with great interest to every detail, ever the guardian of his father’s legacy. When I mentioned something about Ed running around with Doc White, he said he was well aware of his father carrying on some in that part of the country. He remembered  Ed goofing around with a gun one time at Laury’s and accidentally shooting himself. Luckily, it was loaded with blanks.

“That ended some of his foolishness,” he said.

Taking a little inspiration from our stories of Ed’s experience with Laury Hicks, Lawrence fetched a letter from his widow, Minnie, dated March 4, 1953. By that time, Minnie had remarried and moved to Eddy, Montana. It read:

Dear Ella and all Lawrence family and little Ralph. I arrived Home the 1 Day of Mar. at 6:30 pm. Hope you are much better. also Hope the rest are all well. Did Ralph get in? tell him I would of loved to seen him. I would of loved to seen Lawrence. he sure Has a lovely wife and children. Shirley told all of them at Home that Little Girl was the Prettiest and Smartest little Girl he ever Saw. Well Ella I so glad I found you. I do wish you were here with me. You would get Stout and you would love it so much. Well I will see you all in the future if we all live and I am going to arrange so you and I can travel Some places to visit a little. but Vanie is not well. he had the Flue. Well Ella if you get this OK I will send you Some Money in your next Letter so love to you all. I love all of you. Your old faithful pal. Minnie

In Search of Ed Haley 131

17 Monday Jun 2013

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That evening, we all gathered in Wilson’s kitchen and played music. It was clear in watching Wilson play that his style was different from Ed’s, but he knew all kinds of great tunes: “Abe’s Retreat”, “Coo Coo’s Nest”, “Fourteen Days in Georgia”, “Walkin’ in the Parlor”, “Boatin’ Up Sandy”, and “Brushy Run”. He had a real sense of humor. When I played “Stony Point”, he just kinda looked at me laughing, then said, “John, that ain’t ‘Stony Point’. Can I kid you a little? Now, Ed Haley wouldn’t like that.”

Every now and then, between tunes, Wilson told me more little things about Ed. He said Ed wouldn’t change his style for anyone and hated when someone asked him to play fast. He said Ed used to tell him to sometimes play it “lazy” and slow a piece down for different effects, such as at the end of “Birdie”. Wilson remembered that he played “Billy in the Lowground” with a double wind-up.

Wilson really bragged on Ed’s version of “Forked Deer”.

“Anybody that tried to play ‘Forked Deer’ with Ed Haley had to be crazy,” he said. “Oh god, he’d put that B-flat in there and he’d have a little grin on his face. He didn’t laugh very much. I’d watch that fiddle like a hawk. I’d watch them notes but god they were fast. And he;d play that ‘Sweet Sixteen’…”

Now, what was “Sweet Sixteen”?

“Well now, that’s got three titles,” Wilson said. “‘Too Young to Marry’, ‘Chinky Pin’, and all that. Ed said most people just smothered it to death on the bass, but he didn’t. Him and Clark Kessinger both played it about the same. Now John, he just used two notes on that bass.”

Wilson said Ed played “Callahan” in the key of A, then said, “And he played ‘Charleston Number One’ but he called it ‘Goin’ to Charleston’. I tell you where he got it from. He borrowed it from them old Possum Hunters in Nashville way back in ’37 and ’38.”

Wilson said Ed also got a lot of tunes from French Carpenter, the last of the old-time Carpenter fiddlers (and Wilson’s distant cousin) in central West Virginia. Ed used to spend a week or two at a time with French listening to him play cross-key tunes, like “Camp Chase”.

“There was one thing about Carpenter,” Wilson said. “Now Ed Haley was a better fiddler all around, but what Carpenter played he was good. He didn’t have no inferiority complex. He done a good job playing in front of Ed Haley. He’d say, ‘Well, now Ed, if you want to hear me, fine. I’ll give you what I’ve got.'”

I asked Wilson if Ed played “Shelvin’ Rock” and he said, “He liked it, but he never did play it. He liked to get French to play it. He’d sit, you know, and grin. He’d say, ‘By god, you got the bow, Carpenter, to play that tune.'”

Ed and French played “Devil in Georgia”, although Haley called it “Deer Walk”.

Over the next few hours, Wilson played me a lot of tunes, many of which he’d heard Ed play. The tunes had strange names, some familiar but most not: “Elzic’s Farewell”, “Little Rose”, “Mouth of Old Stinson”, “Old Aunt Jenny With Her Nightcap On”, “Run Here Granny”, and “What Are We Gonna Do With the Baby-O” (in the key of E).

There were other tunes that he only remembered Ed playing, like “Bostony”, “Brickyard Joe”, “Dusty Miller”, “Jimmy in the Swamp”, “Katy Hill”, “Lost Indian”, “Old Joe”, “Pumpkin Ridge”, “Snowbird on the Ashbank”, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and “Waynesboro Reel”.

Wilson thought Ed fiddled “Red-Haired Boy” in the key of A, “Mississippi Sawyer” in G, and “Coo Coo’s Nest” in A or G, and said he played “Running Up the Stairs” so well “it’d make a person cry.”

Wilson remembered that Ed had some strange titles for his tunes. He said he used to call some tune with a common name “Dance Around Molly”, then added, “And he played another tune, I never could get it in my mind. Ed called it ‘Raccoon in a Pine Top’. I’ll be danged if he wouldn’t break that bass out — it’d sound like ‘Over the Waves’ or something.”

Wilson said, “You know, John, if I had a lot of time, like a week, I could tell you a lot of things about Ed Haley. When you get old, all that stuff comes to you, then you forget it.”

Hoping to pull something from his memory, I played tunes I knew from long ago and asked, “Did Ed play anything like this?”

He came up with something almost every time.

Ed also played “Fine Times at Our House” but called it “George Booker”, which is interesting in that the old-time Texas fiddlers also call it that.

I told Wilson what Lawrence Haley had said about Ed loving Scott Joplin and ragtime. He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, he may’ve done it, but now, he stayed with hoedowns all the time I heard him. Course he’s afraid to play anything else: them old people didn’t know what that kind of music was.”

In other words, he played what they wanted to hear.

“Absolutely. And he made money by it. And he played straight. He didn’t fancy it up no way. He didn’t want you to change a tune one note. He wanted it like it was. He said, ‘Cut it off at the stump like it is.'”

I said, “He didn’t take tunes and add stuff to it?” and Wilson said, “If he thought it was appropriate he would. The man had enough skill, he could play anything he wanted to.”

Steve and I hung around with Wilson until late that night, talking more about Ed’s music and playing tunes. We eventually pried ourselves away and headed back to Lawrence’s in Ashland.

In Search of Ed Haley 130

16 Sunday Jun 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Wilson was sure about it.

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 129

15 Saturday Jun 2013

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Wilson’s memories seemed to be flowing, so I tried not to interrupt him with questions.

“You know, Ed would talk to me after he figured out I was gonna try to play the fiddle,” he said. “He’d say, ‘Now, play your fiddle with some soul about it. Don’t start these trembling notes. That’s for some violinist in Germany.’ And another thing he would do, you can’t fiddle with the other man’s tricks. There’d be some little old chicken fiddlers around and come over and play about like I do. They’d rear back. Ed would listen at it and never criticize them and then when he started to play he would drop them to the floor. The man would come down on the fingerboard, playing half way down on that neck. It was so clear I couldn’t get over it. But the bow was as smooth. It must have been an imported bow. That danged bow was six inches longer than any bow I ever saw. But I didn’t want to ask him about it. You couldn’t interrogate him no way. And don’t ask him to show you how to play a tune. He didn’t show nobody nothing.”

I asked Wilson if Ed ever heard Bill Monroe and he said, “He talked about all them guys. Now John don’t get me wrong. He said Monroe was a pretty good singer. He said pretty good. Well I’d say Monroe was a A-1 singer, but I wasn’t gonna disagree with Ed. He liked the Carter family. And he said, ‘That old A.P. Carter and Mother Maybelle and them they got the soul about it.’ And he said, ‘Wilson, you know I don’t trust none of them Nashville people. I don’t wanna get involved with them.’ He said, ‘They’ll knife you. They’ll play your tunes, then walk somewhere and make a lot of money out of it.'”

What about banjo-pickers, like Earl Scruggs?

“Oh, no. By god, you’d push the wrong button. He didn’t like Scruggs. No, he liked the clawhammer banjo. He said they could get in and they could get out where it belongs. But I didn’t say nothing. I claimed the Fifth Amendment. I liked both of them, but I wasn’t gonna tell him nothing. I learned Ed Haley. I knowed when to talk and when not to talk. Now he’d cuss you out, don’t you think he wouldn’t.”

Wilson said he only heard Ed compliment a few Nashville musicians over the years. He said Georgia Slim Rutland, who stayed a lot with him in Ashland during the winter of 1937-38, was great on “Southern tunes” and couldn’t be beaten on “Billy in the Lowground”. He felt that Arthur Smith was “hell on them Blues,” complemented his versions of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Katy Hill”, and even played his “Blackberry Blossom”.

“And now he did say a little something about Chubby Wise,” Wilson said. “He liked a few of Wise’s tunes, but he didn’t go in excess about it. But now that was it. Them Possum Hunters and them Fruit Jar Drinkers, he couldn’t stand them.”

In Search of Ed Haley 124

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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I told Wilson about working on Ed’s long bow and the Scotch snap — about the little stops between notes — and he said, “Right, right. That’s hesitation in the notes. That is correct. He talked about ‘chopped notes.’ That’s a quick note. But you know, what I liked about Haley, whenever he would settle down and fiddle… I like to hear a fiddle drive a straight, hard, flat note. A clear note. This skipping over the notes, I don’t go for that. And Haley didn’t do that. Every note he got was clear, or he would make a ‘chopped note,’ he called it, and the hesitation was with the — well the hand was quicker’n the eye. He could make a quick hesitation with the bow.”

I was very impressed with Wilson’s memory of such details, which improved with each passing minute. Apparently, Bobby Taylor was right: after he thought about something for a while his memories became sharp as a knife.

Wilson said, “But now I didn’t tell you about the kind of strings he played, did I? He played the old Blue Bird. They quit making them back in ’42 or ’43. They was a steel string, something like a Black Diamond. I believe they’s a little better toned. They wasn’t so sharp. And they cost one quarter in them days, for I bought one as a kid. Now that was the string that Ed Haley played. He liked these solid bone keys in his fiddle, white bone keys. And I always thought about where he got that dang fiddle bow, but it must’ve been four-and-a-half foot long. I never will forget it: that’s the longest fiddle bow I ever saw. I’ve thought about that many a times. It looked to me like it was six inches longer than any other kind of bow, and he played it from one end to the other.”

I said, “You don’t reckon it was just the way he was pulling it that made it look long, do you?”

“No, it was long,” Wilson answered. “You know, a boy sixteen years old don’t miss nothing for he’s eager to learn, you see? I know a fiddler over here in Webster County, and he’s good, too. He’s a top fiddler. And me and him talked about that, and he said, ‘Ed Haley pulled the longest fiddle bow I ever saw.’ And he said his notes was plain. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Now the frog on that bow was some kind of a bone, if that means anything. White bone.”

Wilson really bragged on Ed’s repertoire.

“Now the man, John, what amazed me, he would play all night and maybe not play the same tune twice,” he said. “And he told me, said, ‘I know over a thousand fiddle tunes.’ Old Ed played ‘Callahan’ out of this world. I can’t remember the key. I wasn’t far enough along. But now, Ed sometimes would put that B-flat in the ‘Forked Deer’ and sometimes he wouldn’t. He would run that B-flat in there if he was showing off, you know. He played the ‘Paddy on the Pike’ in standard tuning. ‘Paddy on the Handcar’, Ed played that cross-key. Two different tunes. And he played ‘Poplar Bluff’ and the ‘Hole in the Poplar’ and all that kind of stuff.”

In Search of of Ed Haley 123

03 Monday Jun 2013

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     I spent the spring of 1994 triangulating the many different versions I had heard of Ed Haley’s life and trying to make some sense of the direction of my research. There were so many avenues to explore: Ed’s background and the story of his father’s death on Harts Creek; Ed’s family and professional life in Ashland; Ed’s experience in places like Portsmouth or Calhoun County… Really, I seemed to only be scraping the tip of the iceberg — and it appeared to be a large one at that. It was amazing to consider how much I might learn about someone who I had first read about as being “a misty legend.” Almost daily, some little scrap of information came in.

     I called Wilson Douglas several times with very specific questions in mind. I asked him if Ed played a lot in the second and third position and he said, “Oh, yeah, he did a lot of that. Well, you know it’s like this, John. When he wanted to show off he would play in the standard position then he would let loose and get down the violin neck — way down — and play down there a while. He’d do a lot of that where he had competition, you know, and more or less to show off. That is, if somebody provoked him that’s the way he would do. I don’t know how he did it, but you wouldn’t detect any change, any hesitation, any loss of time, or nothing like that. But the man was a genius, they’s no question about it. He played the fiddle so many different ways, you had to listen close to tell what he was a doing.”

     I asked Wilson if he knew anything about Ed’s personal history.

     “No, not too much,” he said. “You know, he had the measles when he was two or three years old and that put him blind. He told me, ‘Wilson, where I was born and raised there on Harts Creek in Logan County, we almost starved to death.’ Said, ‘All we had was greens and green onions to eat of a summer and practically nothing of a winter.’ He said, ‘Now you know what the Depression is.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well that was a picnic to what I was raised on .'”

     I said to Wilson, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about Ed’s background and see if that rings any bells. His daddy was lynched.”

     “Right,” he interrupted. “They was mean people. They were mean, violent people.”

     I asked if Ed ever talked about his father.

     “Not too much,” he said. “He didn’t want you to ask him too many questions about a thing like that, you know? He did mention one thing to me one time — said something about his dad, but he didn’t comment much, you know. Not enough to make any sense of it. Ed Haley wouldn’t tell you too much. You had to be in his confidence strongly before he’d tell you much of anything.”

     When I mentioned my theory about Josie Cline being Ed’s half-sister, Wilson said, “Well, I heard him telling Laury Hicks that he had a sister, but he didn’t say his ‘half.’ He said his sister.”