Tag Archives: Kentucky

In Search of Ed Haley 81

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

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

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Satisfied with our stop on West Fork, Lawrence and I said our farewells to the Kirks and went to see Turley and Violet Adams on Trace Fork. After some small talk about new developments, Turley told us about his uncle Johnny Hager and father Johnny C. Adams traveling with Ed in the early days. He said Uncle Johnny was the one who got Haley to take his music on the road, while his father just traveled around with them.

“They left here playing music together,” Turley said. “My father just helped them take care of their musical instruments — carried it around and stuff — but they done the music. He would sing with somebody but he never did sing by hisself. And Ed Belcher, I think, played with them then. He could play anything but played a guitar mostly.”

So where all did they travel to?

“They played up at Logan on the radio at one time,” Turley said. “They had a program on up there, Ed Belcher did. Oh man, that’s been back in the thirties. Maybe ’36, ’35. I was just a little bitty boy. I just heard these tales — I don’t know them for sure.”

I asked about Johnny Hager.

“I was just a great old big boy the last time I seen Johnny Hager,” Turley said. “He came to our house, stayed around a little while and left. He was kindly a small fella. My dad was, too. Ed would make two of ary one of them. He was a great big feller, Ed was. Now Ewell Mullins, they was all buddies. Now Johnny Hager and Ed could play music. I heard an old guy on television one day talking about how him and Ed used to play in front of a church somewhere together. Yeah, he called him ‘Blind Fiddling Ed Haley.’ Said he’s just a real good friend to him. But he lives in Inez, Kentucky, that feller does.”

I said, “Well, isn’t Inez where Milt is supposed to be from?”

Turley said, “Milt, now my dad just could remember him. He said he was a hard-working fellow and when he’d come in home he’d just tell them boys, ‘Right now, we got to have a fight and get everything settled and we’ll be all right.’ They liked to fight. I guess that was Ed and he had how many more — two more?”

I said, “You mean Ed had brothers?” and Turley said, “I think he did. I believe my dad said he had a brother and one of them got in a fight one time and he bit Milt’s ear off right in the yard right down there. Now, they was Milt’s boys. I guess Ed is Milt’s boy, ain’t he?”

Lawrence said he’d never heard of his father ever having any brothers or sisters, but it sure was a strange coincidence that we heard a story about “Milt’s ear” right after hearing Bob Adkins’ account of Green and “the nick.” Maybe Milt had the nick — which would’ve reversed their roles in Bob’s story of their final days.

So Ed had brothers?

“Far as I know, they was two or three more of them from the tales they told, you know,” Turley said. “Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza used to tell it. Said every time they come home — Milt and them boys — said he’d just fight with all of them at one time. Have a good time. Say, ‘Now we’re friends.’ Back then, that’s what they believed in.”

This was a major development.

“I just heard these tales,” Turley said. “I don’t know how true they are. About Milt coming home and say, ‘Now, we’ll straighten ‘er out right now and we won’t have no more problems while I’m here.’ That’s the way he run his family, you know. That old woman said, ‘I’ll agree to that. That’s the way it ought to be done.’ I don’t guess she could do anything with them boys.”

Hoping for clues about Ed’s “brothers,” I asked if any of the old gravestones in the cemetery behind Turley’s had any writing on them. Unfortunately, Violet said all the markers had rolled down the hill in recent years and the land had leveled out to where it didn’t even resemble a cemetery. All she knew about the cemetery was that there was a “big grave” in it at one time that belonged to a woman with the last name of Priest (she was the only person buried there who her mother-in-law had actually known).

Turley said he last heard Ed play the fiddle at Clifford Belcher’s tavern on Harts Creek where he played for money and drinks. Violet remembered him playing music all night at her father’s home on Hoover Fork with Robert Martin (her great-uncle) and Bernie Adams. She described Bernie as a “real skinny” bachelor who sang “a little bit but not much” and who “was a real good guitar player, but he never would hardly play.”

“He’d get to drinking and he’d play but if he wasn’t drinking he wouldn’t play,” she said.

Turley said Bernie could also play the banjo, harmonica, fiddle and accordion.

In Search of Ed Haley 77

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Cemeteries, Ed Haley, Music

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After Ed’s death, Ella lived with Lawrence and his family in Ashland. Every Thursday, she went to Cincinnati where she sold newspapers until Saturday. On Saturday nights, Lawrence would meet her at the bus station in Ashland and bring her home. She and Lawrence would then go into her bedroom where she would empty out her bounty from special slips Aunt Minnie had sewn into her bodice and count her money. It was somewhat of a humbling job for Ella; her own brother Allie Trumbo would call her “Penny Elly” and tease her for taking in pennies and nickels at Cincinnati. The whole experience came to a humiliating end when she “wet” on herself at the bus depot one afternoon. Apparently, no one would help her to a bathroom.

Pat said Ella took to her bed shortly afterwards and didn’t live much longer.

The day after Thanksgiving in 1954, Ella died of a stroke while staying with Jack and Patsy in Cleveland. Lawrence showed me her obituary from a Huntington newspaper:

HALEY – Funeral services for Mrs. Martha Haley, 66, 4916 Bath Avenue, who died Friday night at the home of a son, Allen Haley, at Cleveland, O., will be held today at 3:30 P.M., at the Lezear Funeral Home by the Very Rev. Francis M. Cooper, rector of the Calvary Episcopal Church.  Burial will be in Ashland Cemetery. The body is at the funeral home.

Mrs. Haley suffered a stroke while visiting her son. She was born July 14, 1888, at Morehead, Ky., a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Trumbo. 

Surviving are three other sons, Lawrence Haley, Ashland, Noah E. Haley, Cleveland, and Clyde F. Haley, Michigan; one daughter, Mrs. Mona Mae Smith, South Point, O.; a brother, Allie Trumbo, Cincinnati; and nine grandchildren.

Sensing that Ella’s death might be a sensitive subject, I just kind of left it at that.

In Search of Ed Haley 76

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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That evening, back at Lawrence’s, I was full of questions about Mona. She had made a real impression. As I spoke about her, I could sense a little hostility from Pat, as if there were years of family trouble between them, barely hidden away.

“Mona was married to Wilson Mullins,” Pat said. “He was from Harts. Mona was fourteen, I guess, when she married and he was 23 years older than her. She had one boy by Wilson Mullins — Ralph Andrew, who was named after Ralph Andrew Haley. When I came over here in 1949, Mona was divorced from Wilson and she was married to a Kenny Smith. She had two boys by Kenny Smith. Freddie lives in Michigan and Kenny Jr. lives in Ohio. Kenny Sr. is dead. Had a heart attack in Cleveland.”

After a brief marriage to Raymond Willis, a railroad engineer in Ashland, Mona married James Hager.

Pat said, “We met him once. I think they lived in Ohio.”

Mona had a daughter by Mr. Hager named Mona Lisa.

Pat seemed to think the most of Lawrence’s brother, Jack.

“Jack was a very devoted husband and father and had a beautiful home,” she said. “He worked very hard. Larry and Jack were very, very close. Jack was five years older than Lawrence.”

Jack’s wife Patsy had done a lot of family research “but found nothing beyond Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza.”

I asked if Patsy had any pictures of Ed and Pat said, “No more than what we have, because when Rounder Records came to Larry and we was getting pictures for them we went up to Pat’s and Larry got records from them. Jack had four or five records left and their son Scott brought those to Washington and whatever pictures they had.”

Pat promised to ask Patsy if she had anything.

Later that night, Lawrence told me more about his mother. He said Ella was a very small person, only about five feet tall. As a young woman, she attended the Kentucky School for the Blind at Louisville and earned a piano teaching certificate at the Morehead Normal School (now Morehead University).

“Mom was very refined,” Pat said. “No matter where she went, you could always tell she was an educated lady. Mom had very good manners. She was very good at speaking. And when you saw her and Pop together, and listening to both of them, you could tell there was a vast difference in the way they were raised.”

“Mom would read Dickens to us,” Lawrence said. “Robin Hood, Great Expectations — all them classical stories that came out of England and places at that time.”

When young, Ella was proficient at playing the piano and organ. After marrying Ed, she learned to play the mandolin and banjo-mandolin so that she could play “his type of music.”

“She used to sing more of the old English-type music,” Lawrence said. “Little nonsense stuff. We’d ask for it a lot of times ’cause we didn’t have anything else but the radio. I remember her singing one that had to do with a sea captain and it went something like this:

There was a noble boatsman.

Noble he did well.

He had a lovin’ wife

But she loved the tailor well.

And then it went on to state that the sea captain had to take his boat and go on a trip and he left his house and kissed his wife and started out. And the local tailor came in. And it just so happened the captain had forgot his sea chest so he came back and when he knocked on the door the wife was trying to find a place for him to hide. Guess where he hid? In the sea chest. And what happened to the tailor, he got chucked into the sea sometime or another on that cruise.”

In Search of Ed Haley 74

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     Mona said Ed loved playing for square dances because he could have a few drinks. If he drank too much he “slid” a lot of screeching notes, seldom finished a tune and cursed like he was “disgusted with the whole world.”

     Noah, who had been sitting quietly by, said Ed didn’t play “real good” when he was drunk — that he played “real slow.”

     Lawrence said, “I was telling John that Pop could cuss a man all to pieces with his fiddle if he wanted to.”

     Mona laughed, “Yeah, or with his mouth either. Pop could cuss the hat off your head. One time we lived there on 17th Street. The railroad trains went by and there was a crossing there, of course. They blew at every crossing. He’d get so mad sometimes, he’d say, ‘Them god almighty goddamn trains just stick their horns in these windows and blow as loud as they can.’ And that was his kind of talk.”

     Mona had terrible memories of Ed mistreating her mother. It was a tense moment as Lawrence listened to her reminisce about a part of Ed’s life that he would have probably rather kept secret.

     “That’s what I remember about him,” Mona said. “Not his music and not him — just how he treated Mom.”

     I told her that I liked a man who wasn’t perfect and she said, “Well, he was far from being perfect. He was a perfect fiddler, I think.”

     She looked at Lawrence and said, “He knows Mom and Pop was divorced, don’t he?”

     No, I said.

     “Well, they were,” she said. “What year was it, Lawrence? 1943 or ’44. We still lived on 17th Street.”

     Lawrence thought his parents had only separated but Mona was sure that Judge Imes actually granted a divorce. Afterwards, Ed went back to Logan County, West Virginia, where he played music and saved up a whole change-purse full of money. After Mona had convinced him to come home, he rattled his change-purse to Ella and said, “I’ve got this plumb full of fifty-cent pieces and I’ll give them all to you if you’ll just let me sit by your fire this winter.”

     “It was just pitiful,” Mona said. “I’m glad I took him home.”

     I asked if Ed and Ella ever remarried and Lawrence said no, that there was a “bed and board” arrangement where Ed only slept and ate in the home. Mona felt her parents got along better after their divorce, implying some sort of reconciliation, while Lawrence remembered Ed giving young women small bottles of “Radio Girl” perfume he bought at a five and dime store.

     Not long after Ed’s return to Ashland, he made the home recordings.

     “Ralph made all those original records, you know,” Mona said. “I can see that now. He was cutting them and his wife Margaret was taking a brush and brushing that plastic off as that needle was cutting. He had to touch Pop on the shoulder when to start and when to quit.”

     “I guess you heard me in some of those records, didn’t you?” she asked me. “I was strumming a flat-back mandolin. Mom was playing on accordion, Ralph guitar, Pop the fiddle.”

     I asked Mona which tunes she liked the best from Ed’s repertoire.

     “I liked those fast ones that Pop and Ralph played, like ‘Down Yonder’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’,” she said. “And there’s a lot of them not on record that they sang, like ‘Little White-washed Chimney’. He played ‘Kentucky Waltz’ and ‘The Waltz You Saved For Me’ and ‘Beautiful Ohio’. He played a lot of Irish tunes — jigs. ‘Humphrey’s Jig’ was on that album wasn’t it? He played ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’. He played ‘Take Me Home Again Kathleen’ and sang it. And another one he played was ‘When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget Me’.”

     Just as I thought we were about to get into some heavy music dialogue, Mona said, “Oh, I didn’t tell you about that time we went up Durbin Creek in the flood. Jack was home on leave from the Navy and it flooded up 37th Street and we went up Durbin to Manuel Martin’s. That’s Nora Martin’s husband. Lived up there then. We had to walk up the Big Sandy Railroad then over a mountain. Pop had brought some eggs from the house in his pocket and he fell down and broke his eggs and he just set there and cried. He said, ‘Oh god.’ And Mom just trudged along like a trooper.”

     In Ed’s later years, he grew a beard and didn’t bath because “it was a waste of water.” He would seldom play the fiddle for Mona when she visited from South Point, Ohio. He was pretty bitter about music, especially what was broadcast over the radio in those days.

     “Did your daddy like Bill Monroe?” I asked.

     “I don’t think so,” she said.

     “He didn’t like too much bluegrass,” Lawrence said.

     “Did your Dad ever talk about or listen to anybody like Roy Acuff or did he ever listen to the Grand Ole Opry?” I asked.

     “I don’t think he’d have much to do with Roy Acuff,” Lawrence said.

     Mona said, “He listened to the Grand Ole Opry some and he said that if he’d been a showman like Natchee the Indian — playing under his leg and behind his back and all that — he could’ve made it.”

     “He didn’t much care for Natchee, did he?” I asked.

     “No, he didn’t like Natchee,” Mona said. “He didn’t like the show-offs. He was a straight fiddler. But a lot of people thought he was great. That Jesse Stuart wrote that poem about him. I guess he thought he was great, too.”

     Mona thought the last time Pop played was with Bill Bowler in Ironton, Ohio. He died not too long afterward at 2144 Greenup Avenue.

     “When he was in the funeral home, somebody took Mom up to say her last goodbye,” Mona said. “She put her hand on him and she said, ‘Well goodbye, Ed. I’ll see you sometime, somewhere.'”

     After Ed’s death, Ella gave their records, which had been wrapped and put in storage, to the children. Mona lost a few of hers when she sent them to Clyde, who was incarcerated at San Quentin in California (“he never brought them back with him”). Around 1956, she lost the rest after leaving them in a trunk at the home of a good friend Dorothy Bates in Ironton. She later came back to get the trunk but Dorothy had moved away.

     “I was young and full of, you know, whatever,” she said. “Going here and there. Traipsing around the country and leaving everything. I lost pictures and I lost those records and I lost a lot of stuff by just leaving it here and there. I would have never sold mine, or pawned them, or whatever. I treasured mine, but evidently not well enough.”

     I asked Mona if she thought Dorothy Bates had kept her things, and she said she doubted it because “she was flighty.”

In Search of Ed Haley 71

23 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     The next day, Lawrence and I dropped in on Noah and told him about our intentions to find Milt Haley’s grave on Harts Creek. He said he had gone to Harts some time ago only to find that everyone who ever knew his father had passed away. Lawrence said Joe Mullins was still around so far as he knew. Joe was a first cousin to Ed and the son of Uncle Peter Mullins…as well as Lawrence’s major source of information about his father’s early life.

     “Well, he should know quite a bit about Pop,” Noah said. “He sure defended him.”

     He looked at me and said, “Pop would get drunk — drunker’n dickens. He’d start on Mom and us kids would take up for Mom. Then Joe would jump all over us. Joe and Noah both would.”

     Noah, Lawrence explained, was referring here to Noah Mullins, a first cousin to his dad and a brother to Joe. Noah Haley was named after him, although it seemed apparent to me he thought more of his mother’s people than his father’s on Harts Creek.

     “Joe should know a lot about those things,” Noah continued. “He knows when we used to get moonshine out of them hills.”

     Well, that was an interesting subject to open with — very different from my talks with Lawrence. I could sense that Noah had brought up a touchy subject with Lawrence — domestic problems and alcohol — but I wanted to know a little more. I asked Noah if Ed drank a lot in his early days and he said, “Well, if somebody’d give it to him, he’d drink, yeah. He’d get stone drunk. But he didn’t drink unless somebody’d give it to him. He was meaner than hell when he was drinking.”

     Unlike Lawrence and Mona, Noah seemed to have no musical inclination whatsoever.

     “Well, the only thing I can show you, he never held the fiddle under his neck. He held it right here,” he said, motioning toward his arm. “That’s about all I can tell you about him holding the fiddle. Of course, when he’d come across this way with the bow, he’d make two chords instead of one with one streak across the bow.”

     Make two notes in other words?

     “Yeah, two chords or notes or whatever you call them.”

     Lawrence said, “I was telling John that Pop could play the banjo real good, too.”

     Noah quickly agreed, “Yeah, he could play the banjo, he could play guitar, he could play a mandolin — any kind of a stringed instrument, just about.”

     Noah remembered Ed living at several different places around Ashland.

     “I was born on Horse Branch,” he said. “We lived in three different places on Keyes Creek — maybe four. Then we lived at Ward Hollow. Then we lived on 17thStreet. We lived in two places on Greenup.”

     Noah told me about Ed and Ella going downtown to play on the streets.

     “Soon as they could get a ride downtown, that’s when they’d go. It would be kinda early, before two o’clock. Sometimes the’d have quite a few people standing around listening to them. And of course, they played for just change that people’d give them. Sometimes they’d have ten, fifteen people standing around wanting them to play a piece of music. He’d never play the same song unless somebody would, you know, give him a quarter or a dime or a nickel or something to suggest a song for him to play, then he might play the same one he just played. Sometimes they would play a couple three hours and then they’d go eat or go to the restroom or whatever. And then they’d come back and play another two or three hours.”

     Lawrence said his oldest brother Ralph was a part of the act during the First World War.

     “There’s a picture of Ralph in a little jumpsuit type of thing and they said he’d be up on a stage,” he said. “Pop and Mom might be playing and he would dance around up here on that stage with them and then when he’d get ready to come off of it he’d stand on the edge and do a flip and come off on his feet.”

     Noah said, “Yeah, Ralph always was acrobatic.”

     I said, “Well that’s what got him, wasn’t it?” and Noah said, “Yeah, hanging by his toes from a tree about two feet from the ground. He slipped and broke his neck. But he always was acrobatic. He could run and make a complete turnover. His whole body.”

     Noah said Ed never played on the street at night, allotting that time for square dances. I asked him how much he made per dance and he said, “I don’t know, maybe he’d go play at a dance, he’d get, sometimes, maybe five dollars. He wouldn’t get a whole lot. Hell, a dollar a day then did what ten does today. I remember Ralph, our brother, going out and working for a dollar a day. If they made a dollar a day — or two dollars a day — they was doing good enough to keep us surviving.”

     I said, “So, by today’s standards, it would’ve been like making twenty dollars a day?” and Noah agreed, “I would guess so, yeah.”

     Lawrence added, “It was according to economic times.”

     Noah didn’t hesitate to brag on his father.

     “I think they come there one time from the Grand Ole Opry and wanted him to come play on it and he wouldn’t go,” he said. “I went with them a lot of times when they was playing at the courthouses. They worked all over West Virginia — Beckley. Well, they went downtown here in Ironton. You know we’d take a bus everywhere we’d go. We didn’t have no car. We’d generally stay with friends there up around Logan or Harts Creek.”

     Speaking of Harts Creek, I wondered if Ed had ever talked about learning to play the fiddle from anyone around there. Noah said no — “he just took it up hisself when he was a kid.” He and Lawrence both agreed that Ed never talked about his early life and only seldom mentioned his parents.

     “The only thing I know about my grandfather on my father’s side is about him shooting this guy and they killed him,” Noah said. “Shot his wife through the mouth, I think it was. I think Pop said it was. And then his dad went after this guy with a pistol, killed him, and somebody killed his dad, is the way I heard it. But he never did confide much in anything like that with us.”

     Well, that sure was a different version of things from what Lawrence had initially heard from his dad — and it was much closer to the truth.

Parkersburg Landing 70

22 Friday Feb 2013

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     Later that evening, Lawrence showed a 1989 home movie of him reminiscing with Clyde, Noah and Mona about their father at Christmas. I immediately focused in on Clyde, a natural storyteller who swooped his arms at just the right moments and embellished every detail. He mostly talked about Ed getting into a fight with someone named Frank Creech.

     “Frank’s the one that Pop put the chair rungs down around his head and was choking him to death till Ralph got him,” Clyde said. “Frank said something pretty nasty to Mom about keeping her mouth shut. Boy, he no sooner got it outta his mouth than Pop had that cane-bottom chair right down across the top of his head. Pop reached through there with his left hand — I’ll remember it just as plain as if it was happening right now — and got his throat with his left hand, and then he was reaching for his Barlow knife in the pocket of his old coat and Ralph got the knife out of his hand.”

     Pat said Clyde reminded her of Ed the most on the tape but pointed out that “Pop was a bigger man than Clyde. He had a heavier face. When he died, I would say he weighed about 180. He was a tall man — 5’11”, something like that. He had very blue eyes. They were very cloudy. If you were speaking to him, you would think he was looking at you. He had peculiar facial expressions.”

     Pat said she and Lawrence had told Clyde about me — that he was somewhere near Stockton, California.

     “Well, he was there for, I would say, eighteen months and he hangs around all the rough, low-down places,” she said.

     What about Noah?

     “Noah is an eccentric,” Pat said, a little later when Lawrence was out of ear shot. “Noah is a gambler. He has a very good income every month and it makes me angry because he draws twice as much as Larry and he blows it all away and when they’re in trouble they come to Larry. Of course, he won’t turn them down. He just doesn’t want to know anything about them. Noah will stop in here once in a while. I think Noah looks a lot like Pop.”

Parkersburg Landing 69

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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     That night, I played some of Ed’s tunes for Lawrence in his kitchen. In spite of the great story opening up about Milt Haley, I didn’t lose sight of the music and my quest to understand it. As I played, Lawrence was brutally honest.

     “Notice how you’re using a fourth of the bow?” he said. “Pop played all over it.”

     “Did you hear a few real strong driving notes in that and then some really weak ones that didn’t hardly get out?” he asked.

     “Pretty good — but never just like my dad,” he stated flatly.

     The closest I came to gaining his approval was when I played “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

     “You got a pretty good version of that,” he said. “Nothing too wrong with that.”

     “Your cannons sounded very good,” Pat added politely.

     When I played Ed’s “Red Apple Rag”, Lawrence said there was one part — what I call the “House of David Blues” part — that didn’t belong in the song, even though I knew Ed had played it there in the home recordings. He remembered his father playing “House of David Blues” as a separate tune and singing:

Bring it on down to my house honey,
Ain’t nobody home but me.
Bring it on down to my house honey,
I need the company.

Now a nickel is a nickel
And a dime’s a dime.
You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
Bring it on down to my house honey,
Ain’t nobody home but me.

     I asked again about Haley’s banjo and Pat said she remembered that it was still around when she first came to Ashland in the late 1940s. She thought it belonged to Ella, but Lawrence said, “No, Mom played what they call a banjo-mandolin. It wasn’t too many years that I remember her playing one. Pop probably had a banjo. He’d just as soon sit down and play the banjo a lot of times. Or he’d play the guitar a lot. He played it like he did the fiddle. He’d make runs and everything else. He could sit down and play a organ or piano if he wanted to. I’ve seen him sit down on that old pump organ we had and he’d start pumping and he’d just play it for a while.”

     I wondered if Ed’s talent as, or even fondness for, being a multi-instrumentalist had been somewhat overstated. It seemed a little odd that, among the hundreds of home recordings, there was not one single sample of him playing anything but the fiddle. Of course, I didn’t bring this up to Lawrence because I totally believed him. Besides, he seemed a little cranky.

     Pat said she remembered Ed playing something about “going down the Mississippi” and Lawrence said it was the “Battle of New Orleans”.

     “Pop used to play that a long time ago,” he said. “That and ‘Soldier’s Joy’ and all those old pieces like that. ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and ‘Mississippi Sawyer’.”

Bob Adkins Interview, Part 2 (1993)

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Breeden, Ed Haley, Guyandotte River, Hamlin, Harts, John Hartford, Lincoln County Feud

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Wow. So what about Al Brumfield, the guy who got into the feud with Milt?

“Well, he was a little more tamer fellow than old Paris but he was kind of a rough character — mean as a snake,” Bob said. “All those Brumfields were, you know. They was a tough outfit, all of them was.”

Al and his wife Hollena lived in a large white house at the mouth of Harts Creek, which Bob said had recently burned. They had a store and log boom nearby and kept a boat tied up at the riverbank for easy access across the Guyandotte. Things were going great for them until John Runyon (who Bob called “the root of all evil”) moved in from Kentucky.

“That fellow Runyon, he had a saloon and a store right across the creek there at the mouth of Harts, you know — a shebang,” Bob said. “And Aunt Hollene and Al Brumfield, they had a big store over there on the other side of the creek, over on the lower side of the creek. They was competitors in a way, you know. This fellow Runyon hired these two thugs to kill them, so as to get rid of their competition. And he hired Milt Haley and Green McCoy to kill them. They got a side of bacon and a can of lard and five dollars to do that…each. And these fellows, Milt Haley and Green McCoy, were two characters. I don’t know why they ever took a chance on that. Them boys got into that before they knew what they was into. Them Brumfields was mean as the devil up there.”

Bob spun out the details of Milt and Green’s ambush of Al Brumfield.

“Every Sunday, Al and Hollene would get on their horse and they’d ride up to the Forks of Big Hart about ten miles to visit her father. He was old Henderson Dingess, my great-grandfather. Al had a fine riding horse and he’d get on the horse and she’d ride behind him, see? And they’d been up there on a pretty summer day, and they’d done had dinner with her father.”

Haley and McCoy, meanwhile, laid in wait for them in a sinkhole at Thompson Branch with a .30/.30 Winchester.

“And Al and Hollene came along about three or four o’clock in the evening and those thugs laywaid them on the side of the hill up there as they came back down Harts Creek. They shot at Al’s head. That horse jumped and that bullet missed his head and hit Hollene right in the face right there and the bullet knocked her teeth out and came out this side here. It knocked her off of the horse.”

Al was carried on down the creek by his horse, which “sprang and run” so Milt and Green came off the hill toward his wife.

“They aimed to shoot Aunt Hollene again — and she a laying there in the road, her eyes full of blood. She couldn’t see hardly who it was. But she begged them not to shoot her anymore, because she figured they’d already killed her. She told them she was dying and begged them out of it.”

At that point, Al came back up along the creek bed shooting toward them “and they got scared and they run.”

Bob said, “Well, the Brumfields didn’t know who it was so they watched all around to see who it was. They watched Runyon like a hawk but he changed his name and walked right off. He left his store, his saloon and his family and went back to Kentucky. They hunted for years for him but they never did find him. He never poked his head around there anymore, not even to contact his family.”

Milt and Green also disappeared from the neighborhood — which caused locals to assume that they were guilty of some role in the trouble.

“And these two guys just left their family and went into Kentucky and just deserted their families,” Bob said. “Then they knew who it was. And they started looking for them.”

Al Brumfield put out a $3,000 reward for their capture. Detectives were told to search in river towns, as both men had run rafts out of the Guyan River.

A detective caught Green McCoy first in a Cincinnati restaurant. He identified him by noticing a nick in one of his ears. Just before apprehending him, the detective walked up and said, “I think you’re the man I’m looking for.” Once caught, Green gave the whereabouts of Milt, who was found working a butter churn on a steamboat at the river. Both men were jailed. Al Brumfield was informed of their capture by letter.

Brumfield organized two of his brothers-in-law and perhaps one of his brothers into a posse and rode to the rendezvous point (presumably in the vicinity of Cincinnati). He posed as a sheriff, paid the reward, took possession of the two men, then headed across eastern Kentucky and up the Tug River to Williamson. He and his gang rode a train on the N&W across Twelve Pole to Breeden, where they crossed the mountain and spent a night at the home of John Dingess, Hollena’s brother. Dingess ran a large country store and saloon, Bob said, but “nothing exciting happened around there.”

Parkersburg Landing 65

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     About an hour later, Lawrence and I headed back to his house where we spent the evening talking at his kitchen table. I hung onto his every word hoping for some little detail about Ed.

     “Pop smoked a pipe,” he said. “He’d fill it up with tobacco and then he might take a cut apple and put apples in it to flavor it. He enjoyed his tobacco. He would go to a lot of places to people he knew and they’d give him maybe a hand of tobacco and he’d make his own twists out of it. Mom never could stop him from chewing. He was fairly clean with it around the house. He usually kept a good size vegetable can for a spittoon. If he was setting in a chair, he’d put it down in the chair and he’d pick it up and hold it up close to his mouth and spit in it.”

     Lawrence spoke more about the extent of his father’s travels.

     “Pop’s range was northeastern Kentucky mostly,” he said. “West Virginia and southeastern Ohio. In West Virginia, he might’ve took it all in except maybe the far panhandle up in there. I think he’d been as far as Morgantown. I can remember being up the Big Sandy River with them on the West Virginia side and at Louisa.”

     Lawrence didn’t think Ed made it to Hazard and Harlan.

     I asked if there was much money to be made in the coalfields and he said, “They had money, I guess, when mines were running good. And I guess during the timber business when them guys grabbed logs down out of the Sandy at Catlettsburg.”

     I really wanted to get at the source of Ed’s music, but Lawrence said his father never discussed his early life or musical influences with any of the kids. Lawrence never heard him talk about those things with buddies either because most of them stopped coming around by the time he was a teenager.

     I jarred his memory a little bit when I mentioned the name Ed Morrison, whose father (Christopher Columbus Morrison) had learned “Blackberry Blossom” from General Garfield during the War Between the States.

     “Ed Morrison, as far as I know, lived right out here on Belmont Street for a while,” he said. “He was a buddy of Pop’s.”

     Thinking back to Ed’s experience on Harts Creek, I wondered if a lot of his music came from pain.

     “No, I don’t think Pop was…,” Lawrence said. “He mighta been…”

     “Anger?” I asked.

     “Anger, yeah, maybe.”

     That made sense to me. He sure had a lot to be angry about.

In Search of Ed Haley 64

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Big Sandy Valley, Ed Haley, Music

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Early that summer, I was back at Lawrence Haley’s in Ashland with plans to visit Lynn Davis in Huntington, West Virginia. Lynn had been mentioned in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes as a source for Haley’s biographical sketch and was the widower of Molly O’Day, the famous country singer. Snake Chapman had told me that Molly and her family were close friends to Haley, who visited their home regularly in Pike County, Kentucky. I was sure Lynn would have a lot of great stories to tell about Ed. At our arrival, he was incredibly friendly — almost overwhelming us with the “welcome mat.” All we had to do was mention Ed’s name and he started telling us how he and Molly used to pick him up in Ashland and drive him up the Big Sandy Valley to see Molly’s father in southeastern Kentucky.

“That was back in the early forties,” he said. “We’d come to Ashland and get him at his home up on Winchester about 37th Street. They was a market there or something you turned up by and we’d go there and pick him up and take him up to Molly’s dad and mother up in Pond Creek, Kentucky — above Williamson. There’s an old log house up there — it’s been boarded up and sort of a thing built around it so people couldn’t get in and tear it up or something — but it’s falling down. He’d stay up there with Molly’s dad and mother for several days. They’d take him to Delbarton, a coal town over there from Williamson, and they’d just drive him around, buddy. Now Molly’s brother, he really loved Ed’s fiddling.”

Lynn was referencing Skeets Williamson, Molly’s older brother and a good fiddler by all accounts. Lynn showed me an album titled Fiddlin’ Skeets Williamson (c.1977), which referenced him as “one of country music’s more skilled fiddlers during the 1940’s — one of the best in his day.”

Skeets was born in 1920 at McVeigh, Kentucky, meaning he was approximately 35 years younger than Haley. As a child, he played music with Molly and his older brother Duke Williamson, as well as Snake Chapman. “During these years, the famous fiddler of Eastern Kentucky, Blind Ed Haley, became a tremendous influence on him,” the album liner notes proclaimed. “Skeets (along with Clark Kessinger) still contend that Haley was the greatest fiddler who ever played.” During a brief stint on Texas radio, Skeets met Georgia Slim Rutland, the famous radio fiddler who spent a year listening to Haley in Ashland.

I asked Lynn more about his trips to Haley’s home on 37th Street.

“We used to go down to his house and Molly’d say, ‘Uncle Ed, I’d just love to hear you play me a tune.’ Well he’d be sitting on the couch and he’d just reach over behind the couch — that’s where he kept his fiddle. He always had it in hand reach. So he would get it out of there, man, and fiddle.”

Sometimes Lynn and Molly would join in, but they mostly just sat back in awe.

“You’ve seen people get under the anointing of the Holy Ghost, John,” Lynn said. “Well now, that’s the way he played. I mean, I’ve seen him be playing a tune and man just shake, you know. It was hitting him. I mean, it was vibrating right in his very spirit. Molly always said, ‘I believe that fiddlers get anointed to the fiddle just like a preacher gets anointed to preach.’ They feel it. Man, he’d rock that fiddle. He’d get with rocking it what a lot of people get with bowing. It was something else. But he got into it man. He moved all over.”

Lynn said Ed was a “great artist” but had no specific memories of his technique. He didn’t comment on Ed’s bowing, fingering or even his fiddle positioning but did say that he mostly played in standard tuning. Only occasionally did Ed “play some weird stuff” in other tunings.

Lynn’s memories of Haley’s tunes seemed limited.

“Well, he played one called ‘Bluegrass Meadows’,” he said. “He had some great names for them. Of course one of his specials was ‘Blackberry Blossoms’. He liked that real good, and he’d tell real stories. He would be a sawing his fiddle a little while he was telling the story, and everybody naturally was just quiet as a mouse. You know, they didn’t want to miss nothing.”

What kind of stories?

“Well, I know about the hog’s foot thing. He said they went someplace to play and they didn’t have anything to eat and those boys went out and stole a hog and said they brought it in and butchered it and heard somebody coming. It was the law. They run in and put that hog in the bed and covered it up like it was somebody sleeping. And Ed was sitting there fiddling and somebody whispered to him, said, ‘Ed, that hog’s foot’s stickin’ out from under the cover there.’ So he started fiddling and singing, ‘Shove that hog’s foot further under the cover…’ He made it up as he went.”

The next thing I knew, Lynn was telling me about his musical career. He’d been acquainted with everybody from country great Hank Williams to Opry star Minnie Pearl. We knew a lot of the same people — a source of “bonding” — and it wasn’t long until he started handing me tapes and records of Molly O’Day and Georgia Slim Rutland. He said he had a wire recording of Ed and Ella somewhere, but couldn’t find it. He promised me though, “When I find this wire — and I will find it — it’s yours.”

Sometime later, he called Dave Peyton, a reporter-friend from the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, to come over for an interview. With Peyton’s arrival, Lynn (ever the showman) spun some big tales.

“Now, Molly’s grandfather on her mother’s side was the king of the moonshiners in West Virginia and he was known as ‘Twelve-Toed John Fleming’,” Lynn said. “He had six toes on each foot. Man, he was a rounder. Little short fella, little handlebar mustache — barefooted. He was from the Short Tail Fork of Jenny’s Creek. And the reason they called it that, those boys didn’t have any britches and they wore those big long night shirts till they was twelve or fourteen years old.”

Lynn was on a roll.

“I preached Molly’s uncle’s funeral. Her uncle is the father of Blaze Starr — the stripper. That’s Molly’s first cousin. In her book, she said she would walk seven miles through the woods to somebody that had a radio so she could hear her pretty cousin Molly sing. She was here in town about three or four months ago. We had breakfast a couple times together. She’s not stripping anymore. She makes jewelry and sells it. She’s about 60 right now.”

In Search of Ed Haley 60

30 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Big Sandy Valley, Ed Haley, Huntington, Music, Pikeville, Williamson

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A few months later, I met Lawrence Haley at the Fraley Family Festival at Carter Caves State Park near Grayson, Kentucky. Lawrence and I spoke with Bill Necessary, a musician who saw Ed and Ella all over the Big Sandy Valley when he was about twenty years old. He said they rode a train up Levisa Fork to Paintsville, the seat of government for Johnson County, where they spent the day playing music at the courthouse. From there, they continued by train to Prestonsburg, county seat of Floyd County. At times, they went into the nearby coal camps of Beaver Creek and played at theatres. From Prestonsburg, they took the train to Pikeville, the county seat of Pike County, and then continued over to the Tug River around Williamson, county seat of Mingo County, West Virginia.

“Aw, they took in the whole dern country up through there,” Bill said. “By the time they made that circuit, why it’d be time for them to come again. I guess they’d tour a couple of weeks. By God, I just followed them around, son.”

Lawrence didn’t remember going to all of those places with Ed but did remember staying with Molly O’Day’s family around Williamson. Bill said Molly’s widow Lynn Davis was still living around Huntington, West Virginia.

Bill said Ed always wore a long overcoat — “rain or shine” — and even played in it. He never sang or entered contests.

“He was pretty up to date on music at that time,” Bill said. “His notes were real clear, boy.”

Back in Nashville, I worked really hard trying to figure out Ed’s bowing. There was a lot of contradictory information to consider. Snake Chapman said he bowed short strokes, indicating a lot of sawstrokes and pronounced note separation. J.P. Fraley, Slim Clere, Lawrence and Mona said that he favored the long bow approach and only used short strokes when necessary, like for hoedowns. Preacher Gore, Ugee Postalwait and Curly Wellman spoke about how smooth his fiddling was, which kind of hinted at him being a long bow fiddler. All were probably accurate in some respect. It seemed plain to me that one reason why there were so many contrasting and sometimes completely opposite accounts of how or even what Ed played was that everyone I’d talked to witnessed him playing at different times and places during his musical evolution. All along the way, he was experimenting, looking for that “right combination” or playing the style needed to create the sounds popular in a certain area. Even what I could actually hear on his home recordings was really just a glimpse into the world of his fiddling as it existed at that moment toward the end of his lifetime.

In Search of Ed Haley 59

28 Monday Jan 2013

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A few days later, I called Roger Cooper, a fiddler in Lewis County, Kentucky. Roger was a protégé of Buddy Thomas, the eastern Kentucky fiddler who captured the interest and won the hearts of folklorists in the 1970s. Roger was more than happy to talk with me but said, “Really, I don’t know very much about Ed Haley. Course, I’m just like 43 years old myself so I never did see him or nothing, but a lot of guys around here knew him and would see him and stuff. I’ve heard quite a bit of talk about him. He’d come down to the Portsmouth area and play sometimes. And the Portsmouth area had lots of fiddlers around during the 20s and 30s and on up into about the 50s before they started dying off. There was stories going around about how he played.”

I asked Roger if he knew anything about Asa Neal, the famous Portsmouth fiddler.

“Asa Neal, from what they say about him, he was from down here in this county starting out and lived on a shanty boat and I guess he went on up towards Portsmouth,” Roger said. “He even made some records, I think.”

I told Roger that I figured Asa and Clark Kessinger were Ed’s two chief competitors and he said, “Well, Clark Kessinger, he gave Ed Haley a lot of credit as to learning some stuff from him himself.”

Roger felt there were a lot of other good fiddlers in the area aside from Asa Neal and Clark Kessinger.

“There was six fiddlers in South Shore — that’s just across the river from Portsmouth — all brothers — Keiblers — and there was six of them played the fiddle and they was supposed to been the best around here,” Roger said. “They was a German people. Uncle John Keibler was supposed to have been the best. The old guys around here, they say they learned from the Glenn Brothers out of West Virginia. Their names were Bob and Abe Glenn. Those Glenns would come down through here and sometimes they’d stay maybe a year with those Keiblers and they learned a lot of tunes off them Glenns. They all say that Bob Glenn was a great fiddler. I’ll tell you a little story. John Keibler was over there and Ed Haley was playing in Portsmouth, you know, like for nickels and dimes, so he went over to see him and asked Ed if he could play him a tune. And Ed let him have the fiddle and after he played the tune he thought he was Glenn playing. He went over and started feeling of him. He said, ‘Are you Glenn? You sound just like him.’ That’s what Morris Allen told me. He was a nephew to the Keiblers.”

“I wish I could tell you more about Ed Haley myself,” Roger said. “An old man and some boys named Mershon, they was awful good fiddlers. The old man Mershon, he musta been something great. One of his boys came home and said, ‘Dad, I found a fiddle player that can beat you.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll just have to go hear him.’ He said, ‘Well, come tomorrow and go with me and you can hear him.’ He took him into Portsmouth and there was Ed Haley playing for nickels and dimes and that old man watched him play for a while and said, ‘Boy, he is a great fiddler but he don’t play like I do.’ That’s all he had to say about it. Evidently, Ed really showed him some stuff. All I can hear from any of these guys around here, they just talk like there was hardly any way of describing how Ed Haley could play. They all just seem to think he was the greatest that ever was. And them old German fiddlers, it’d take something to win them over.”

Roger recommended that I contact Abraham Keibler — a nephew to “those good fiddlers” — who took up the fiddle himself when he was around 50 years old. He also suggested John Lozier, an 82-year-old harmonica player who used to watch Ed play in Portsmouth.

“He said Ed Haley was the smoothest fiddler he’d heard in his life,” Roger said of Lozier.

We talked a lot about the old tunes played in eastern Kentucky.

“A lot of those kinds of tunes I just didn’t get to get on tape or nothing and I wasn’t far enough along and my memory’s not that good, but I can tell you somebody that you really should talk to is John Harrod down there. John Harrod, he plays an awful lot of tunes and he’s researched them for years. He don’t try to be no star fiddler or nothing but he’s got a real good bow lick. He’s got bow licks down like a lot of the fiddlers in this area — the old ones. And he’s a real fine fella along with it. He researched all the old fiddlers, him and Gus Meade. I think he’s some kind of a schoolteacher. Also, he has a lot to do with Berea College.”

Roger gave me John’s telephone number just before we hung up. I put it away for later reference, trying to keep my focus on Ed Haley and not getting lost researching the fiddle music of eastern Kentucky in general.

In Search of Ed Haley 58: Slim Clere Recollects Ed Haley

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Ed Haley, Music

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The cassette player was giving Slim fits. I used the opportunity to ask him more about Ed. His answers came swift and sure, leaving little room for doubt.

Me: What kind of strings did Ed Haley use?

Slim: Believe it or not — gut. He used an aluminum-wound A, an aluminum-wound gut D and a silver-wound G. Professional stuff.

Me: Did Ed use a flat bridge or a round bridge?

Slim: I would say a round bridge.

Me: Did he ever talk about who he learned from or any of that?

Slim: No, but I think Clark Kessinger stole some of his stuff.

Me: When Ed played, was it loud?

Slim: He played very soft. He wasn’t rough.

I could hear Slim’s wife talking — she was helping him with the cassette player. Slim told her I was on the other end of the line and she got on the telephone and said, “Are you the one that does the riverboat things? I have seen you on Ralph Emery’s show. I have enjoyed you tremendously because you’re different.” That flattered me, of course, but I had more questions for Slim, who was still battling the tape player.

Me: Did you ever hear Ed sing?

Slim: No, but I’ve heard people say that he could play a guitar well.

Me: Was he easy to get to know?

Slim: He was a very congenial guy. You’d go around where he was playing, he’d hand you his fiddle. “Here,” he’d say. In other words, he was a very cordial guy.

Me: Did you ever see him play away from his wife?

Slim: He always had that woman with him. And when she played with him it seemed like she was straining to keep her eyes closed. She did not have a happy look on her, I remember that. But she played a Taterbug mandolin; they had a good tone.

I asked Slim where he first met Ed and he said, “I knew him a long, long time – maybe 25 years. Down in Ashland, Kentucky. Well, I know exactly where he used to live down there. He lived in a little old four-room house that had a bunch of steps going up on the porch there. And he used to sit out there on the porch and rock and fiddle. I think it was a kind of open rocker. I don’t think the chair had those high handrails on them. It didn’t matter to him. He relaxed that way, see.”

I asked Slim to describe how Ed looked.

“His hair was a kind of a dark brown, I believe,” he said. “He was fair complected and his hands were as soft as a rag. He had a little hand — and his fingers were pointed. It seems to me like his eyes were pretty well blanked out. He didn’t wear glasses, like most blind men do. And his wife didn’t either. He didn’t have too much action. Being blind, he didn’t have any personality or anything like that. You almost had to close your eyes to appreciate the guy. He always had that woman with him. She kept good time. Of course, she didn’t make any runs or nothing. And he had a son that was a good guitar player but he was ashamed to play with Ed and his mother because they were blind.”

Slim remembered Doc Holbrook, although he didn’t necessarily equate him as Ed’s good friend.

“Doc Holbrook is the one that loaned Clark Kessinger a fiddle to play on. See, there was years and years that Clark never did own a fiddle. And when Doc Holbrook wanted his fiddle back, Clark got mad at him for taking his fiddle away from him. Doc said, ‘You’ve had it all this time. Had a chance to buy it and never would.'” I wondered if this was the same fiddle that Ed had given Doc but Slim didn’t know about any of that.

Slim confirmed that Ed was acquainted with Georgia Slim Rutland, the popular radio fiddler. “Yeah, I bumped into Georgia Slim in Macon, Georgia in a contest in 1937 and I was telling him what a great country this was up here and when I came back up here, here he was.” I had heard that Georgia Slim moved to Ashland just to hear Ed Haley and Slim sort of agreed. “Well, he was down there a while. I remember I told him about Ed Haley myself.”

Parkersburg Landing 57

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     Curly Wellman had also recommended that I talk with Slim Clere, an Ashland-born fiddler whose telephone number I secured from a friend, Curly Fox. As I told him about my interest in Ed Haley, he was very rigid and formal; he kept referring to me as “sir.” Things loosened up once I mentioned the name Curly Wellman and asked if he had learned anything from watching Ed play.

     “Well, I would say yes that I did,” he said. “He had a style of his own. Now I picked up my backward bowing from him. What he would do, he noted out a lot of stuff. Like he was playing ‘Devil’s Dream’, he bowed it out with a straight slur all the way down. And you didn’t hear him return his bow from one end to the other. Ed was the smoothest violin player. Mostly always long bow, but you never would know it. He never made a bobble and he wasn’t a double-noter. Now, he was not a waltz man. He could play a waltz, though.”

     Slim said Ed had a unique bow hold.

     “What he did when he bowed his violin… You know when you put your finger under the frog on the stick? He gripped the whole thing with his thumb under the whole frog, like you’d do a butcher knife.” As for Ed’s fiddle placement: “He played it right on top of his collar bone there. He let it sit on his wrist.”

     “He was hot stuff,” Slim said. “He didn’t know what a different position was — he just reached up and got it — but he knew where it was. His favorite tune was ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. And there was nobody in the world that could beat him playing ‘Dill Pickle Rag’.”

     Slim remembered playing against Ed in a contest one time at the Paramount Theatre in Ashland during the Depression.

     “Every contest Ed ever got into, he won. They had a contest down there at the Paramount Theatre at Ashland one time — that’s our home. He and I was both born in the same place. There was four or five fiddle players in the contest and they drew numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… They didn’t allow anybody else to play the same tune the guy played before and his heart was set on playing ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. A guy got up and he said, ‘I’m gonna play ‘Cacklin’ Hen’.’ Ed smiled. I told the guy that was playing with me, I said, ‘He’s got a trick up his sleeve.’ He said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘This guy played his tune. When he looks like that, you know that he’s thinking and he’s gonna win.’ And they came around to Ed and said, ‘What’re you gonna play Mr. Haley?’ and he said, ‘I’m gonna play ‘The Speckled Pullet’ and she cackles, too.’ And he played ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ and cackled himself into first place. I thought that was the cutest thing I ever heard in my life.”

     Slim’s memories of Ed were broken up with stories about his own musical career. We knew a lot of the same people. I asked him again about Ed playing in contests — something no one seemed to remember in great detail.

     “Oh yea, he played in contests all the time,” Slim said. “He liked the money. They had them a bunch of theatres in Ashland. They had the Paramount and the Grand and the Capital and they would have contests in county fairs. Then he used to do a lot of barnstorming on courthouse steps. See, by being blind he didn’t have to get permits or anything like that.”

     Slim said he bumped into Ed all over West Virginia.

     “I’ve seen him in Logan, I’ve seen him in Williamson, in Grantsville, seen him in Spencer, in Charleston, Huntington. And he could always smell me when I was around him. He’d say, ‘I smell Slim Clere.’ Everybody had a smell to him and all you had to do was say, ‘How’re you doing, Ed?’ and he knew you by name just right now, see. He was an old trooper. He knew what it was all about. He wasn’t a dummy. He used to come down there to Central Park and I’d go down there and sometimes I’d play his fiddle. He liked to hear other people play because he got his ideas that way.”

     Slim said he wanted to play me some music by Ernie Hodges, an old fiddling teacher who he felt was as good as Ed. I could hear him over the telephone trying to get a tape working in the cassette player — buttons popping, an occasional “dad-burn-it,” etc. As he struggled with the tape, he talked more about some of the people he’d worked with back in his radio days. “Curly Fox, he was with the old school that I was with. McMichen and John Carson and Gid Tanner — all of them. I worked with them down in Georgia. I worked with Bert Layne and Riley Puckett in Gary, Indiana, till they sent for me to come to Atlanta. Ed reminded me so much of Riley.”

In Search of Ed Haley 56

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Huntington, Music

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Back in Nashville, I followed up on some leads from Curly Wellman. I focused in on Molly O’Day, the famous singer who grew up hearing Ed’s music at her parents’ home in McVeigh, Kentucky. Snake Chapman and Lawrence Haley had both implied a strong connection between she and Ed. Named Laverne Williamson at birth, she initially used the stage names Dixie Lee and Mountain Fern. In 1941, she married Lynn Davis; the following year, she changed her name to Molly O’Day. During the 1940s, she was one of the leading female vocalists in country music.

“Uncomfortable with fame, Lynn and Molly found consolation in religion and evangelism from 1950,” according to Mountaineer Jamboree. “More often than not Huntington or its suburbs has been their home and since 1974 they have had a program called ‘Hymns from the Hills’ on WEMM-FM radio which features country gospel records and inspirational talk. Molly O’Day continued as a familiar voice on WEMM-FM radio in Huntington until she was diagnosed with cancer. She ‘went home to be with the Lord’ on December 4, 1987, and Lynn Davis has continued their radio ministry alone.”

I definitely wanted to look up Molly’s widower the next time I was in Ashland.

Parkersburg Landing 56

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

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     Mona was about fourteen years old when Ed made the dining room recordings at 17th Street. I had some detailed questions for her, since — unlike Lawrence, who was away in the service — she had first-hand memories of the whole experience.

Mona: My brother played a guitar…

Me: And you played the mandolin on some of them?

Mona: I don’t remember which one. I don’t remember but you can hear it in the background.

Me: What kind of room were those records made in?

Mona: Dining room.

Me: How big a room was it?

Lawrence: Not very big. Twelve feet by twelve feet, I guess.

Me: You put the recorder on the table and he’d sit up next to the table and play?

Mona: Yeah, it was on the table. It was an old one where they had to brush the curls off the record. He wasn’t holding the fiddle over the table.

Me: What time of the day were they made in?

Mona: Different times. He didn’t make them all in one day.

Lawrence: It mostly depended on when Ralph had the time, I guess.

Mona: Yeah and — again — it depended on whether Pop felt like it.

Me: Was he drinking during any of those records?

Mona: No.

Me: Do you think those records were a pretty good representation of how he played or do you think he played a lot better than what’s on those records?

Mona: He played a lot better than what was on the records because some of them was a little too fast. You know, the speed on them. When he was in a good mood you could just hear the happiness in it.

Me: So a lot of that’s not on the records?

Mona: No, a lot of it’s lost forever.

     In the car on the way home, Lawrence told me more about why he thought Ed never recorded commercially. “He was a kind of a proud man. But I’m like Curly Wellman: if he’d been alive back when these people first started coming to me back thirty years ago he could’ve made a bundle of money if he’d a wanted to. If he hadn’t been afraid of being taken by recording companies and things.”

     As we made our way through town, Lawrence pointed out a spot on Greenup Avenue where Pop used to play: “Right here on this empty corner there used to be a two or three story building. It was a big restaurant called Russ’ place. Pop used to play on the sidewalk out here on his own when he felt like it, if the weather was good. He’d go in there and stay all day and play a while and drink a while and talk a while and go back and play a while.”

In Search of Ed Haley 54

20 Sunday Jan 2013

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Lawrence said we could go see Mona if Noah would show us the way. Apparently, Lawrence didn’t know where his own sister lived. Noah agreed to guide us there, but drove a separate car so he could leave right away. He and Mona weren’t getting along. On the way, I said to Lawrence, “Now this sister is the youngest one?” and he said, “Yeah, she’s the baby.” I said, “She’s the only sister you have, and her name is?” “Mona,” he finished. “M-O-N-A. That wasn’t what she was intended to be named. Mother intended her to be named after old Doc Holbrook’s wife — her name was Monnie.”

Mona was staying with her daughter in nearby Ironton, Ohio. At the door, before Lawrence could tell her who I was or the reason for our visit, she looked right at me and said, “Well I know you. I’ve seen you on television.” It was an instant connection. I noticed that she had a high forehead just like her father.

We went on out in the yard where she showed a little surprise that Noah had led us to her house.

“He’s mad at me,” she said before sighing, “I feel sorry for poor old Noah. So lonely. Has to buy his friendship.” Right away, she dispelled our hopes that she had any of Ed’s records.

“No, I don’t have any,” she said. “I let my part of the records get away from me. I lost mine in my travels. I left them somewhere and never did get them back. It was around ’56. I went back to get them and the lady — Dorothy Bates — had moved. And I think she’s dead. I was living here in Ironton.”

Mona seemed a little emotionless — her voice was hollow, distant, as if her mind was a million miles away. She didn’t seem to show much remorse about losing her father’s records — “I’m sorry that I did, but you know hindsight’s 20/20.”

I asked her if Ed ever talked about his father or mother and she said, “He talked about his dad getting killed. He said that he was in the Hatfield-McCoy feud and he got killed with Green McCoy. He was a friend to the McCoys, I guess. And that’s all I can tell you about that. And he never talked about his mother at all.” Mona had no idea who Ed’s mother was and knew nothing about her connection with Uncle Peter Mullins on Harts Creek. She didn’t even remember what year her father died, saying, “My memory is failing me. I was married and living at South Point.”

I noticed again how much Mona looked like her dad.

I asked her if she ever had any long talks with him and she said, “My mother and I were very close but we didn’t talk much about my dad. I’ll tell you, I loved my dad but I didn’t like him very much because he was mean.”

She laughed and said to Lawrence, “Wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, if you struck him the wrong way,” Lawrence admitted. “He never was mean to me. I can’t even remember Pop whipping me.”

Mona insisted, “He wasn’t ever mean to me either but he was mean to Mom.”

I asked her what Ed did to her mother and Lawrence said (somewhat agitated), “He was a little bit mean to Mom. He’d fight with her sometimes and we’d have to stop things like that.”

It got a little quiet — a whole new facet of Ed’s life had just opened up to me.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” Mona said, “but that’s how I feel. I sympathize with him now but he was a mean man.”

Lawrence tried to smooth it over by saying, “I put that down, part of it, to frustration with his condition. Really, I do.”

Sensing Lawrence’s dislike of the topic, I got the conversation directed back toward Ed’s music. He and Mona remembered Pop playing frequently on the streets of Ashland at Gibson’s Furniture Store, Field Furniture Store (later Sears) on 17th and Winchester and at the Ashland (later Second) National Bank on 16th and Winchester. It made sense that Ed often played on Winchester Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare through town, currently merged with Route 60 and Route 23. I asked if Ralph ever played with Ed and Ella on the street and Mona said no — that he only played with them at home. Bill Bowler, a blind guitarist, was the person she remembered playing with her father on the street.

“He wasn’t very good,” Mona said. “When they’d get ready to set down and make music Pop would have to tune up his guitar for him.”

Ed hung around Ashland through the winter, Lawrence said, then took off around February. There was not a particular place he went first; it just depended on his mood. Mona said he was in Greenup County, Kentucky, often.

“He played in front of the courthouse there,” she said. “I’ve seen them have that whole front of the courthouse with people standing around dancing.”

She and Lawrence also remembered Pop playing in Portsmouth, Ohio; Cabell County, West Virginia; Logan, West Virginia; Lawrence County, Kentucky; Paintsville, Kentucky; and “all up and down the Big Sandy River.”

“They’d play around railroad YMCAs, too,” Lawrence said. “They had one in Ashland, one in Russell. And down on the N&W they had a big railroad YMCA in Portsmouth — New Boston, I guess. And there was a big steel mill at New Boston. Mom used to play there more than Pop, I guess. Mom used to play at the main gate.”

Mona and Lawrence gave me a great idea of how Ed dressed when on the road. She said he wore “moleskin pants and a long-sleeve shirt — sometimes a top coat when it was cold.” Lawrence said his dad always buttoned his shirt “all the way to the top button” but never wore a tie and mostly wore blue pants. For shoes, he preferred some type of slipper, although he sometimes wore “high top patent leather shoes” — what I call “old man comfort shoes.” Mona said he always donned a hat, whether it was a Panama hat, straw hat or felt hat. He also packed his fiddle in a “black, leather-covered case” — never in a paper sack as Lawrence remembered. “No,” she stressed, seeming amused at the idea of Ed having anything other than a case. Lawrence disagreed, clearly recalling to the contrary — “Buddy, I have.” He said Ed seldom had his fiddle in a case when he went through the country, usually just tucking it under his arm. “Same way with Mom. She didn’t have a case for her mandolin a lot of times. I guess that’s the reason he wore out so many, reckon?”