Tag Archives: Laury Hicks

In Search of Ed Haley 262

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Timber

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Just before we left, Stump let us borrow a cassette containing a 1976 interview with his father. Surely, we thought, Dood would speak a lot about fiddling and of his friendship to Ed. Instead, he told about his life in Harts. His voice was very melancholy and he spoke loudly and in spurts. Some of his earliest memories were of the timber industry in Harts and of the Cole and Crane Company, which timbered extensively in the LoganCounty area from about 1893-1908. In 1900, he said, Cole and Crane used splash dams to float logs down to the mouth of the creek “where Al Brumfield had a boom in.” The boom was located at the present-day site of the West Fork Bridge.

“And this boom caught them logs all,” Dood said. “Them logs was piled on top of one another from that boom…to the mouth of Big Branch. At that time, if you owned across the creek, you owned the creek. Al Brumfield owned the other side there and he put this boom in there and bought the Cole and Crane Company and when he bought them he kept that timber there and they gave him a contract on rafting it and running it down to Guyandotte.”

Cole and Crane Company once paid Brumfield $2800 to cut his boom loose and let timber out of the creek, he said.

Dood said he went to work cutting timber for Cole and Crane Company when he was seventeen years old. He also drove oxen and cattle and loved to hunt foxes and raccoons.

After marrying, he supported his family by farming and raising cattle, sheep and hogs at his 300-acre farm on Big Branch.

In subsequent years, he worked as a blacksmith, bricklayer and coal miner.

In 1964, he took a three-month visit to Chicago and hated it about as much as an earlier visit to Michigan. He said, “My days is short. I’ve spent 84 years here and I’m figuring on spending the rest of my life here.”

And that was basically it.

Not one reference to fiddling from a guy who had played all of his life.

Well, in spite of the tape, we were pretty sure that Haley’s good friendship to Dood Dalton was authentic and was perhaps as important as his friendship with Laury Hicks in Calhoun County. We wanted to visit more of Dood’s children, so Stump directed us to the home of his oldest brother, Jake Dalton, an old fiddler on the Big Branch of Harts Creek. Jake lived in his father’s old home — the place where Ed had visited so frequently during the last twenty years of his life.

In Search of Ed Haley 240

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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A few days later, I called Ugee Postalwait with a whole bunch of questions, mostly related to my recent trip to Harts. I asked her if Laury Hicks ever went to Harts Creek with Ed.

“Oh, yeah,” she said immediately. “All through them places. Dad had a car and he had a driver, and they’d go a lot of places. Anybody was willing to take Dad any place.”

“Did Doc White ever take them anywhere?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Ugee said. “They’ve all run around together. He was a photographer, he could make teeth, he was a doctor, he was everything — and he learned it all in the penitentiary. He was a mid-wife. He could do anything. Played the fiddle. He was crazy about the railroad. He had a railroad steam engine and all that stuff back of his house. He was a smart man. Even my dad doctored with him.”

Ugee remembered Ed playing a tune called “Getting off the Raft” and figured her father also played it.

“I don’t remember Dad ever playing it but if Ed played it he played it, too,” she said. “Whatever one played, the other’n played. They was just that close together, John. They was just that way.”

I asked if Laury ever talked about a fiddler named Jeff Duty and she said, “Yeah, he talked about a fiddler by that name.”

What about Cain Adkins?

“Adkins. That sounds right.”

“Ought to be some people in Cincinnati to know Ed Haley real well,” Ugee said, kind of changing the direction of our conversation. “Him and Ella went down there and played music a lot. They made some money there. Whenever they’d get close and need some money they would go to Cincinnati and stay maybe for three or four days.”

In Search of Ed Haley 239

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

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Inspired by Louise’s letter, I called Pat Haley, who told me what she knew about Ed’s meeting of Laury Hicks.

“Ed knew Laury Hicks through Bill Day, who was Rosie Day’s husband at that time,” Pat said. “Pop was here in Ashland, I guess. Him and Bill Day got together and then Aunt Rosie and Bill Day took him to Laury Hicks. And that’s the way he got acquainted with him.”

I said, “So he never met Laury Hicks until after Rosie and Bill Day got married? But that doesn’t sound right because Ugee told me that Ed used to come up there with John Hager way back. She’s known Ed since she was a little girl. And the reason John Hager stopped traveling with Ed was because he didn’t like his lifestyle. He said he was drinking too much.”

Pat said, “Well now that makes sense, too.”

I asked her more about the circumstances of Ralph Haley’s illegitimate birth.

“I talked to Mona about there being some confusion over Ralph’s birth,” she said. “Oh, she got very uptight with me about that. She said, ‘Yes, my mother was married because my mother told me so.’ Well, I was explaining this to my sister-in-law, Patsy. She said, ‘No, no, Patricia. That’s not right. Ralph was illegitimate. Payne was a married man and Mom was teaching his daughter piano. That’s how she became pregnant.’ And the reason she’s so sure about that is Patsy had a little girl before she was married and gave her up for adoption and later she told Jack out in California and he said, ‘Well, don’t let it bother you. My mother also had a child out of wedlock.’ We got to wondering why Jack would know that and nobody else would, and then we came to the conclusion that Jack stayed with Ella Haley’s dad and stepmother for many, many years. Patsy said she figured he learned that from Nan, the stepmother.”

In Search of Ed Haley 213

20 Friday Dec 2013

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The next day, Wilson Douglas and Kim Johnson came on the bus where Wilson spun another one of his great stories, this time about Ed and Doc White.

Ed was already over at Laury Hicks’, but Laury was gone somewhere. That mail carrier brought the word through that Ed wanted Doc to come over and go down there to Bear Fork and play some music for that dance. Well, Doc lived in Ivydale. He played the fiddle a little, the banjo a little. He come down there and he got me one evening. Doc said, “Now, if you’ll drive, we’ll both go. We’ll hear Ed fiddle.” I said, “All right.” So we started. It must’ve been four o’clock in the evening. It was warm, you know. It was maybe the middle of August.

We stopped over on the Calhoun County line. That’s between Calhoun and Clay. Doc said, “Stop here. I know this old lady here. We’ll get some wine.” She had a bunch of green beans and set them out along the road selling them you know in little baskets. She said, “Now Doc, I’m gonna sell them beans right there for six dollars a basket.” Doc said, “My god, I don’t want to buy them beans.” So she kept on, you know. She looked at me and winked. Said, “Now Doc, better take a couple of baskets. Well, I’m gonna rake in here and show you how nice they are.” She had a quart jar of moonshine in each one of them. She was a bootlegging and Doc said, “Yeah, by god, yeah, I’ll take two baskets.”

We got down the road a little bit, Doc he pulled them two-quart fruit jars out and throwed them baskets and green beans over the hill. I said, “Now, look, Doc. If you get too drunk and cause trouble over there, they’ll throw all of us in jail.” Time we got to Bear Fork they was all drunk but me and I was a driving. Some old man there was calling that dance and Ed Haley was fiddling some of the prettiest fiddling I ever heard, but as the evening progressed the alcohol went to working on him. He lost his coordination. And he got so high, he was a making bad notes. Doc did, too. Doc was a talking fine — his glasses way down on the end of his nose. And Doc said, “Well, we better go home.” They liked Ed. They wanted to keep him all night. He said, “I gotta go with Doc and this boy. I gotta get back over to Laury Hicks’.” We come in the next morning. He was so drunk when we got back to Hicks’ I had to lead him up the steps. That’s the way it happened, all them things over there.

In Search of Ed Haley 211

14 Saturday Dec 2013

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After pouring over all of this new information, I called Ugee Postalwait and asked if she could sing me any more of Ed’s songs. I hadn’t been thinking much about Laury Hicks lately and it seemed like a good time to just “check in” on that facet of Ed’s story. It wasn’t long until she was spinning this story that gave me insight into Ed’s ability to take a little melody and make it into a tune.

“One time when I was a little girl, somebody went up or down the road at night a singing, ‘Blue-eyed rabbit went away, the blue-eyed rabbit went to stay. Doodledy-do, doodledy do, doodledy do do doodledy do’,” Ugee said. “So I got up and that’s all I was singing all day long. Ed said, ‘What are you trying to sing?’ I said, ‘I’m a singing ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Dad and him said, ‘Well it’s got a name. What is it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Said, ‘Where’d you hear it?’ I said, ‘I heard it in the night.’ Said, ‘Did you dream it?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t dream it.’ They fooled around with that piece there for weeks trying to play it. When Ed Haley and Dad got done playing that, they had all kinds of runs in that there piece. One’d be a playing it and then the other’n, then they’d bring the different runs in on that song. Someone liked it real well when Ed was a playing it and wanted to know what the name of it was. He said, ‘Well, the one that give me the name of it said it was ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Ed just laughed and would tell Aunt Rosie about him a playing that piece.”

This story was very interesting since I was starting to formulate this improvable theory that Ed first learned to play fiddle tunes by listening to his mother whistle or hum them. As a young widow who had lost her husband in tragic circumstances, she may well have been determined to pass along some of her beloved’s music to little Ed as best as she could. Of course, he may well have begun playing before Milt’s death, even “sneaking” and playing on his fiddle when his father was out working timber. (I’d had a similar experience with an old fiddle in my grandfather’s closet as a boy.)

I asked Ugee if Ed ever talked about where he learned to play and she said, “He told me about somebody leaving an old fiddle laying around when he was a boy. I don’t remember who the man was.” I told her his father had been a fiddler and asked if maybe he’d meant “my old man left an old fiddle laying around” and she said, “Some old man left an old fiddle laying around and I just wonder if it was his dad. And he picked that up and went to see-sawing on it and he said he found out he could play the fiddle. He said that was all he was good for: to play the fiddle. That’s all he studied. I asked him if he went to school to learn to play the fiddle. He said no.”

I just couldn’t shake the image of Ed playing on Milt’s fiddle. If he hadn’t fooled with it before Milt’s death, maybe he picked it up afterwards (“it was just laying around”) and learned to play with his mother’s help. I had these images of Emma whistling or singing Milt’s tunes to him and saying, “Yeah, do that.” “Don’t do that.” I got chills thinking about the way Ed may have began learning tunes and the way I used to ask Lawrence, “Did he do this?” “Did he play this?” Or the way he would say to me, “Pop didn’t do it like that.”

In Search of Ed Haley 161

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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After hanging up with Pat, I called Ugee Postalwait — Laury Hicks’ daughter in Akron, Ohio — to tell her about getting the picture of Ed from Maxine McClain. Ugee was full of energy. Her memory was obviously working in overdrive.

“I used to know all of them,” she said of the old musicians in her part of the country. “They was all to our house. They’d come from miles around to hear Dad play, especially when Ed was in the country. Maybe they’d stay two or three days at our house. I’d get up of a morning to look see who was in the house asleep and who all I was gonna have to cook breakfast for, when I was a girl growing up. The young men would sleep in the boys’ room and they’d sleep in the floor. Then they’d sleep four crossways in the bed, too. As I get old, I get to thinking about all of them and wonder how in the world my dad ever fed them all. I been a cooking ever since I was nine years old for workhands and people like that. One morning — I never will forget I wasn’t very old, then — got up and got breakfast. We’d had cabbage the day before for supper. A big pot of cabbage. And Ed and Ella was there. I never put cabbage on the table for breakfast. Ed looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, what did you do with that cabbage last night?’ I said, ‘It’s in there.’ ‘Well why didn’t you put it on the table for breakfast?’ I said, ‘Well who eats cabbage for breakfast?’ He said, ‘I do.’ Now I never seen anyone eat such a mess of cabbage for breakfast. Him and Ella did. Ella said, ‘Oh, we always eat the same thing we had for supper.’ I never will forget that. From that time on, whatever was left over from supper, I’d warm it up, you know, and fix it for their breakfast ’cause they would eat it. They liked cabbage or kraut.”

Ugee really laughed telling about that, then started in with another tale.

“One time they was some Baileys there and I believe they was some of them McClain boys, and I was peeling tomatoes for supper — you know, slicing them and putting them on the plate — and I had a plate on one end [of the table] and one on the other end. And Manuel Martin was there too, and Commodore Cole. And I looked in both places and them tomatoes was gone. ‘What in the world? Some of them’s come in and hid my tomatoes.’ I looked out and Ed was standing there sitting on the walk — I never will forget — a laughing, and he said, ‘Wait till she finds out.’ I said, ‘Ed did you get them tomatoes in there?’ He said, ‘We ate every one of them.’ I said, ‘If I could find the plate, I’d break it over your head.’ That Commodore Cole, he said, ‘You wouldn’t dare do that.’ Ed said, ‘Don’t dare her too much, Commodore. I know her.’ And they was a eating them tomatoes as fast as I was a peeling them. Them ornery birds, I never will forget that.”

“The last time I ever seen Ed was at his house,” Ugee said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, can you still make a rhubarb pie?’ I said, ‘Why lord yes, I reckon I can. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, I want a rhubarb pie.’ And I made four and I never seen no such eating as he done that evening, him and Ella, on them rhubarb pies while they was hot — with milk cream over them. I can see them yet. I went down to Ashland, Kentucky. They lived on 45th Street.”

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 150

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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After speaking with Maxine, I called Wilson Douglas to ask him about Edden Hammons, regarded by many as a top old-time fiddler in the early part of the century.

“Well now, I’m gonna tell you about Edden Hammons, John,” he said. “Now I heard him fiddle one time in Webster Springs, I believe it was, about ’48 or ’49. And something happened. They broke the concert up and he went home. Now that’s the only time I ever heard him in person, but by god he was one of the best old-time fiddlers in the state. And Burl Hammons, his nephew, I don’t think anybody coulda beat him on the old tunes. And Sherman — they could all play to tell you the truth.”

I asked if Ed knew Hammons.

“Well, I’d say distantly he did,” he said. “He had a lot of Ed Haley’s bow in a way, but he didn’t know the tunes that Ed Haley knew. But now Edden Hammons had a lot of bow power.”

What about Uncle Jack McElwain?

“Yeah, I knew about him, John,” he said. “But now I never heard the man play, but my father said he was a powerful fiddle player. My dad was around him a lot. However, he said he was in no comparison with Edden Hammons.”

I asked Wilson if Ed ever played for dances without any second, and he said, “Well, I seen him play about an hour one time over at Hicks’ and he didn’t need no second. You know, playing the fiddle for a square dance, Haley taught me something there I’ve never forgot: you’ve got to get the fiddle with the rhythm and the fiddle with the caller. You’ve got to get them all in coordination, and Haley done just that.”

In those days, did the caller dance while he called or did he call from the side?

“Well now, they was an old gentlemen — he was a hell of a banjo player — by the name of old man Tom McCune. Now brother, he could call and dance right along with it. He was the best I ever heard. That banjo player that played with Ed Haley, I believe it was Tom Cheneth. Lived down Walker. Him and that Tom McCune I guess, was two of the best in the state that was clawhammer, you know. He lived at what’s called the mouth of Walnut. Then he turned over, I think maybe he lived over in what they call that Nicut country. You know, Ed Haley didn’t have no bad musicians with him.”

Wilson said, “I’ll tell you what, John. Ed Haley would not play a lick if they was somebody else a fiddling. He’d sit there and work his fingers and listen like a fox a listening for a bunch of chickens, you know. By god, he had an ‘awful’ ear. He’d just sit there, and he’d command them sometimes. Sometimes he wouldn’t say nothing. It depended on how he felt, you know?”

In Search of Ed Haley 142

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

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For the rest of the summer, I was busy on the telephone with Ugee Postalwait, Wilson Douglas and of course Lawrence Haley. I first called Ugee to tell her about peering up at the old Hicks homeplace in Calhoun County with Wilson Douglas. I also wanted to cross-check a lot of what Wilson had told me about Haley’s time in that part of the country with Ugee, who was about 20 years his senior. Together, they represented most of my research on Ed’s life in northcentral West Virginia.

“Well, it was beautiful when I was a growing up,” she said. “All them hills was clean then, but the brush has grown down to the road now. I got to go down last September and visit around. Went up on Coal River and up through there. Places I hadn’t been for 20-some years. My dad’s old home burned down in 1966 or ’67. I owned the place when it was burnt down. Then they came back about a year after that and burnt my garage down at the road. They was a burning houses down there like crazy till I got the law in on them. They even burnt barns with horses in them.”

I’d been re-reading the story in Parkersburg Landing where Haley played at Laury’s grave in 1937 (and had heard Wilson’s version), so I asked Ugee if she remembered who came there with him.

“Ed and Ella and the kids,” she said, contradicting what Wilson Douglas had said about Bernard Postalwait being there. “Well, let’s see, now. Ralph wasn’t with them. Noah and Clyde and Lawrence and the girl and I believe Jackie might’ve come with him, too.”

And what happened at the grave?

“Oh, he didn’t stay out there very long,” she said. “He played some fiddling tunes and he played some songs that he wanted. ‘Sally Goodin’ and things — old songs they liked. You know, fiddling pieces. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, and something like that. He didn’t play very many up there. He was tore up pretty bad over that, he really was. Him and Ella both. They thought an awful lot of my dad, and Mom and Dad thought an awful lot of them, too. It was a very sad occasion when they got there that evening, I can tell you that, for all of us.”

After Laury’s death, Ed and Ella made other trips to Calhoun County.

“They was back the next summer,” Ugee said. “I lived up at what they call Stinson up above there. I’d moved over there. They played music on the hill where I held a Sunday school. A Hardshell Baptist Church. I was the first one ever had Sunday School there and it was called the Metheny Church. The first year that I had Sunday School, they wasn’t there — they went somewhere else, I think, playing music — but he come to that Sunday School for my Children’s Day, him and Ella. You oughta seen that hill when they found out Ed and Ella was a gonna be there. They come from the head of Walker and every place around.”

I told Ugee what Wilson Douglas had said about Ed always requesting a certain banjo-picker at Laury’s named Chennison.

“Cottrells,” she said immediately. “Jenes Cottrell, the younger one, he was from over around Rosedale and he was a good banjo-picker. He made his banjos out of drums. Old Senator Cottrell, I knowed him, too. They was all good musicians. Will Jarvis, he had a thumb off at the first joint and he was a good banjo-picker, too.”

What about French Carpenter?

“Yeah, I knowed about French Carpenter. He lived over towards — oh, I expect about fifteen miles. Maybe more than that. And there was another one too named Frank Santy. They both played the fiddle. Frank was a left-handed fiddle player. I used to know about every thing that went in that country — them old people playing music — ’cause they always come to Dad’s and sit on that porch and played music. And if Ed was in the country they’d just come from miles around to hear Dad and him play. I hate to say this, but Nashville down there ought to have some of the players that’s been in that country.”

I told Ugee a little bit about learning that Ed may have had a sister and brother named Josie Cline and Mont Spaulding in the Tug Valley.

“I don’t know of Ed a having any brother,” she said, “but it’s just like a dream that I heard him say something about having a sister. I believe he did say he had a sister.”

Ugee could tell I had been fishing for new details in Ed’s background.

“Ed wasn’t blind when he was born,” she said. “Neither was Ella. She got sore eyes, Ella did, when she was a baby. And the old people washed their eyes with blue vitteral and that ate her eyeballs out. Ed, he had the measles that put him blind when he was a baby.”

Just before we hung up, I mentioned that Ed supposedly learned some of French Carpenter’s tunes.

“Well, I don’t think he got that many tunes from him,” Ugee said. “I have an idea he got more tunes from Ed than Ed ever got from him, if you want to know the truth about it. But you know, when Ed went back through the country — the only way they got out of that country was going to Ivydale and catch a train and they’d walk and go and maybe they’d stay a night or two a going, so they might’ve stayed over at French Carpenter’s and might’ve got some music.”

I guess French’s house was on the way to the station.

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 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 128

13 Thursday Jun 2013

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Wilson said Ed hung out with his buddies for a month or so, then made plans to head back down to Ashland or to Logan County.

“About a week before he’d get ready to go to Logan, we’d say, ‘Now Ed, stay another week. They is some big farmers coming out of Roane County, and you can make a little money there’,” Wilson said. “And that Postalwait, a week or two before he knew about when Ed was gonna leave, he’d [give Ed] some homebrew — and ah God it’d knock your hat off. Bernard would say, ‘Now Ed, hang on a few days, now. We’ll help you get some more money.’ Aw, he’d cuss around, ‘Well, I’ll stay another week, and that’s it.’ When that homebrew’d work off, Postalwait would bring him just a little bit about noon that day before the session. By God, he’d just lick his lips, you know, and he’d say, ‘That’s fine,’ but he’d never let him get none before the session. Well he’d stay that week and we’d tell all the aristocrats that had money. Some of them old retired ladies, they liked to hear him and they would bring a little money.”

“Well, he’d leave over there maybe with sixty or seventy dollars,” Wilson said. “Then he’d head for Logan and the coalfields, and they would begin to make money, stay up there two or three weeks. Back to Ashland, and then in the fall, he’d come back to Calhoun County. Let everybody build up a little, you know? And if they was nobody down there to meet him, he’d catch that what we call the ‘mail hack’ — a man that carried the mail with a little buggy and a team of horses. Everybody hollered, ‘Well where’re you gonna be?’ ‘I’m over at Hicks’, boys!’ That danged house was full. The yard was full. Minnie Hicks’d have a big pot of beans and three gallon of coffee. And it was just about every night.”

Wilson had really specific memories of Ed playing at Laury Hicks’ house.

“He’d sit there in an old split-backed chair, by god, and never miss a note,” he said. “And his endurance never slowed up. He patted his feet a little bit, but not in excess. Any time Haley was just sitting around, his fingers constantly moved all the time just like he was playing the fiddle. And there was no fine tuners. The man didn’t have a chin rest — he didn’t have no use for a chin rest.”

What kind of strings did he use?

“John, in them days, there were no super sensitive strings,” Wilson said. “It was the old Bird, and the old Gibson, and them Black Diamonds. They cost twenty-five cents. And he played them strings and them white bone keys and that old fiddle. And I tried to remember what kind of fiddle he had but it didn’t matter much whether it was any good or not. He could make it play. Now John, another thing I want to mention to ya. Now, Ed Haley’s bridge was almost flat. He didn’t have much roll in his bridge.”

Wilson said Ed didn’t have a lot of rosin on his fiddle because he didn’t use much on his bow.

What was he like?

“You couldn’t punch the wrong button,” Wilson said. “He didn’t want you to ask him about any ‘Orange Blossom Special’ or ‘Boil the Cabbage Down’. You had to be real careful. We didn’t talk a lot, but he took a liking to me. I picked up enough nerve to ask him why he didn’t go onto WSM way back there in ’37 and ’38. ‘Well,’ he said,’‘I don’t like them people. I don’t trust them. And another thing, they’ve got no soul about their music.’ And if you mentioned Natchee the Indian, you punched the wrong button. Ah, there’s so much stuff about him — I don’t want to leave nothing out. I remember this one night in particular it was about 3:30 in the morning. Some lady come in there. She was about half-stooped on that homebrew. Said, ‘Ed, I wanna hear the ‘Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor’.” He said, ‘Damn the ‘Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor’. I’m tired. I’m quitting.’ That’s the way he was.”

In Search of Ed Haley 127

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

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In mid-summer of 1994, I was back in Ashland visiting Lawrence Haley. Lawrence, I noticed right away, was indeed in poor health. His overall appearance wasn’t good; actually, he seemed convinced that he probably wouldn’t get any better. Pat was ever so cheerful, saying that he would be back to his old self soon enough. Lawrence’s son Steve had driven in from Hendersonville, Tennessee, to serve as his replacement on any “Ed Haley trips.”

Early the next morning, Steve Haley and I left Ashland to see Wilson Douglas, the old-time fiddler who remembered Ed Haley in Calhoun County, West Virginia. We drove east on I-64 past Charleston, West Virginia, where we exited off onto a winding, two-lane road leading to Clendenin, an old oil town on the Elk River. We soon turned onto a little gravel driveway and cruised up a hill to Wilson’s nice two-story home. We parked and walked up to the porch where we met Wilson and his banjo-picker, Kim Johnson. Inside, he told me more about seeing Ed at Laury Hicks’ home. He was a great storyteller, so we naturally hung onto his every word.

“Laury Hicks got in touch with Ed Haley,” he began. “So, in them days, you come to Charleston by train and from Charleston to Clay Court House by train. All right, when you got to Clay Court House, you caught the B&O train on up to Otter, which is Ivydale. Well, the word would come out and they’d be somebody there in an old car or something to pick him up and take him about fifteen, 20 miles over to Hicks’ in Calhoun County. Well, the word’d get around, you know, and my god, it was just like a carnival a coming to town. And my dad had an old ’29 model A Ford pick-up truck. Well, gas was 11 cents a gallon. So, what we’d do, we’d take our pennies or whatever we had, we’d get us that old truck up — had a big cattle rack on it — and everybody’d load in that thing. Say, ‘Well, Ed Haley’s over at Laury Hicks’. Let’s go, boys!’ Everybody would grab their loose pennies, which were very few, and we’d get over there.

“Well, it’d be probably dark, or a little before, when he would start fiddling — about maybe eight o’clock — and last until three in the morning. And he would never repeat hisself unless somebody asked him. We just sat and never opened our mouth and he’d scare [them other fiddlers]. I’d sit there till I’d get so danged sleepy, I’d think I couldn’t make it. He’d start another tune and it’d just bring me up out of there. And that Chenneth on that banjo. And then they was a fellow, he lived down the road about seven or eight miles, a fellow by the name of Bernard Postalwait. And this man was a “second Riley Puckett” on the guitar. Well, Ed’d send for him. By god, they’d never miss a note. Ed had a little old tin cup sitting there. Everybody’d put some money in it, you know. And they was some rich feller, but I can’t think of that danged guy’s name, he liked fiddle music. He’s the only man in Roane County that had any money. Well, he’d give a few one-dollar bills, you know, and he’d mention a tune. Well, if he give him a dollar, he’d play it for fifteen minutes. Well, by the time the night ended, he’d have five or six dollars, which was equivalent to fifty now. Well the next night, we’d go over — all of us’d work that day. Next night, the same thing: we’d be right back over.”

Wilson said Ed would get drunk with Bernard Postalwait and “disappear” to some rough establishments. Bernard was with Ed when he played his fiddle at Laury Hicks’ grave.

Ed also ran around with a casual fiddler named Benjamin F. “Doc” White (1885-1973) of Ivydale. Doc was a banjo-picker, veteran of the Indian Wars, schoolteacher, midwife, doctor, photographer, local judge and dentist (he even pulled his own teeth). He took Ed to “court days” and other events where he could make money.

“I was around old Doc a lot,” Wilson said. “God, he was a clown. He had kids all over West Virginia. He couldn’t fiddle much but he tried.”

Doc asked Ed one night, “Ed, how do you play them tunes without changing keys?” and Ed said, “Well Doc, I change them with my fingers!”

Wilson said Ed wasn’t being sarcastic.

It seemed like Wilson knew a lot of stories about Ed’s “running around days” with guys like Postalwait and White — which would have been great to hear to get a better understanding of him — but he refused to be very specific. He did tell one story:

They went over to a place called Minnora. That’s over where Laury Hicks lived. Doc White and Ed. Somebody else was with them, I think that Bernard Postalwait. They went down there to a Moose Lodge or something and they had a little fiddle contest or something. Well, now, Ed said, “I ain’t gonna play in this contest.” Said, “I’d ruther be a judge.” Now Old Doc White, you know, he had quite a bit of money. I don’t know, they’s four or five fiddlers that played. Old Doc played a tune, you know. They said, “What do you think, Ed?” Well, Ed said, “Boys, I hate to say it. By God, old Doc’s gotcha all mastered.” Course Ed was wanting a drink of liquor, you know. After it was over, by God, they got drunk, all of them. Doc couldn’t play much, but Ed said, “Well, that old Doc’s got you boys bested.”

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.”

In Search of Ed Haley 105

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Taking Bobby Taylor’s advice, I decided to call Wilson Douglas and ask him more about Ed Haley.

“You know, he’d come to Calhoun County, West Virginia, which borders Clay County,” Wilson said. “And there was an old gentleman over there by the name of Laury Hicks. He played the banjo for him a lot and also the fiddle. Now, he was a hell of a fiddler. Ed said the first time he went over there, Hicks was setting on the porch playing the ‘Arkansas Traveler’ — him and Cheneth on the banjo. And he said, ‘Wilson, I thought I was up against it right there. That old Hicks was a powerful hoedown fiddler.’ I knew it when I was a boy.”

I asked Wilson how Ed looked back in those early days, hoping to glean more personal and less-musical memories this time around.

“He would weigh about 185 pounds and he had a large-like stomach on him and he had little tiny feet,” he said. “When he went to a strange place, he would have me to lead him one time to the kitchen, one time to the living room, one time to the outhouse and that was all after that. He didn’t ask you to go no place with him and he walked like a cat, you know — very quick, very active man. He moved like a mountain lion. I’d say, ‘Now slow down a little bit Ed, and I’ll let you get the feel.’ But he picked his feet up fast, you know what I mean? And he could tell if you was a tidy housekeeper or a messy housekeeper. When he wasn’t playing the fiddle, he was continually moving his fingers — just like he did it so much that he did it unconsciously. He was an oddball. He didn’t fool with very many people — very withdrawn. Now when he got with a gang of mountain people playing music, he was very talkative then.”

Wilson said, “I was sixteen or seventeen years old and he saw I was interested in the fiddle and he sorta took a liking to me and he talked to me quite a bit. He treated me nice but he was a very obnoxious, sarcastic man if he didn’t like you. If he liked you, fine, and if he didn’t, he’d do his thing and that was it. And I’m gonna tell you something about Ed Haley. In as much as he was blind, especially if he’d had a drink or two, he was a dangerous man. He was a mean man. But he had an awful sense of feel. He had this sense of knowing when anything was close. He knew when he wasn’t in danger. He said, ‘Wilson, I went to a place one time,’ and he said, ‘it was rough, the people was rough.’ And said, ‘This man took me to the outhouse. I come back and I thought I could go myself.’ And said, ‘I must’ve got a little bit out of the path. I was fixing to make a step and something told me not to do it and I pulled back.’ And said, ‘I turned around and went back,’ and said, ‘I just liked one step of falling in that big, dug well.’ Now, that was the kind of good sense of feeling he had, you see?”

 

In Search of Ed Haley 98

28 Sunday Apr 2013

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After some thought, I called Wilson Douglas, whose voice sounded “robotic,” like someone singing through an electric shaver. He said he had to talk through one of those little buzz boxes because he had lost his vocal chords to throat cancer several years ago. I asked him what he remembered about Ed coming to Laury Hicks’ house and he repeated a lot of what I had already read.

“Well now that’s a pretty long story,” Wilson began. “I knew him way back in ’38, ’39. As you know, he was a resident of Ashland, Kentucky, and he was born in Logan County, West Virginia. Well, he would come up to Ivydale, West Virginia, by train and then he would ride over on up into Calhoun County with the mail carrier. And he would get a ride with somebody over to Laury Hicks’, like with an old gentleman who used to be a country doctor, Dr. White. And while he was up in Calhoun County and Clay County, we’d go ever night — if we could get there anyway — and he’d play that fiddle about four or five hours at a time. Well, he’d go back to Ashland and stay a couple of months. I guess he was playing somewhere around in Kentucky. And then along in the fall he’d come back and maybe stay a month and then he’d catch the train to Logan County.”

I asked Wilson if he played a lot with Ed and he said, “Oh, well. No, I didn’t play a lot with him. I was just beginning to fiddle, you know, and he was my idol of a fiddler player. He mostly inspired me to fiddle, him and David French Carpenter of Clay County, West Virginia. I’m going to tell you, that there album [Parkersburg Landing] don’t give him credit.”

I asked Wilson if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “Oh god, he played all the old tunes. Well, as you know, they all played the ‘Billy in the Lowground’, the ‘Tennessee Wagner’. I play one of Haley’s tunes: he called it the ‘Morning Flower’. Played in the key of A. I’ll have to think. Well, as you know, he called the ‘Stony Point’, the ‘Gilroy’. I learned that off of him. You know, all these tunes has got four or five different titles. And I played a little bit of his ‘Devil’s Dream’. He would play that to get warmed up.”

Did you ever hear him play “Blackberry Blossom”? I asked.

“Oh, by god yeah,” he said. “I remember him playing that. You know, Ed Haley told me he could hear a tune twice and play it, and I believe it.”

I said to Wilson, “Now, Ed Haley improvised a lot, didn’t he? Like take a tune and play it different kinda ways.”

“Well, he could play it about any way,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. He’d do a lot of that to show his skill, I think, but when you settled him down he didn’t vary the bow from one time to another. Now where they’s a gang of fiddlers around, you know, a little distant to him, trading tunes and messing around, he would show them up. I don’t think he did it just to be smart: he did it to show them that he could do it, you know. And what I liked about him: if he heard somebody play a tune, they’d say, ‘Well now Ed, am I getting it?’ And he’d say, ‘No, you’re not getting it.’ And if you were to get it, he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough. Drop it. Don’t try to do it no better than that.’ I liked that. He went straight to the point, and he told it like it was. If a fiddler got to fiddling too fast, he’d say, ‘Well, you’re losing the soul.’ Oh, he’d just cuss. Only tune to my knowledge that he really played fast was ‘Forked Deer’.”

I asked Wilson what he remembered about Ed’s bowing and he said, “Now, he played a long straight bow, but he put in the bow whatever the tune required. Every tune requires a different bow technique, as you know. Oh God, he played a long shuffle bow. I always thought he had the longest fiddle bow I’d ever seen. You know, he could tell if a fiddler was playing the short bow. He’d say, ‘Well son, don’t hold your bow up in the middle. Catch back on the frog of the bow. By god, you need to have bow if you’re gonna play that kind of music.'”

I asked Wilson if he thought Vassar Clements’ bowing was anything like Ed’s and he said, “No, no. By god, no. No, not in my book. Now, you know everybody’s entitled to his own opinion.”

Did Ed play with a tight or loose bow?

“He played a half-tight bow. He didn’t want any bouncing or want any wobbling.”

In Search of Ed Haley 97

27 Saturday Apr 2013

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     Around that time, I read up on Wilson Douglas, an old-time fiddler who remembered Ed Haley visiting Laury Hicks during the Depression. I had first heard of him several months earlier from J.P. Fraley’s circle of friends. Wilson came from a family of musicians in the Elk River Valley north of Charleston, West Virginia.

     “I was born October 22, 1922 in Clay County,” Wilson said in one published interview. “My grandfather, Martin Stephenson Van Buren Douglas was one of the greatest ballad singers of all times. My dad was Shirley Andrew Douglas and he was a beautiful banjoist! And my Grandmother Morris was an old-time square dance fiddler and all her brothers were top fiddlers on my mother’s side, the Morris side.”

     Wilson started playing music at a young age, first the guitar, then the fiddle.

     “I started on the guitar when I was nine years old and I played the guitar Carter-fashion,” he said. “And 1935-36 was a severe cold winter. I was 13 years old. I had played the guitar up until that time for various fiddlers. During that winter I lived about a mile from my grandmother’s. At that time she had the only old fiddle in the country to my knowledge. The old instrument was patched with solder, carpet tacks, and various other things. Every night I would take my guitar over there and play. She would play hoedown fiddle tunes half the night. She played mostly dance tunes on two or three strings. She seldom played the bass. The following winter her health failed and she began to lose interest in the violin. However, that fiddle began to sound good to me. Then I suddenly decided that I would quit playing the guitar and try to make some kind of fiddler out of myself. So I started saving my money to buy me a fiddle.”

     In a short time, Wilson found himself visiting at the home of Laury Hicks, where he first saw Haley.

     “There was an old gentleman that lived in Calhoun County joining Clay County by the name of Laury Hicks,” Wilson said. “He was a good old-time rough fiddler. I would ride a bicycle over to his home to hear him play the fiddle. Then somehow Laury Hicks contacted Ed Haley in Ashland, Kentucky. In about a month Haley came to Calhoun County. So the news got around through the country that Ed Haley was at Laury Hicks’. Everybody around went to hear him play. It was 12 miles from where I was raised over to Laury Hicks’ where Ed Haley’d come to. And if a gang didn’t gather up to go in an old ’29 Model-A Ford truck, we’d start walking. Maybe somebody’d come along in an old car and pick us up. And it was just like a dang carnival, you know. We just sat and never opened our mouth and he’d scare them fellers. Them fellers never tried to play. I was just dazed with that fiddle. He’d play until about 12 o’clock at night, and when he got tired, he’d quit. I was really not conscious of coming back home.””

     According to Wilson, the locals tried to keep Haley in that part of the country as long as possible.

     “Well, when he’d take a notion to go back to Kentucky, we’d all beg him to stay another week,” he said. “Doc White would say, ‘Ed, now listen. They’s a gang of people coming from Roane County, you can make some money. Now, you stay another week.’ Ed was bad to swear. Well, they’d talk him into it. Maybe some of these old farmers would come along. They’d had a tune and maybe their father played or some of their ancestors and they’d heard it. They’d say, ‘Well, Ed, play me this tune,’ and they’d hand him a dollar. Well, he’d play it for 15 minutes! They’d sit there with big tears. Well, he’d play till the money ran out and he’d quit!”

     Wilson told about the last time he saw Haley play at the Hicks home.

     “The last night, the last time I seen him, I was a big boy and I’d got over there,” he said. “I was sitting in this old split-bottom chair. Sleepy, you know. But every time he’d play a tune, I’d survive. And he said, ‘Son, what’s your name?’ I didn’t know that he knew that I’d been sitting in front of him. I told him. He said, ‘You’ve been over here every night, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Mr. Haley, you’ve played tunes for everybody and I don’t have no money. I’m saving up to buy me a fiddle.’ He laughed! I said, ‘How about you playing me a tune?’ ‘All right. What is it?’ I said, ‘Play the ‘Black-Eyed Susie’.’ ‘Well, that’s really no tune. It’s just a little old thing.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Damn it, I’ll play it. I don’t like to play it. Them’s single-line tunes, but I’ll play it for you.’ And he did, because I was interested, you see?”

In Search of Ed Haley 91

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Clyde said Ed never said “too much” about where he learned to play the fiddle.

“Well, he was blind all his life, since he was a small boy, and he started with a cornstalk.”

Ed did talk about other fiddlers, though.

“Oh, yes,” Clyde said. “He knew Sam Vie and Asa Neal, and all those old-timers. Did you know Bill Day? Well, my dad used to play with him a lot. But Bill Day couldn’t play the fiddle as far as I’m concerned.”

Bill Day’s wife Rosie was a sister to Laury Hicks, Haley’s veterinarian friend in Calhoun County, West Virginia.

“Well, Rosie was Laury’s sister, as I remember,” Clyde said. “Rosie stayed with my mother and helped take care of Mom because my Mom didn’t like to cook in the summertime because of the flies. I got in trouble one time and I had to go stay with Laury and Aunt Minnie. And I stayed with them in my growing up years. Laury was a doctor, you know, and so was Minnie. She’d just go on a horse, travel miles and miles and miles on a horse, to go deliver a baby or something like that.”

Clyde also remembered Doc Holbrook, Ed’s friend in Greenup, Kentucky.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Monnie, my sister, was named after Dr. Holbrook’s wife: M-O-N-N-I-E.”

Clyde was well aware of Ed’s suspicions toward the commercial music industry.

“My dad didn’t ever want his music recorded and it was difficult to get him to get in a position where he would let anybody record his music,” he said. “There was a guy named Bus Johnson in Cincinnati that wanted my dad — I remember — he wanted my dad to come down there to Cincinnati to WLW and get some music recorded for him but he wanted to commercialize it, you know, which I wish he had’ve now. My dad and mother would’ve had a lot better life with the money they could’ve made off the music. I always did tell my dad, ‘Pop, you ought to get those things recorded because you got money laying around in the fiddle case.'”

Talking about Ed’s refusal to make commercial records caused me to ask about his home recordings.

“Him and my mother had over six hundred records,” Clyde said. “Them old records that Ralph sent home out of the Army. He was in the Signal Corps at Camp Crowder, Missouri, and he took a lot of the equipment home — borrowed it from the Army — and my dad and my mother was in on some of the records, too, you know. And Lawrence has got all that kind of information; more than I would have because I’ve been gone from home. I’ve been a roamer, you know. And I used to drink a lot. I don’t think I’ll ever take another drink, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m in this hospital and it’s what it’s for. I had strokes. It’s not a nut-house hospital or anything. It takes care of people like me. I used to drink quite a bit myself, but I’ve made up my mind since I had the strokes that I’ll let that stuff alone when I get out of this place. I talk like it’s a jailhouse, but it’s not. It’s full of women.”

In Search of Ed Haley 63

11 Monday Feb 2013

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After listening to Gerry’s tape, I gave Brooks a call. His voice was extremely weak compared to the 1988 interview, indicating that his health had taken a turn for the worse. As I introduced myself and tried to explain the reason for my call he told me to speak up because his hearing wasn’t very good. Just when I figured he hadn’t heard a word I said, he remarked, “I’ve got a lot of tapes of you, John. I’ve been listening to you for twenty years.” He also had Ed’s record, which he said was a good representation of his fiddling.

“It had his zip on the bow,” Brooks said. “The record that I’ve got was made off of some old discs that his wife had saved. They was a record man visited him and talked with him and wanted him to make records but at that time they just paid you for it and that was it. And Ed said, ‘I won’t make a record unless you give me royalty on it. You’ll have to give me a percentage of what you make on it.’ So he never made no records.”

I wanted to know more about the “zip” in Ed’s bowing, but Brooks didn’t remember any specifics.

“No, at the time I met Ed Haley I was just a big young boy entering into manhood,” he said. “But I’ll never forget Ed Haley and his fiddle as long as I live. My my, he fiddled fast. He had the smoothest bow hand I ever heard. Soft as silk — soft as a woman’s voice. And he had fingers like a baby. You see, he never did work any. I think he went blind at about nine years old.”

I asked where Ed positioned the fiddle when playing and he said, “He held the fiddle high on his shoulder. Not on his arm nor not up under his chin.”

As for Ed’s tunes, Brooks said, “He played these old Clay County-Braxton-Calhoun-Gilmer tunes. These old John Cottrell tunes — ‘Mississippi Sawyer’. The old-time ‘Sally Goodin’ — mercy mercy he could play ‘Sally Goodin’. And ‘Sally Ann Johnson’.”

I asked Brooks where he used to see Ed and he basically repeated what he had told Gerry Milnes about him playing at the courthouse in Spencer, West Virginia. I wondered if there was a crowd around him.

“You betcha there was a crowd,” Brook said. “Generally, they was ten or fifteen men standing around up as close to old Ed as they could get. He was sitting on a chair and had that tin cup on the arm of that chair. Them nickels and dimes was just cracking in that tin cup. I even put a quarter in his tin cup. Course he’d empty it every little bit. That was back in the late 20s, early 30s. You take a tin cup half full of nickels and dimes and you could buy a pretty good sack of groceries with it. It wasn’t like it is today.”

In spite of Ed’s popularity, no one in the crowd danced.

“Them old farmers wouldn’t hit a lick with their feet,” Brooks said.

Brooks said he never heard Ed play the banjo but got really excited when I asked him about his singing.

“Oh, I’m glad you mentioned it,” he said. “The first time I heard ‘Stackolee’, Ed Haley played it and sung it sitting in the courthouse yard at Spencer. Now I’m telling you, he could make you hump up when he’d sing that song. And he knew it the old original way. That’s the first time I ever heard a man sing with a fiddle. Back in that day, it was seldom you heard a man do that. French Carpenter, he was a good singer with the fiddle. He was a good old-time fiddler. His daddy was named Solly Carpenter. Old Sol Carpenter’s favorite was Emery Bailey. He was fifty years ahead of his time.”

I asked if Emery Bailey was as good as Ed Haley and Brooks said, “He wasn’t as good as Ed Haley by no means. Ed Haley was far ahead of everybody at that day and time. But Emery Bailey was one among the best of the fiddlers in Calhoun-Braxton-Clay-Gilmer Counties. Now, there’s a contemporary of Ed Haley — have you heard of Clark Kessinger? He could fiddle just about… Well, not as good — there was nobody could fiddle as good as Ed Haley could, but I’ll tell you, Clark Kessinger could come close to him.”

Brooks pointed out that being a fiddler in those days wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“No, at that time the fiddle was looked down upon. People wouldn’t fool with a fiddler,” he said. “The fiddle seemed to be a disgrace. You take a man going along the road with a fiddle and he was looked down upon and talked about.”

Things got kind of quiet, then I asked him if Ed played a tune called “Jimmy Johnson Bring Your Jug Around the Hill”.

“Oh, you betcha,” Brooks said. “Ward Jarvis learned to play that just about as good as Ed played it, too. Ward Jarvis was among the best fiddlers in the country.”

Brooks said Ed also played “Dusty Miller” and “Lost Indian”. He played everything in the standard key.

“Now you take a lot of tunes that some of our country fiddlers — Laury Hicks and Ward Jarvis and others… French Carpenter. They would tune their fiddle and put it up in A — they called it the high key. Ed never changed his fiddle that I seen.”

Brooks didn’t remember Ed playing some of his most famous cross-key pieces, like “Old Sledge” or “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

“Now them’s Sol Carpenter tunes that you’re talking about,” he said. “That’s back a generation behind Ed Haley.”

In Search of Ed Haley 62

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

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At that point, Gerry asked Brooks about Ed Haley, and it was clear from his remarks that he thought he was an incredible fiddler.

“I’ve saw Ed Haley and stood and listened to him and sat in houses and listened to Ed Haley play,” he said. “Ed Haley is the best fiddler I ever listened to and I’ve heard a lot of them. And I’m a pretty good judge of what good fiddling is. And Ed Haley was the slickest, hottest… He bluegrassed it — he’s another fellow that was 50 years ahead of his time, like I mentioned about Emery Bailey. Ed Haley could lay the leather on that fiddle bow and so smooth it was out of this world.”

Brooks told Gerry about seeing Ed at the Roane County Courthouse in West Virginia before the Depression.

     I walked up in the courthouse at Spencer one time back in the 20s and there was a crowd in the courthouse yard and there sat Ed Haley fiddling. He had a tin cup sitting there on a little stand. Ed Haley wouldn’t play unless that tin cup kept rattling with nickels and dimes. A dollar bill was out of this world in them days. I listened to Ed Haley play and Homer Bailey, Emery’s brother, was at the stock pen. The stock pen was just across the stream from the courthouse and I hurried to tell Homer. I wanted Homer to hear Ed Haley. I said, “Homer, Ed Haley’s over here at the courthouse yard playing the fiddle. Let’s go over and hear him play a tune or two.” And as we was crossing the bridge going back over the courthouse Homer said, “Plum honor, Brook. I wonder if he can fiddle ‘Chicken Reel’ as good as Emery can?” I said, “I don’t know but we’ll find out pretty soon now and you be the judge.”

     And we walked up close to Ed. Ed wasn’t playing — there wasn’t no nickels going in the cup. I put a big Bull Moose nickel in the cup and rattled it and I said, “Ed, I’d like to hear you play ‘Chicken Reel’.” And he reared back and leveled off on that fiddle and you never heard such a ‘Chicken Reel’ in all my life. Homer turned sideways and bent over and held his head right forward towards Ed Haley and took that tune in. Shortly, when Ed quit playing, Homer looked at me with a big gold-toothed smile and said, “Plum honor, Emery can’t play it can he, Brook?” So he really took a spell over Ed Haley. But Emery was good on it but that was what Ed Haley would do for a fiddler. When you heard Ed play, that was it.

Brooks said to Gerry, “Now Emery Bailey never did see Ed Haley but Clark Kessinger copied Ed Haley fiddling. Ed Haley made a statement before he died. He said he hoped that his type of fiddling had rubbed off on somebody that could carry the thing along and keep it going. Well now, Clark Kessinger was the man. He could imitate Ed Haley’s stroke. But I had the privilege of seeing and hearing Ed Haley play. Nobody could fiddle as good as Ed Haley could, but Clark Kessinger could come close to him.”

Gerry asked Brooks what brought Ed into the Calhoun County area of West Virginia.

“I would say it was Laury Hicks,” Brooks said. “Laury Hicks was another fiddler. Laury Hicks had his own stroke. He never copied nobody. Laury Hicks was rough as a cob but my my he could put stuff on a fiddle that was out of this world. They lived on Stinson, over in that Nebo country. And he would go down to Charleston and bring Ed Haley up and keep him a week — maybe two. Ed enjoyed that. That was free board for Ed, you see. That day and time, it was nippity tuck to make a living if a man didn’t live on a patch of land somewhere. And Laury picked up a lot of his stuff, too.”

Brooks told about a time when Ed was staying with Hicks and visited John McCune, an old fiddler who lived “in that Nebo country” a half-mile below Hicks.

   Now, Frank Santy told me this and Ward Jarvis and Senate Cottrell. They fiddled till midnight and Laury thought of old John McCune. He couldn’t play much but he had one tune that they said he was out of this world on. Laury thought of that and he said, “Ed, if you ain’t too tired I’d like to go down to John McCune’s and have him fiddle a tune for you.” Ed was going home the next morning and he said, “We may not have time to do that tomorrow.” And they went down to old John McCune’s John got out of the bed and fiddled that tune. And Ed Haley sat there and listened to it. When John got through, Ed Haley said, “Mr. McCune, you never need to hesitate to play that tune for anybody. There’s nobody living that can beat you playing that tune.” So that was an honor to John McCune on his number.

Brooks knew a little about Ed playing over Laury’s grave, which I had first read about on the Parkersburg Landing liner notes.

“When Laury Hicks was on his dying bed, he said, ‘I would like to have Ed Haley play a few tunes over my grave when I’m dead and gone.’ And Ed Haley made a special trip up to Stinson and fiddled over Laury Hicks’ grave. They said he played some of the sweetest tunes they ever listened to. He took a little group with him and he played the fiddle over Laury’s grave. That’s a true story.”