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Tag Archives: Lawrence Haley

John’s epilogue 2

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Arthur Smith, banjo, Ben Walker, Benny Martin, Bernie Adams, Billy Adkins, blind, Brandon Kirk, Buddy Emmons, Clayton McMichen, Doug Owsley, Durham, Ed Haley, fiddlers, fiddling, Green McCoy, Haley-McCoy grave, Harts, history, Imogene Haley, Indiana, Jeffersonville, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, Lawrence Haley, Mark O'Connor, Matt Combs, Melvin Kirk, Michael Cleveland, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, music, Nashville, North Carolina, Smithsonian, Snake Chapman, Tennessee, Texas Shorty, Ugee Postalwait, Webster Springs, West Virginia, Wilson Douglas, writing

When Ed first went out into the neighborhood with his dad’s fiddle and armed with his melodies (as interpreted by his mother) I think he probably caused not a small sensation amongst family and neighbors and his ear being as great as it was I think he picked up an incredible amount of other music really fast. I think he played with a lot of ornaments when he was a teenager and up into maybe even his thirties. Snake Chapman and Ugee Postalwait have alluded to this. Snake said the dining room recordings just didn’t sound as old-timey as he remembered Ed playing and Ugee said she remembered him and her dad talking about the little melodies between the notes. Of course Ed had to have been through a lot of subtle changes in style since that time. I think in later years he stripped a lot of the ornaments out of his fiddling in order to appeal to the Arthur Smith-Clayton McMitchen crowd who loved the radio style that was so much in vogue at that time. This might have helped make a little more money on the street. People have always liked to hear someone play and sound just like what they hear on the radio or a record. But I think if someone had asked Ed if he had done that consciously that he would have denied it and if he was in a bad mood they might have even had a fight on their hands.

I keep having this idea of Ed imitating other instruments on the fiddle because I’ve tried it myself and wouldn’t it be something that some of these great parts was really an imitation of John Hager’s banjo playing. I’d love to know where that passage is or whether it even exists.

It’s obvious that when Ed had good firm second that wouldn’t slow down for anything, he really leaned back on the beat and got in that little pocket where so many great musicians like to be. Ella and Mona really held up a good solid beat, but I’ll bet Ed was hard on them — a real taskmaster. It’s all in that rhythm section. Wilson Douglas told me one time that Ed always told him to play it real lazy. Texas Shorty, Benny Martin, and Buddy Emmons refer to it as holding on to the note as long as you can before you start the next one. This is an important part of Ed’s feel and sound and it really comes through on the dining room recordings. I get it by playing as slow as I can against a beat I hope is not gonna move, and then I swing the notes with a dotted note feel — a real lilt if I can get it — and just drag on the beat as hard as I can ’cause I know it’s not gonna slow down. I’d love to know just when Ed figured that out or if it was always there. I always think of Ed in his younger years playing on top of the beat or even ahead of it like I did when I was young and full of piss and vinegar. Actually when you’re playing alone you do hafta pretty well stay on top of the beat to hold the time or at least set it, cause you are the beat but you have to keep from rushing which we will tend do when we get to hard passages in order to get them over with. We’ll not do that no more. Mark O’Connor told me one time that while he is playing a tune he’ll play on top of and behind the beat on purpose. He described playing behind it as letting the beat drag you along…almost like water skiing. Oh, to have known what Ed and John Hager or Bernie Adams sounded like together.

I think Ed worked on his fiddling probably daily most of his life so it is fair to say that it was changing all the time. This would explain the varying descriptions of his playing that have come down. I’m sure they’re probably all accurate. Lawrence, Ugee, and Mona always said Ed played with great smooth long bow strokes and Snake Chapman always was adamant about him playing with short single strokes and Slim Clere said the same thing — that he bowed out everything — no bow slurs. Of course, in the dining room sessions you can hear both ways. It’s amazing how well Ed did without the feedback of working with a tape recorder. What an incredible ear he had. As far as I know, the only time he probably heard himself played back was the recordings we have. I hope there are others out there but I’ve come to doubt it.

Brandon and I have always had a gut feeling that if we’d dug down into the hillside a little further at Milt and Green’s grave we might have found something. We only went down five feet and then we were defeated by the rain. What if we had gone down the requisite six feet? What if, like the probe, Owsley had misjudged the bottom of the grave shaft due to the mud and water? What if it hadn’t rained and muddied up the work area? If Melvin Kirk and Ben Walker went so far as to bury the men in a deep grave, why not assume they would have gone for the standard six feet grave traditionally dug? In the following weeks, old timers around Harts kept telling Brandon and Billy, “If they didn’t dig at least six feet, it’s no wonder they didn’t find anything.” We didn’t want to question the professionalism of experts like the Smithsonian forensic team or seem like we wanted to find Milt and Green so badly that we couldn’t accept the concept that they were gone…but what if? The explanation that Doug Owsley gave us about the coal seam and underground stream made a lot of sense. Needless to say we were really disappointed. I had started to rationalize that not finding anything might indicate that they were buried in the nude and just thrown in the hole with no box or winding sheet or anything.

I was in Durham, North Carolina, the other day and I saw a fiddler on the street and I automatically found myself thinking of Ed. I didn’t have to fill in or rearrange much in my imagination to see him there playing on the street — even though this man was standing up, and played nothing like him. Of course when Ed was younger he probably stood up to play all the time like in the Webster Springs picture…dapper and wearing his derby. I always seem to picture Ed sitting down. Another great thrill for me is a young blind fiddler from Jeffersonville, Indiana, named Michael Cleveland who when he plays I can see Ed at nineteen. He stands up so straight he almost looks like he’s gonna fall over backward the way Lawrence said his dad did. When he plays I can’t take my eyes off of him thinking of Ed. Now my friend Matt Combs, who has done a lot of the transcriptions for this book, sits with me and plays Ed’s notes off of the paper, and I play off the top of my head, so in that sense it’s like playing with him.

I guess it’s time to just leave this alone and get back to my study of the fiddle. Maybe get geared up for “Volume Two.” I spend long hours here at the dining room table with my tape recorder and I can hear Lawrence and feel Ed as I try and play my way back into the past. I find that the study of Ed’s music leads me to the study of all music and the way it’s played.

John’s epilogue 1

28 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Brandon Kirk, Ed Haley, fiddle, fiddler, fiddling, history, Howdy Forrester, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, music, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. South, writing

For me a “tune” is a specific order of notes played by a certain person on a certain day at a certain time and given a certain name and if you want to really pin it down you could include the latitude and longitude of the event. If you were not there to personally witness this happening then the word of some one else is okay as long as you include that in the triangulation so that when you have put out this information you can lean back and say to your listener, “Now…you know as much about it as I do and you can draw your own conclusions.” This works for events and etc. Sometimes these sort of documented rumors are as close as we can get to the truth and it’s better than nothing.

I’ve been thinking about how much Ed probably wouldn’t like to think about a whole lot of what we have put in this book. For sure he didn’t like to talk about it, especially to his family. I guess I don’t blame him — he lived it. It’s easy for us to get into all of it from our totally secure positions here in 2000 knowing what we know. And from the vantage point of our research, there are probably some areas where we know things that Ed never did.

We decided to call this book “The Search for Ed Haley: Volume One” because we know that after it comes out people will be calling us saying, “Well, you didn’t call me,” and “You didn’t get that right,” and no telling what. But then that gives us fuel for Volume Two. Of course there is the chance (and it has crossed my mind) that when this book comes out that some of the old Harts Creek animosities might still be smoldering and some people might feel hurt. God, I hope not. Everybody has encouraged us and said it was time to bring out the truth.

In case you hadn’t figured it out, Brandon wrote most all of this book and I just went through and “Hartfordized” it. Even though I have my name up top, Brandon is the one who did all the work. A typical day for us would be Brandon back in the office transcribing taped interviews, making chapters out of them, and working and reworking the words. Me, I’ll be sitting at the dining room table out in the other room sawing on a fiddle. At first when Brandon would bring me a chapter I would go through it on the laptop and make corrections and reword some things. Then Brandon very quickly caught on to what it was I was after, and after awhile he would bring me chapters and I would just read them in amazement and not do anything to them, and we would just go on. It really is wonderful, ’cause even though we know every word in the book when we read it back we still learn things. “Oh, that’s why that happened that way. Well I’ll be damned.”

I’ve given this story a lot of thought and most of what I’m about to say is from instinct and gut reaction cause we didn’t necessarily have cold hard facts. I think Ed learned a lot from his mother in the period right after his dad’s death when he and her probably spent a lot of time in that cabin hid out together from the community at large and his only contact was through his mother’s family (his grandparents). Ed found a fiddle that his father had left behind (very possibly the one in the photograph which looks home made) and started sawing around on it. His mother in her grief over her late husband was probably all the time whistling and singing the old melodies, most of which he had played, and Ed picked them up much in the way that Howdy Forrester told me he picked up a lot of melodies from his mom’s whistling and singing around the house. They were the melodies Ed and his mother shared. His unusually natural technique developed because he had such a great ear and naturally not being able to see he was not in a position to pick up bad technical habits from other fiddlers. His mother probably coached him much in the same way that Lawrence coached me a hundred years later…saying things like, “That just don’t sound right.” “Pop never played that many notes.” “Pop’s groups of notes were smaller.” But then because we both could see, Lawrence also said things like, “Your bow hold don’t look like Pop’s” and “Pop held his fiddle down here and turned it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 352

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Chapmanville, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Ashland, Brandon Kirk, California, Catlettsburg, Catlettsburg Stock Yard, Chapmanville, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, genealogy, Halbert Street, history, Horse Branch, Jack Haley, Jean Thomas, John Hartford, Junius Martin, Kenny Smith, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, Mona Haley, music, Ohio, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, Ralph Haley, Ralph Mullins, Rosie Day, San Quentin, South Point, Wee House in the Wood, West Virginia, Wilson Mullins, writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 351

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, John Hartford

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Allie Trumbo, Ashland, Beautiful Isle of Somewhere, Brandon Kirk, California, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Doug Owsley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Florida, genealogy, history, Jack Haley, Janet Haley, Jimmy Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Margaret Ryan, Mona Haley, music, Noah Haley, Oak Hill Cemetery, Ohio, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, Ralph Haley, Ralph Payne, Rosemary Haley, Wilson Mullins, World War II, writing

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

Patsy said Ralph was a nice and intelligent person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 344

26 Saturday Jul 2014

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

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Ashland, banjo, Bobby Taylor, Brandon Kirk, Charleston, Clyde Haley, Cultural Center, Deborah Basham, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Forked Deer, Green McCoy, Grey Eagle, history, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, mandolin, Michigan, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, music, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, Ralph Haley, Ralph Mullins, Rounder Records, San Quentin, Scott Haley, Smithsonian Institution, Steve Haley, West Virginia, writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 343

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Calhoun County, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Akron, Banjo Tramp, Black Sheep, Calhoun County, Canton, Chloe, Ed Haley, fiddle, fiddlers, fiddling, Gus Meade, harp, Jo LaRose, John Hartford, Kerry Blech, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, music, Ohio, Parkersburg Landing, Ragpicker Bill, Rector Hicks, Rounder Records, Stackolee, Sugar in the Morning, Tommy Jarrell, Traditional Music and Dance in Northeast Ohio, West Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 341

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Calhoun County, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Alabama, blind, Brandon Kirk, Calhoun County, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, genealogy, history, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Mona Haley, Noah Haley, Ralph Haley, Rogersville, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing

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

Brandon asked about Ella’s appearance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 336

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley

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Andy Mullins, Ashland, blind, Brandon Kirk, Columbus, Dobie Mullins, Ed Haley, Edith Dingess, Ella Haley, Ewell Mullins, Ferrellsburg, fiddling, genealogy, Harts Creek, history, Huntington, Imogene Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lancaster, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Liza Napier, Logan, Mud Fork, music, Nashville, Ohio, Ora Booth, Pat Haley, Peter Mullins, West Virginia, writing

By the spring of 1997, Brandon and I were at a reflective point in our research efforts. We had begun to lose our edge. After all, how many times could we ask, “Now, how did Ed Haley hold the bow?” or “Do you remember the names of any tunes he played”? We decided to step away from interviewing people and focus on writing what we knew about Ed’s life and music. I spent long hours in Nashville at my dining room table listening to Ed’s recordings and working with the fiddle, while Brandon — in his three-room house in Ferrellsburg — transcribed interviews, re-checked facts, and constructed a manuscript. This went on for quite some time.

Eventually, Brandon came to visit and we decided to telephone a few people and ask more questions. Our first call went out to Edith Dingess, the only surviving child of Ed’s uncle, Peter Mullins. Andy and Dobie Mullins had told us about her several months earlier when we visited them on Harts Creek. Edith, they said, had recently moved from her home on Mud Fork in Logan to stay with a daughter in Columbus, Ohio. When we dialed her up, her daughter said, “She might be able to give you some information. Her memory is pretty bad. She’s 81 years old and she’s had a couple of real major heart attacks.”

I first asked Edith if she knew about Ed’s mother — her aunt — who apparently died in the early 1890s. Unfortunately, Edith didn’t know anything about her. As a matter of fact, she said she barely remembered Ed, who we knew had been practically raised by her father. She said he was a “nice person, likeable” who would “laugh and joke and go on.”

“I know Ed Haley used to come to our house with Mrs. Haley and they had a little girl. Might’ve had some boys — older,” Edith said. “I believe they lived down around Huntington. They’d come up home when my dad was a living and we was all home — I was young then — and they’d play music and we’d have company. We used to have some square dances at our house. We had some good times when he come up there.”

Edith said Ed’s children led him around, but he also got around using a cane.

Before we hung up, Edith gave us the telephone number of her niece, “Little Liza,” who lived with a daughter in Lancaster, Ohio. This was wonderful; I had first heard about Little Liza from Lawrence and Pat Haley in 1991. Little Liza had grown up in Uncle Peter’s home and was a featured face in family photographs. Prior to this lead, I wasn’t even sure if she was still alive.

When we called Liza, we first spoke with her daughter, Ora Booth, who gave the familiar introduction: “I don’t know if you’ll get too much out of her or not. She’s kinda forgetful and she repeats herself a lot. All I can do is put her on the phone and see what you get out of her. She’s seventy-six and her mind just comes and goes on a lot of things.”

I told Liza that I was good friends to Lawrence and Pat Haley, had heard a lot about her, and was very interested in Ed’s life. She said Ed used to stay a week or two with Uncle Peter — who she called “Poppy” — before heading back to Ashland. To our surprise, she had no idea exactly how Ed was related to her family.

“It’s been so long and you know I’ve been sick and everything and been operated on for cancer and stuff and I just don’t feel good,” she said. “When you get old, your mind just comes and goes.”

Just when I thought Liza’s memories of Ed had all but disappeared, she said, “I tell you, he was awful bad to drink all the time. Lord, have mercy. Anything he could drink, he’d drink it. That might have been half what killed him. He was a mean man. Just mean after women and stuff. I don’t know whether he could see a bit or not, but you’d get and hide from him and he’d come towards ya. I was scared of him.”

I asked Liza who Ed played music with when he visited at Peter’s and she said, “He just played with his wife. He didn’t have nobody else to play with. Lord, him and her’d get into a fight and they’d fight like I don’t know what.”

I wondered if Ed fought with his kids.

“Yeah, they liked to killed Ed Haley one time up there,” she said. “They’d just get into a fight and the kids’d try to separate their mommy and daddy and it’d just all come up. I had to holler for Ewell to come down there and get them boys off’n Ed Haley ’cause I was afraid they’s a gonna kill him. I didn’t want that to happen, you know? He got down there and buddy he put them boys a going. They was mean. I guess they took that back after Ed Haley. Yeah, he’d come up there and go here and yonder. After Mommy and Poppy got so bad off, people’d bring him down there and set him off and I had to take care of them, so Poppy just told him, said, ‘Ed, she has to wait on us and she can’t wait on you. You’ll just have to go somewhere else.’ He did.”

That was a horrible image.

In Search of Ed Haley 335

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in African American History, Ed Haley, Music

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accordion, Aracoma, Ashland, Bill Bowler, Clayton White, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, Kentucky, Kiss Me Quick, Lawrence Haley, Logan, Lula Lee, Man of Constant Sorrow, Manuel Martin, Mona Haley, music, Nora Martin, Old Man Duff, Pat Haley, Soutwood Mountain, West Virginia, writing

Meanwhile, as Brandon flushed out more information about the 1889 feud, I was on the phone with Ed’s daughter, Mona Hager. In no time, she was singing “Old Man Duff”, one of Ed’s songs:

Old Man Duff was so doggone tough

That they called him dynamite.

On a mattress filled with broken glass

He rested well each night.

He combed his hair with a garden rake

And he ate his vittles raw.

He picked his teeth with a horseshoe nail

And he shaved his beard with a saw.

Old Man Duff was mighty tough

And rough as a man could be.

He had hair on his chest

And he wore no vest a

And he looked like a chimpanzee.

Old Man Duff had a daughter fair

But she died a poor old maid.

Lots of men woulda courted her

But they were all afraid.

Once old Duff seen a fella with her.

You could hear him rave and shout:

He’d put his hand down the poor man’s throat

And he’d turn him inside out.

Old Man Duff was mighty rough

And tough as a man could be.

He ate iron nails and the bones of whales

And he drank gasoline for tea.

Old Man Duff lived a thousand years

And he died and went below.

And when old Satan looked at him

He smiled and said, “Hello.”

Now the fire was mighty hot

When they put old Duff in there,

But he layed right down and he went to sleep

And it never singed a hair.

Old Man Duff was mighty rough

And tough as a man could be.

He had hair on his chest

And he wore no vest

And he looked like a chimpanzee.

Mona also remembered Ed singing “Man of Constant Sorrow”. She said Ed sometimes sang “little ditties” like with “Sourwood Mountain”. Ella did the same thing to “Kiss Me Quick”.

Kiss me quick, kiss me runnin’.

Kiss me quick ’cause my daddy’s comin’.

Love my wife, love my baby.

Love my biscuits sopped in gravy.

Ed never called square dances but would “blurt out some of the square dance reel” while fiddling.

I told Mona that I was still very interested in the source of Ed’s music.

“Pop was around a lot of blacks, you know, up in the coalfields up in West Virginia,” she said. “I even had a black nanny up there. She babysat me sometimes for Mom and Pop. Now that was at Manuel and Nora Martin’s house on the hill there at Aracoma [near Logan]. And Pop took me up to an old color lady’s bootleg joint one time somewhere up in West Virginia. And I know he was around a lot of blacks and I know that he learned some of the black’s music. They had a lot of blind friends that made music on the street, too, and one of them was Clayton White. He played an accordion. He walked up from 15th to 16th and back, you know.”

I asked Mona how many musicians were playing on the streets of Ashland in Ed’s time and she said, “Well, there was Pop and Mom, and there was Bill Bowler, and then there was a lady named Lula Lee. Now she was an illiterate woman and a lot of people got my mom and her mixed up. Mom was a cultured lady.”

I asked Mona if she thought her mother’s education rubbed off on Ed over the years and she said, “Oh, yeah. He only got uncultured when he was drinking. He talked well educated but of course he wasn’t. He was a very intelligent man.”

Mona seemed surprised when I told her that Ed could supposedly quote the Bible.

I asked her more about Ed’s and Ella’s relationship in later years and she said, “You know about me bringing him back from Logan back to Mom after they were divorced? Well, I was up there and I persuaded Pop to come home with me and I brought Pop home and he had one of those long change purses that snapped together and he had that in his pocket. And when we got home, he sit down and he was talking to Mom and he said, ‘Ella, I’ve got this plumb full of half-dollars and if you’ll let me sit by your fire this winter, I’ll give them all to you.’ I’m glad I took him home. That was when we lived on Greenup. He stayed with her until he died. Eventually Mom stayed with Lawrence and Patricia. She didn’t do any good after Pop died. She lost her friends. She didn’t have anybody to talk to.”

So after their divorce, they had a good relationship?

“They had a better relationship than they did before the divorce,” Mona said.

In Search of Ed Haley 322

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Spottswood

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Brownlow's Dream, Drunkard's Hell, Ed Haley, Harts Creek, history, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, music, Peter Mullins, Roxie Mullins, Vilas Adams, Violet Mullins, West Virginia, writing

After spending a few hours with Vilas, we drove a short distance up main Harts Creek to see Violet Mullins. Violet still lived in her mother Roxie’s little house. I hadn’t seen her since my first visit to Harts with Lawrence Haley in 1991; the home seemed a bit empty without Roxie. Violet began to speak in a voice hauntingly reminiscent of her mother’s.

“I knew Ed well,” she said. “He used to come stay all night at our house when he was traveling through here. I know he played all kinds of music. He’d play tunes and then sing them. He’d sing ‘The Drunkard’s Hell’ and the ‘Brownlow’s Dream’, I’ve heard him play that. They’d always be a big gang with him and I never stayed around with them where they was a playing music very much. He’d drink with them every now and then. He’d get to drinking and they’d get into a racket and have him a talking every once in a while. He never was at our house too much — just come and stay all night, him and his daughter and his son. Now, his son Jack stayed with us a long time. He come here, you see, and stayed with Uncle Peter’s fellers, and with different families around here. He stayed for a year or two.”

In Search of Ed Haley 312

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor

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Allen Martin, Appalachia, Atlanta, Ben Adams, Brandon Kirk, Charley Brumfield, crime, Frank Adams, Georgia, Greasy George Adams, Harts Creek, history, Huntington Herald-Advertiser, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, moonshining, murder, Ward Brumfield, West Virginia, writing

“Greasy George” Adams, a son of Ben Adams, was apparently a notorious character on Harts Creek in the early decades of the twentieth century. Lawrence Haley had mentioned his name to me on my first trip to Ashland, while Brandon said his home was the scene of Charley and Ward Brumfield’s double murder in 1926. A 1953 article from the Huntington Herald-Advertiser titled “HARTS CREEK HOME WHERE FIVE MET DEATH NOW IS OFTEN SCENE OF PRAYER MEETINGS” had this great interview with Adams.

George Adams of Harts Creek in Logan County has his rifle on the wall now and instead of a pistol in his hand he carries a prayer book. He’s given up feuding and fighting and settled down to old-time religion at his neat farm home where five persons were killed in gun fights. Almost never does the tantalizing smell of moonshine cooking in a barrel up a mountain hollow drift down to taunt the nostrils of the man who proudly states he has made thousands of gallons and the law never chopped up one of his stills. “I put ’em high up in the hills and the law got too tired before they reached them,” he said.

THE HONKING of a brood of ducks and the whining of droves of bees busy at work at his 40 honey hives are about the only sounds which disturb the silence around his 25 acres of land today. Land which he says he was able to buy through the sale of bootleg liquor. But it was not always so at George Adams’ place. Several decades ago he recalls that when he heard a rifle singing through the hills he reckoned it was a neighbor shooting at another neighbor. Open season on humans has closed in the area since, and squirrels and rabbits are about the only targets. George Adams misses the sparsity of “shine” from the hill country he loves so well, even though he says he hasn’t touched a drop since the last killing at his home. “Dang revenooers probably don’t know how good moonshine made out of tomatoes is, or they wouldn’t go around bustin’ up all the stills in the country,” he said.

THE MOUNTAIN folk in the Harts Creek area will tell you that there’s many a home along the small stream which flows into the Guyandotte River that’s seen a shooting or a killing. But George Adams’ home is slightly above par for the area — five people have met violent deaths there. As “Greasy George,” which his neighbors call him, puts it: “No trouble for a man to get in trouble but it’s hell to get out!” And he’s a man who should know about trouble. His legs are a little wobbly now because of carrying his six foot of height and weight around for 72 years, and he gets a little short of breath when working too hard, but when he starts talking about his shooting scrapes, he has all the enthusiasm of a country boy walking a country mile to a country house to date a country girl for the first time.

“I FUST got into trouble when I was nineteen. Mail carrier undertook to kill Dad and I went after him. Somebody got him,” he said, hastily adding: “Weren’t too nice a way to treat a man who delivers letters.” George related that his Dad got shot four times in the exchange of lead and “we both went to jail.” A trial in Logan County lasted for three days and he said, “Dad nearly went broke paying off lawyers,” before a verdict of self defense was brought in. That shooting affair took place less than a mile from George’s present home but several years later his kitchen was the scene of a battle where he said “guns were going off like popcorn.” Three participants emptied their guns at each other after George said one of them knocked him down and out of the way. Three burials took place afterwards. Before George built his present frame house over a log cabin, the logs were speckled with the bullets which went wild. The house today is probably the only frame house in the nation which has a cement roof on it three inches thick. “Ran out of lumber and got concrete real cheap,” George said. “While the house is plenty warm in winter time it sure is hot in summer,” he added.

ADAMS recalls that except for getting a year in jail for fighting during the kitchen shooting affair, the only time he strayed from the Harts area was when he went on a three-year vacation in Atlanta, Ga., courtesy of the federal government. Things were peaceful at his house for a while until a relative “up and chased his wife over here,” he said. The relative, according to George, fired and hit the wife with a blast from a 16-gauge shot gun. The next and last time a shooting occurred in the old homestead, Frank Adams, George’s son, lost his life. He said the affair was due to drinking and “since then I haven’t touched a drop unless somebody put it in my food unbeknowst to me.” “My boys were singing a lot of old fool songs and I told ’em to shut up. My son got up and slapped me down. While I was knocked out somebody shot Frank.”

GEORGE SAID he had 18 children. Three are living at home with him now and the rest are in other parts of the state. He says he can’t recall all their names “but they are in the Bible.” During recent years his home which saw so much violence is now the scene of many a religious meeting. He has even constructed benches in his yard to seat the neighbors who come from miles around to hear the services. He’s not filled full of the brine and vinegar he had when he was younger and as he says: “Me and other folks have quit this tomfoolery.” But nevertheless, George remarked that he would “sorta like to git in ‘nuther shakedown if I wasn’t too old.” And on the wall overhanging his bed is his rifle. “Keep it so’s if a man keeps coming in the house at night when I say stop I can stop him,” he said.

In Search of Ed Haley 311

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, Harts, Lincoln County Feud

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Al Brumfield, Ann Brumfield, Appalachia, Ben Adams, Bob Adkins, Brandon Kirk, Burl Adams, Cain Adkins, crime, Daisy Ross, Ed Haley, Green McCoy, Guyandotte River, Harts, Harts Creek, Henderson Dingess, history, Howard Dalton, Imogene Haley, Joe Adams, John Frock Adams, John Hartford, John W Runyon, Lawrence Haley, Lawrence Kirk, Lincoln County, Logan County, Major Adkins, Milt Haley, Paris Brumfield, Peter McCoy, Sallie Dingess, Trace Fork, West Virginia, writing

Two months later, Brandon was still digging, but in a different way. He was knee-deep in land records at the Lincoln and Logan County court houses. He was curious — based on the economic aspect of the 1889 feud — to know about property ownership for feudists, particularly those with land around the mouth of Harts Creek.

He started with the Brumfields.

In 1889, Paris Brumfield owned 771 acres of land worth $1020, while his wife owned 367 acres worth $483. Al Brumfield had 295 acres (195 acres on Brown’s Branch and 100 acres on the Guyan River) worth $642. By combining Al’s totals to that of his parents, the Brumfields owned a total of 1433 acres of land worth $2143. A little further up Harts Creek, Henderson and Sarah Dingess owned 546 acres (five tracts) worth $1234.50 with a building valued at 100 dollars.

How did these totals compare to the land holdings of their enemies?

Well, Cain Adkins owned 205 acres worth $420 (with no buildings listed for 1889), while John Runyon owned 100 acres worth $187.50. Ben Adams owned at least 340 acres in Lincoln and Logan Counties (2 tracts) worth $380. By combining Ben’s property with that of Adkins and Runyon they owned 645 acres worth $987.50 — not even half of the Brumfield family holdings.

Based on these records, we realized that it might have been the financial superiority of the Brumfields and Dingesses which caused Adams, Runyon, and/or Adkins to act out against them (through Milt and Green).

But there was also a reason for the Brumfields to feel a little threatened themselves: John Runyon, whose 100 acres of property was situated geographically closest to them near the mouth of Harts Creek, had accumulated his estate in only three years of residence in Harts. His first tract, totaling 75 acres, was worth $1.50 and was deeded by A.S. “Major” Adkins in 1887. The other tract, totaling 25 acres and worth three dollars per acre, was deeded in 1888. Neither tract contained a building, according to land records.

Al’s 100 acres near the mouth of Harts Creek, in contrast, reflected eight years of effort.

Brumfield was likely concerned that Runyon had acquired so much land at the mouth of Harts in such a short time, especially since it was property that he wanted for himself.

It was immediately clear in looking at the feud in mild economic terms that Milt Haley and Green McCoy were pawns in a larger game between local elites. While Paris Brumfield, Al Brumfield, Cain Adkins, John Runyon, and Ben Adams were leading citizens, property owners and businessmen, Milt and Green were timber laborers and musicians who owned no property whatsoever. Based on what we’d heard from Daisy Ross, it was easy to see why Green might have took a shot at Paris, but why did he attack Al? And what was Milt’s motivation for even getting involved in the whole mess? Was he pulled into the fray because of his friendship to Green, as Daisy Ross had said? Or did he have connections to Ben Adams (a possible economic dependence on the timber-boss, his residence nearby Adams on Trace, or the fact his wife was related to Ben)?

And what did either man hope to gain from the assassination of Al Brumfield? I mean, that’s a hell of a lot to risk for a side of bacon and a few dollars. I had this nagging suspicion that they were maybe innocent of the crime, but Brandon was pretty well convinced of their guilt (as had been Lawrence Haley). He did, however, leave an opening by pointing out how Bob Adkins, Howard Dalton, Joe Adams and Lawrence Kirk had all heard that they were innocent. Bob and Joe had actually mentioned other suspects: Burl Adams, a nephew to Ben Adams, and John “Frock” Adams, a half-brother to Ed’s mother (who later shot his wife’s head off with a shotgun in his front yard). There was also the testimony of Preacher McCoy, who said Milt and Green were “as innocent as Jesus Christ on the cross.”

In Search of Ed Haley 307

18 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Calhoun County, Civil War, Ed Haley, Music

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Ashland, Atlanta, Big Ugly Creek, Birdie, blind, Boatin' Up Sandy, Catlettsburg, Chapmanville, Charleston, Cincinnati, civil war, Clark Kessinger, Coalton, Crawley Creek, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddlers, fiddling, Girl With the Blue Dress On, Godby Branch School, Grantsville, Grayson, Great Depression, Green Shoal, Harts School, history, Hugh Dingess School, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Logan, Margaret Arms, Mona Haley, music, Orange Blossom Special, Pat Haley, Ralph Haley, Slim Clere, Sweet Georgia Brown, Tennessee Waggoner, The Old Lady Carried the Jug Around the Hill, Wewanta, writing

We hadn’t played long until Slim was telling me more about his background.

“I came from a line of Irish fiddlers,” he said. “My dad, his brothers, and his dad…  The old man was so good on the fiddle — he was in the Civil War — my grandfather — that the soldiers all chipped in and bought him a fiddle and he didn’t have to fight. He was from Coalton on the road to Grayson out back of Ashland.”

Slim said his dad played “The Old Lady Carried the Jug Around the Hill” and “Girl With the Blue Dress On”.

Here comes the girl with the blue dress on, the blue dress on, with the blue dress on.

Everybody’s crazy about the girl with the blue dress on…

I asked him if his father played “Catlettsburg” and he said yes, although it was not the same version as what Ed played.

“My dad played it,” Slim said. “He played ‘Birdie’, ‘Tennessee Waggoner’. He got these two fingers cut when he was working at a steel mill and his fingers stayed stiff so he had to play the rest of his life with these two fingers. I don’t remember when he played with all five ’cause I was too small. He played ‘Boatin’ Up Sandy’.”

Every now and then, Slim would tell me something about Ed.

“Every Saturday Ed would go to a county courthouse someplace,” he said. “Believe it or not, he was in Grantsville one time when I was up there, sitting on the steps up there at the courthouse. I walked over, I said, ‘Ed, aren’t you out of place?’ He said, ‘You’re liable to find me anywhere.'”

I asked Slim if he ever saw Ed drunk and he said, “I don’t think I ever saw him sober. He didn’t get too high. Seemed like it give him more pep.”

I asked Slim if he remembered Sweet Georgia Brown coming to see Ed in Ashland and he said, “He was up in Ashland at one time. We called him Brownie. Well, he wasn’t around Ed too much. Ed was a close guy. He didn’t associate with a lot of people. Now, he liked me pretty well…but most fiddle players don’t like fiddle players.”

Speaking of fiddlers, Slim said he had met a lot of them during his lifetime. I wondered if he ever met any as good as Ed and he said, “Clark Kessinger was the closest. I think Clark learned from him. See when Clark made records for Brunswick — they had a studio down in Ashland — Ed wouldn’t play on it. He wouldn’t make records. Didn’t want to. He wouldn’t play over the radio. He said they wasn’t any money in that. He wanted to be somewhere somebody could throw a nickel or dime in that cup. He was very poor. He wasn’t starving to death, but — his wife was blind, too — there was no way that they could make any money. And he had a 17- or 18-year-old boy — he was a good guitar player, but he wouldn’t play with him. I don’t remember what his name was. He was ashamed of his father and mother — to get out in public. Not for any personal reasons…just the fact he could see and they couldn’t.”

Slim began talking about his own career in music, mostly his Depression-era radio work. He mentioned working with or meeting people like Bill and Charlie Monroe and Earl Scruggs and even credited himself with bringing “Orange Blossom Special” to Charleston from Atlanta in October of 1938. He kind of caught us by surprise when he spoke of having played all through the Guyandotte Valley.

“We played personal appearances up and down through there,” Slim said. “Played schools and theaters: Godby Branch School, up on Crawley Creek — one room school — and Hugh Dingess School — it was about an eight-room red brick building — Green Shoal, Wewanta. Harts School, I guess I must have played that school fifteen times. From about ’39 on up to 50-something. Everybody turned out when we played Harts. It was supposed to be the meanest place they was on the Guyan at that time. Came across Big Ugly Creek there. See, it goes from Lincoln County over into Boone. I used to broadcast down in there. I’d say, ‘All you Big Ugly girls be sure to come out and see us now.'”

I asked Slim if he played with any local musicians and he said, “No, we went in and played the show. Once in a while, we’d have amateur contests and they’d come in. Well, we’d have fiddling conventions at big high schools.”

I asked Slim if he ever saw Ed around Harts and he said, “No, not down there. Only time I ever seen Ed was around Ashland and Logan and Chapmanville. He played at the bank in Chapmanville. Chapmanville was 12 miles from Logan.”

Later that night, Brandon and I found some more family photographs in a box at Pat Haley’s. One was of Ella, while others were of Margaret Arms. Margaret was a real “mystery lady”: nobody seemed clear on her relationship to the Haley family. Lawrence Haley had remembered her as a cousin to either Ed or Ella, while Mona called her “Margaret Thomas” and said she lived in Cincinnati.

In Search of Ed Haley 305

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Calhoun County, Clay County, Ed Haley, Music

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Appalachia, Arnoldsburg, Ashland, banjo, Ben Friend, Bernard Postalwait, Bill Stutler, Bob Carr, Brandon Kirk, Calhoun County, Camp Chase, Charleston, civil war, Clay, Clay County, Clendenin, Ed Haley, Ed Williams, Edden Hammons, fiddlers, fiddling, history, Hog Run Hollow, Jack McElwain, John Hartford, Kentucky, Kim Johnson, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Lincoln Republican, Luther Carder, music, Pat Haley, Pisgah Bridge, Richwood, Sol Carpenter, St. Albans, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, William E. Chilton, Williams River, Wilson Douglas, writing

Brandon and I got a good night’s sleep at Pat Haley’s home in Ashland, then took off the next morning to see Wilson Douglas in Clendenin, West Virginia. I wanted to hear more about his memories of Ed, play some music, and go see the old Laury Hicks homeplace. Wilson met us on his porch with Kim Johnson, a banjo player. We all went inside and got settled, where Kim mentioned that Laury first invited Ed to his house after meeting him in St. Albans, near Charleston. Wilson was quick to offer new details about Ed — of a more seedy variety. He said Ed “ran around” a lot with Bernard Postalwait when he was in the area. They usually got drunk and went “women crazy” and stayed gone all night. Hicks apparently had a “wild side,” too. Wilson hinted that he was a moonshiner who sometimes left home on timber jobs…and never showed up.

We wasted little time in taking off to see some of Ed’s old stomping grounds in Clay and Calhoun Counties. There was a slight drizzle, just enough to wet everything.

Our first stop was the Hicks homeplace, which had been overtaken by weeds on my previous visit in 1994. The weeds were gone this time, so we got out of the car and maneuvered through the rotting remains of an outhouse, chicken coop, cellar base, parts of an old fence, and scattered boards — all damp and colored dark brown due to the light rain dropping down around us.

It was a far cry from the “old days” when (according to Ugee Postalwait) the family had farmed corn, wheat and cane all the way back up the mountain to the head of Hog Run Hollow. Gone were the apple and peach orchards. Gone were the gardens down by the creek (now taken in by the paved road). And, most obviously, gone was the old Hicks home, the last of four houses built on the site (the final one having been constructed in 1936).

We soon made our way up the hill to the cemetery, where Brandon took pictures. I just kind of stared at Laury’s grave — picturing Ed playing there after Laury’s death in 1937.

As we came off the hill, Wilson said Hicks was rumored to have died from “some bad cases of VD.”

Later that day, Wilson showed us Clay, the seat of government for Clay County. This was the place where Ed Haley arrived by train from Charleston enroute to the home of Laury Hicks. Lawrence Haley once told me about his father walking from Clay to Arnoldsburg, a town some thirty miles away. Brandon had found this great article titled “Old-Time Fiddlers Will Gather At Clay Saturday” from a 1921 edition of the Lincoln Republican.

Clay, W.Va., Jan. 10 — Elaborate preparations are being made in the little city of Clay for the old-time fiddlers’ contest which will be held on Saturday night, January 22. An attendance surpassing anything ever held in Clay is expected, and the hospitable citizens of this town have appointed a committee to look after the welfare of its guests. Similar contests have been held in various other sections of West Virginia this winter, but they cannot even compare to the one which will be held in Clay, it is predicted. Old-time fiddlers from far and near are coming to compete, and, if possible, carry off the honors of the evening.

Among some of the celebrated old-time fiddlers who will be here is “Jack” McElwaine of Erbacon, in Webster county. “Jack” has played the fiddle for more than fifty years, and between times has been justice of the peace, preached the gospel and practiced law. He learned to play under Saul Carpenter, the most famous old-time fiddler of them all, and who played himself out of Camp Chase during the Civil war. Another fiddler equally famous is “Edin” Hammons, who hails from the head of Wiliams river, and whose sole occupation all through life has been hunt, trap and play the fiddle. “Edin” has killed more bears, deer and played the fiddle more than any other man on Williams River.

It is said that Senator William E. Chilton and Colonel Bob Carr of Charleston have been given invitations to attend the contest and compete with these old-time fiddlers.

Several local celebrities are expected to enter the contest, and the old mountaineer fiddlers are looking forward to this part of the contest with great pleasure and saying “the city fellers will have to fiddle some to beat them.” No complete list of the fiddlers who enter the contest has been made public, but some fifteen or twenty are expected. Ben Friend, Ed Williams, Luther Carder and “Bill” Stutler, men who have been winning prizes in other contests, will be there.

People of Clay and surrounding country are looking forward to this event with great anticipation and pleasure. The last contest of the kind was held at Richwood, Thursday night of last week, and fully 200 persons were unable to get into the theater where it was held.

There are very few of the real old time fiddlers who play the old mountain tunes living today, and within a very short time there will be none left and no one to take their place. The younger generation has neither talent nor desire for this kind of music. At any rate, one can not find a young man of today who can play the fiddle in the “good old-fashioned way.”

Clay, I found, was a small shell of a town with a nice old courthouse sitting high on the hill. There was the typical arrangement of buildings: sagging old businesses hinting at lost prosperity, a small bank, dollar stores, a car dealership, a post office, and a Gino’s restaurant. No red lights and basically one two-lane thoroughfare through town. There was a hotel with the weekly newspaper office headquartered beneath where, I was told, you could go in late and help yourself to a key and then pay for your room the next morning on your way out. After passing through town and crossing the Pisgah Bridge, we spotted an old section of residences and a community church. The track bed was still visible but the railroad was long gone.

In Search of Ed Haley 295

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Ashland, Big Sandy River, Bill Day, Canton, Clay Hicks, Durbin Creek, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Florida, history, Jean Thomas, Jilson Setters, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Manuel Martin, Margaret Payne, Mona Haley, music, Ohio, Pat Haley, Ralph Haley, Ralph Payne, Rosie Day, Tampa, Wee House in the Wood, writing

We next discussed Jean Thomas, who wanted to feature Ed in her “Wee House in the Wood” production.

“I remember Pop and Mom didn’t care too much for Jean Thomas,” Mona said.

Pat said she had a run-in with Thomas later, long after Ed had died.

“Larry and I went to see Jean Thomas so we could take our cub scouts out there and as soon as she found out he was Ed Haley’s son, she didn’t want a thing to do with him. We never did take our troop out there. She said Pop was blasphemous — which I suppose was true — and he was a drunkard because he would not go along with her plans to be Jilson Setters.”

Mona said, “Bill Day…there was some controversy there between Jean Thomas and Pop and Mom. And I think Bill Day had a lot to do with it. I remember that. He was almost blind. He wasn’t quite blind. He wasn’t blind like Mom and Pop. I wouldn’t say they were friends, but they were acquaintances.”

Mona said Bill Day wasn’t much of a fiddler and seemed to enjoy telling me how his son Clay was cross-eyed and a little “off”.

Talking about Bill Day got us on the subject of his wife, “Aunt Rosie Day.” Mona had great memories of her.

“She kept house for us a lot and lived with us. She was rough. She’s whipped me home a lot of time with switches. She chewed bubble gum all the time and dipped snuff and she would stick bubble gum up all along the door facings and stuff and go back and get it later.”

Pat said, “I knew she dipped snuff. I used to go down and try to clean Aunt Rosie’s house, bless her heart.”

Mona said, “We never called her ‘Aunt Rosie’. We just called her ‘Rosie’. She fell down the steps one time from the landing. She was drunk. Her and Mom had been drinking apricot brandy. I remember it well. They was a stove in the corner and Rosie got down to the landing and missed a step and hit that stove with her head and made a big dent in that stove and never even hurt her. Mom fell down the steps too once, but she fell from the top to the landing. This time Mom fell down, Pop was playing music down in the living room and Mom was dancing upstairs to his music and danced right off the edge of those steps. It didn’t seem to hurt her, either. They could make the house come alive with music. When I would dance, Pop would say, ‘I hear you. I hear you.'”

Pat said Ed used to get drunk and fight with Aunt Rosie Day. He liked to drink with her son-in-law, Manuel Martin. Martin was a bootlegger. He and his wife lived on Durbin Creek up the Big Sandy River. In the 1960s, Manuel got drunk and shot his son at the kitchen table in Canton, Ohio. Lawrence went to see him in the penitentiary, Pat said.

Just before Mona left, I told her, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you coming over here and talking to me.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she said. “Anything I can do. I’m available.”

At the door, I gave her a big hug and she said, “It’s good seeing you, John. You seem like family.”

A few minutes later, just before I turned in to bed, I mentioned Ralph Haley’s importance in this story. It was Ralph, after all, who had the foresight to record Ed and Ella Haley’s music in the late forties. (Never mind that he wasn’t really Ed’s son or that he recorded him on a machine stolen from the army.) Pat said Ralph helped take care of the family when he was young, like stealing chickens when the kids were hungry. When he was older, he kind of distanced himself from the family by changing his last name from Haley to Payne — perhaps to protest Ed’s treatment of his mother. (This was the surname used on his tombstone in Cincinnati.) The Haleys tried to keep in touch with Ralph’s widow, Margaret, who remarried a younger man named Mel and moved to Florida to work a chicken farm. At some point, she had a grocery store in Tampa called “M&M’s”. In the late forties, Lawrence was stationed nearby and visited. When he went back, her husband put a pistol in his face and ran him off. Pat had no idea why.

In Search of Ed Haley 294

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Ashland, Catlettsburg, Catlettsburg Stock Yard, Doc Holbrook, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Great Depression, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Mona Haley, Ohio, Pat Haley, Ralph Mullins, South Point, Ward Hollow, writing

Pat, slowly becoming the interviewer, asked Mona how far back she could remember and she said, “As far back as I can remember was Halbert Street. I can remember going out in the rain and standing out in the rain while Mom and Pop was fighting or Pop was fighting Mom — which that was probably the way it was. But it takes two to make a fight or an argument. I don’t remember whatever started it. I just remember Pop being mean to Mom, and that was on 45th Street. And the next memory I have is at Ward Hollow. 337 37th Street, that was Ward Hollow. And the next one was at 17th Street. And the next one was back up on 45th Street.”

Pat said, “When they lived on 45th Street that time had to be about ’48, ’49.”

Mona agreed: “It was, because Ralph was a baby. My Ralph.”

Pat said, “Good or bad memories are you talking about?”

Mona kind of laughed and said, “They’re all bad but there had to been some good ones.”

I said, “Bad stuff is easiest to remember. Most history and everything is told in terms of bad things instead of good things. Usually, if you go along a highway, most highway markers that you see commemorate battles and tragedies.”

Mona said, “I remember some good times with Mom. I remember seeing a lot of movies.”

Pat said, “That’s what Larry said. Said you’d see movies while they played.”

Mona said, “Yeah. I can imagine how Mom worried, too. I couldn’t sit there with her. They didn’t let us go too far away.”

Mona said she mostly traveled with Ella as a girl but remembered going with Ed to Doc Holbrook’s office where she watched him reach into her father’s mouth with something that looked like a giant spoon and take out his tonsils. Ed said, “How long do I have to do this?” and Doc answered, “It’s over…” and then they started playing music.

I said, “Did your mom and dad usually play around a movie theatre?” and Mona said, “Seems to me like it might have been a block or two away from the movies but that wasn’t very far.”

I asked what kind of places Ed usually looked for when he first came into a town and she said, “Pop always looked for a courthouse square or a YMCA — something where they’d be a lot of people around. He played at the Catlettsburg Stock Yard a lot, him and Mom.”

We made small talk for a few minutes — the kind that often signals the end of a conversation — when Pat said to Mona, “What do you remember about your childhood other than those bad memories?”

“I remember Mom playing with me and me getting a wash pan and washing her face and her hands and her arms,” Mona said. “Just with Mom, you know. Lawrence and I would take turns doing dishes and cooking for Mom and Pop. I remember playing cowboys and Indians with the boys and they didn’t like me playing with them.”

Mona was apparently quite the tomboy when she was a young girl.

Pat said, “I told John about how harsh they were with you about keeping your dress down and sitting property.”

Mona said, “Yeah, they were. They was rough on me. There wasn’t any ‘Come here, let me have you,’ or no love. Always ‘You do this’ or ‘You do that.'”

Pat said she figured Lawrence had been right in on all that and Mona said, “Why, I’d a whipped Lawrence. You remember Mom sent Lawrence to get me one time — I don’t know where I was – and he said, ‘I can’t.’ She said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘She can whip me.'”

Pat said, “I’ve heard Mom tell that story. And he used to tattle on you.”

Mona said, “Yeah, he did. But I don’t know if I tattled on him or not. I don’t remember.”

A little later, when they were teenagers, Lawrence was so overprotective of Mona that he cut one of her boyfriends with a knife trying to run him away from the house. Ed was also hard on her boyfriends; he called one of them a “raggedy-ass-son-of-a-bitch.”

Mona told me about her memories of Ed in his later years.

“He retired from playing…period. I remember one time on 45th Street. I came over from South Point, where I lived, and I tried to get Pop to play some for me and Mom said, ‘He’ll never play no more. He’s quit.’ It was a long time after the divorce.”

I asked her if Ed had his beard at that time and she said, “Yes. I used to shave him with a straight razor under his beard. Trim it. He shaved hisself most of the time, but once in a while I’d shave him.”

She said Pop seldom took baths.

“He said it was a waste of water. He was like that guy that said too much bathing will weaken you.”

In Search of Ed Haley 293

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, Jack Haley, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Luther Trumbo, Mona Haley, Nellie Muncy, Noah Haley, Pat Haley, The Waltons, West Virginia, Williamson, writing

The more I played for Mona, the more Pat’s little dogs barked at me — especially when I got up and danced. Their commotion caused Mona to say, “We always had an animal. We used to have an old blue-tick hound named King and every time Pop would play the fiddle he’d howl. Uncle Luther gave him to Pop when I was a baby. I don’t know if it was as much Pop as it was Mom, but they all loved King. All of us did. He was smart. He was a good hunter. He taught all the dogs in the neighborhood to hunt. Everybody wanted to hunt with him — they come from miles around to borrow him to go hunting — and someone stole him one time and he was gone about a week and when he came back blood was running out of all four paws and he just flopped on the front porch. He had a broken-like front paw right here in the first joint. He was young then. We had him till he died. He growed old and died. I was about fourteen when he died — maybe thirteen.”

I wondered if Ed ever used a seeing eye-dog and Pat said no, although Ella did. She said the family had a pet dog named “Jaybird” when she married Lawrence.

I could tell that Mona was in the mood to talk, so I put my fiddle away and told her about our recent research on Milt Haley. When I told her that Milt appeared to have been an illegitimate son of Nellie Muncy, she immediately told me how Ed visited a family of Muncys around Williamson, West Virginia. Her memories of such trips were vague.

“I remember a place we had to go in an automobile so far and then we had to cross the river in a boat to get to where we was a going — in a rowboat — but I don’t remember where it was. It had to be in West Virginia somewhere. I remember a store building where we went and we slept upstairs over that store building. I remember Pop getting real mean and mad at Mom up there one night and I wanted to crawl under the covers and pull it on me. He was getting real nasty with her.”

I asked Mona what they were into it over and she said, “Sex, I reckon. He wanted it and she didn’t want it and he said he had to have it. That’s how nasty he was — but he didn’t say it in those nice words. My dad happened to be drinking that time, too, so it made it that much worse.”

Trying to lighten the memory, I told her that sex had been a sore spot with married couples for thousands of years.

Pat said what was remarkable about Mona’s memories was the fact that Lawrence had never said a bad word about his father.

“He never talked bad about Pop,” she said. “Of course, he was Momma’s boy.”

Mona said Ed only whipped her once.

“It was on my birthday and I was getting ready to cry and he said, ‘Four, five, six.’ That’s the only time he ever whipped me. I do remember a time that Jack and Noah got into a fight and they was young men. And Pop jumped up — he wore suspenders — and he had them down. He jumped up to part them and got a hold of each of them and his pants fell down. The fight stopped and we all started laughing.”

Pat said that happened at 1040 Greenup after she’d married into the family — “right out on the front porch.”

Mona added, “But he had long underwear on.”

That fond memory caused her to say, “You know, The Waltons remind me a lot of the way we were brought up. We had a pretty good family life. We’d tell each other good night and stuff. Lawrence and I usually slept with Mom.”

Pat said, “Scratch each other’s backs,” and Mona said, “Yeah.”

I asked if Ed came around and kissed every one goodnight at bedtime and Mona said, “No, no. Mom did. Pop didn’t. If she’d tell him to go see about one of us, why, he would.”

For entertainment, the family gathered around the radio or listened to Ed’s “wild stories.”

In Search of Ed Haley 292

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, Music

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Ashland, Blackberry Blossom, Calhoun County Blues, Cherry River Rag, Come Take A Trip in My Airship, Dunbar, fiddling, history, John Hartford, John Lozier, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Man of Constant Sorrow, Mona Haley, music, Parkersburg Landing, Pat Haley, Ragtime Annie, writing

“Pop put a lot of emotions in his music,” Mona said. “He was real excited with his playing. He would put things in there that no one else would.”

She described Ed’s music as loud and lively — contrary to testimony from John Lozier and others — and told how it generated a great deal of excitement. She re-iterated that Ed had very little body movements when playing and seemed a little bothered by my energy when I played the fiddle — all the facial and head gestures, loud tapping, leg movements.

I asked her if Ed played much around home and she said, “When he was sad or when he was drinking or when he was happy he played — especially when he was happy.”

I wondered what made Ed happy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe hearing about a place to play or some money to be made. Music was his life. There wasn’t much about the family that made him happy. I mean, we was always fighting.”

In no time at all, Mona and I slipped into a familiar routine: me playing and asking things like “Did Ed play this?” or “Did Ed play it like this?” I played a lot of tunes for her — mostly ones I knew Ed played but also ones I had heard or suspected him of playing based on talking with Ugee Postalwait and Wilson Douglas and reading notes in the Lambert Collection.

When I played “Cherry River Rag”, Mona said, “I always loved that. Now that’s one that Pop put the slurs and insults in.”

Lawrence Haley had spoken of the “slurs and insults”, but I had never really figured out what they were. I had this theory that they were when Ed used tiny chromatic slides to create a modal and “slidey” note, thereby broadening and helping to achieve more of a “human voice effect” — much like vibrato does. This concept goes way back into Celtic history and may be much more a source for Blues than anything African. (Scholars have, incidentally, found no historical precedent for the Blues in the music of the continent of Africa.) I figured that Ed hit a little “dead” grace note beforehand which helped separate the notes in his long bow style. It is what the Irish call a “cut:” the finger on the grace note barely touches the string so as to give a good stop or separation.

As for the “slurs and insults,” Mona couldn’t seem to explain them either. I suggested listening to “Cherry River Rag” on Pat’s copy of Parkersburg Landing and having Mona point them out to me. We went into the living room and gathered around the record player. As “Cherry River Rag” played, Mona pointed out the slurs and insults. Basically, she described them as being when Ed slid a note for emphasis.

“Sounded to me, John, like when he was getting tired,” she said, back in the kitchen. “He was just wanting to get out of it as easy as he could.”

I asked if there were ever times when Ed would play and just slide the notes a lot and she said, “No, not unless he was drinking. He’d slide those notes a lot when he was drinking. Screech a lot when he was drinking — especially on those high keys.”

Mona loved it when I played “Man of Constant Sorrow”, saying, “Beautiful. That reminds me of Pop being sad. I love it, though. I wanted to tell you, they made a lot of requests, people on the street. They’d say, ‘Ed, play ‘Blackberry Blossom’. If he knew it, he’d play it. He had people dancing on the street, John. He could play forever.”

I played a variety of tunes for Mona that I thought Ed might have played but she only recognized one called “Wilson’s Jig”. She said her father played “Dunbar” a lot and recognized the melody for “Run Here Granny”. She said he made up the tunes “You Can’t Blame Me for That” and “Come Take A Trip in My Airship”. She said “Ragtime Annie” was one of her father’s “main attractions,” while “Birdie” sounded “very familiar.” She said Ed played “Old Joe Clark” and “Money Musk” and fiddled “Done Gone” in B-flat. She said something in my version of “Wild Hog in the Red Brush” was familiar, although she said she never heard Ed play anything with that title. When I played “Uncle Joe”, she immediately recognized the melody but not the title.

“See, I know so many of the tunes I’ve heard but I don’t know the title,” she said.

It was probably a little confusing for her to sit and listen while I assaulted her with a whole barrage of tunes, but I was so excited about picking her brain that I just kept playing.

She remembered Ed playing “Waggoner” and “Paddy on the Turnpike”, as well as the very similar “Snowbird on the Ashbank”. She recognized “Pumpkin Ridge”, “Old Joe Clark”, and “Money Musk”. She didn’t know the melody for “Brownlow’s Dream” but recognized the title, while she knew the melody for “Indian Squaw” but not the title. She said Ed never played “Orange Blossom Special” but did play “Listen to the Mockingbird” and even “made the bird sounds, too.”

When I played “Calhoun County Blues”, she said, “I’ve heard him play that lots. You put a lot more notes in it than what he did.”

Pat and Lawrence Haley

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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genealogy, history, Lawrence Haley, love, Pat Haley, photos

Pat and Lawrence Haley, c.1949

Pat and Lawrence Haley, c.1949

In Search of Ed Haley 283

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Air Force, Ashland, Ashland High School, Beverly Haley, Biloxi, C&O Railroad, David Haley, Ed Haley, history, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Minnie Hicks, Mississippi, music, Pat Haley, Ugee Postalwait, writing

A few days after my visit with Ugee, Lawrence Haley’s daughter Beverly Williams died of cancer. Beverly had asked me to sing at her funeral, so I loaded up my bus and rode to Ashland. After the funeral, I played a bunch of Ed’s tunes in Pat’s kitchen. Once again, I could almost feel Lawrence’s presence. There was something about the location and having all the Haleys around that brought out Ed’s music in a marvelous way.

In quiet times, Pat spoke more with me about family affairs.

“Larry went to the Ashland high school until his senior year and he left when he was seventeen to join the Air Force,” she said. “He said he never ever wanted his children to ask him about the war and him not be able to say he went to fight. He got his GED when he was in Biloxi, Mississippi. He wanted his diploma from the Ashland high school but he never got it.”

After marrying, Pat said she and Lawrence settled in Ashland where he went to work for the C&O Railroad to help support the family (including his parents).

I told Pat about my recent visit to see Ugee Postalwait, who seemed to be rekindling a strong bond with the Haleys by telephone.

David, Pat’s son, remembered Ugee’s mother, Minnie Hicks.

“She called Mom and Dad and wanted them to come up and see her,” he said. “She said he didn’t think she was gonna be around much longer and wanted to see them. So Dad got off work and by the time he and Mom got ready and got up there it was two o’clock in the morning. She told them they could sleep as long as they wanted. At six o’clock in the morning, she was saying, ‘You fellas gonna sleep all day?’ She was ready to go. She was just an old farmer. Went to bed early and got up early.”

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Appalachia Ashland Big Creek Big Ugly Creek Blood in West Virginia Brandon Kirk Cabell County cemeteries Chapmanville Charleston civil war coal Confederate Army crime culture Ed Haley Ella Haley Ferrellsburg feud fiddler fiddling genealogy Green McCoy Guyandotte River Harts Harts Creek Hatfield-McCoy Feud history Huntington John Hartford Kentucky Lawrence Haley life Lincoln County Lincoln County Feud Logan Logan Banner Logan County Milt Haley Mingo County music Ohio photos timbering U.S. South Virginia Wayne County West Virginia Whirlwind writing

Blogs I Follow

  • OtterTales
  • Our Appalachia: A Blog Created by Students of Southern West Virginia CTC
  • Piedmont Trails
  • Truman Capote
  • Appalachian Diaspora

BLOOD IN WEST VIRGINIA is now available for order at Amazon!

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OtterTales

Writings from my travels and experiences. High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water. Mark Twain

Our Appalachia: A Blog Created by Students of Southern West Virginia CTC

This site is dedicated to the collection, preservation, and promotion of history and culture in Appalachia.

Piedmont Trails

Genealogy and History in North Carolina and Beyond

Truman Capote

A site about one of the most beautiful, interesting, tallented, outrageous and colorful personalities of the 20th Century

Appalachian Diaspora

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