Tags
Appalachia, Calhoun County, history, Lawrence Haley, Minnie Hicks, Pat Haley, photos, West Virginia
Lawrence and Pat Haley with Minnie Hicks (center), Calhoun County, WV
Lawrence Haley with Minnie Hicks
05 Saturday Apr 2014
Posted in Ed Haley
Tag Archives: Lawrence Haley
In Search of Ed Haley 280
02 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
blind, Calhoun County, Clay Hicks, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Mona Haley, Noah Haley, Ralph Haley, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
Ugee and I turned our attention back to the family photographs, where she spotted a picture of Ed’s son, Clyde. I told her about my visit with Clyde the previous year in California. She totally dismissed his story about Ed teaching him to drink, saying, “His dad never done no such stuff as that.” She paused for a second then said, “I went out and stopped Ed from whooping him one time. I think he’d stole some money or something. But he didn’t steal it. Noah did. I walked out and Ed had his belt off and I just took a hold of it. He said, ‘Who’s got a hold of me?’ He thought it was Ella. I said, ‘It’s me. You hit him another lick and the next lick’s mine. If you’re gonna whip him, whip the other’n.’ I said, ‘Noah’s the one was in your wallet.’ I seen Noah in it. I thought they’d sent him to get it. And Ed walked in and said, ‘Goddamn him, I ought to kill him.’ Then he told me, said, ‘Ugee, you ought to be careful with Clyde. He’s dangerous. He’ll sneak around and hurt ya.'”
Ugee had other run-ins with Noah, who was apparently one of Ella’s favorite children.
“Noah was picking on Lawrence and if he cried Noah’d say, ‘I never touched him.’ I said, ‘You do it again, I’ll whip you.’ Ella took Noah and went to Clay Hicks’ and stayed three days and when he come back he done just what I told him not to do. I never let on — I was a cooking. I said, ‘Noah, come here.’ I gave him three licks. I said, ‘I told you I’d whip you and I will.’ I looked at Ella and I said, ‘You needn’t take him and leave the country with him because I’ll follow wherever he’s at a whooping him.'”
This was interesting new information in the daily goings-on for Ed’s children. It was logical that since their parents were both blind they could get pretty wild. No doubt, Ed and Ella depended on family and friends to help raise the kids. Ugee, I noticed, had a close attachment to and interest in Ed’s children, almost as if they were her own family. She didn’t hesitate to tell how mean they could be.
“See, them kids had a hard time ’cause their dad and mother was blind and a lot of people didn’t want to bother with them,” she said. “People wanted the music of Ed and Ella but they didn’t want to put up with the family. That’s the truth of the matter. They was ornery. In other ways they wasn’t bad, either. You know, they was just children.”
Ugee seemed to think Mona was the meanest of the children.
“Mona was the orneriest young’n you ever seen in your life — to the core. She had to have all the attention. And she was pretty as a doll baby — curly-headed — just pretty as she could be. But my god, you couldn’t turn your back on her for a minute. If you was a baking a cake, she’d stick her hand in it. She could really get under your skin. I said, ‘Mona, you’re gonna keep on till I smack you.’ Ella said, ‘You don’t have to — I’ll give it to her.'”
Ugee lightly patted the air mimicking Ella.
“That’s the way she smacked — didn’t hurt them a bit. Mona would get up and look at her and laugh. Mona’d get out and go play a while, then she’d think of something to get into, like picking up chickens — ‘gonna weigh them’ — ringing their necks, throwing them down. ‘I’m weighing the chickens,’ she’d say. Killed about six or seven of them chickens. But that Ralph, he even shot hisself to see what it felt like. He’d do anything. You didn’t trust him out of your sight. He wouldn’t a cared to go out there and cut a cow’s throat or anything like that.”
I told Ugee what Mona had said about Ed being mean to her when she was growing up and she said, “Oh, I don’t think he was really mean to her. He’d fly up and cuss maybe. Now, the one they was really mean to was Clyde. Ella and Ed both was mean to Clyde.”
Wonder why?
“I’ve studied about that,” Ugee said. “Dad kept him all summer there at home to keep him from going to reform school. Now my dad woulda fought over him in a minute ’cause whatever he told him to do he minded him. And Mom, too. But I guess he was awful ornery when they were living in town. You know, kids a getting up to twelve, fourteen years old or something like that, there’s so much to get into. Now it would be awful to raise a family. I don’t remember Lawrence ever being like that. Jack and Lawrence was so good. Jack was a beautiful young man. Slender, dressy. He was a fine boy, but none of them came up with Lawrence far as I’m concerned. He was the best ole boy you ever seen. He would lead his mom and dad anyplace. I can see how careful he was. That little hand of his leading his mother ’round this mudhole — and his dad, too. I always called him my little boy. He was always better than the rest of them.”
Ugee said Lawrence always seemed bothered by the family troubles, even as a child.
In Search of Ed Haley 279
01 Tuesday Apr 2014
Tags
Annadeene Fraley, Beverly Haley, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddlers, fiddling, French Carpenter, history, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, life, music, Pat Haley, Sol Carpenter, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
Ugee also remembered French and Sol Carpenter coming to her father’s house. They were regarded by many as two of the best fiddlers in central West Virginia, so I had to ask, “How did your Dad and Ed regard the Carpenters?”
“There wasn’t nobody as good as Ed and Dad,” she said quickly. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re good,’ to the Carpenters and brag on them. Then get away from them and Ed’d say, ‘They didn’t come up with you, Laury,’ and Dad’d say, ‘They didn’t come up with you, either.'”
Ugee said a lot of fiddlers wouldn’t play in front of Ed. When they did, he would usually “listen a while, chew that tobacco and spit and wouldn’t say a thing” — then “cuss a blue streak” after they left. If the fiddler was really bad, though, or “if somebody was a playing something and they butchered it up a little bit — one of his tunes — he’d jump on his feet and stand straight up and say, ‘Goddamn! Goddamn!,'” Ugee said. “You knowed right then that there fella wasn’t playing it to suit him.” Laury would just die laughing over it and say, “Boy, he’s good ain’t he, Ed?”
I wondered if any fiddlers ever asked Ed for tips on how to play and Ugee seemed shocked. “Why, he wouldn’t a showed one how to play,” she said. “He learned music like I did — just a fooling with it.”
I asked Ugee about Johnny Hager, the banjo player she remembered coming with Ed to her father’s house when she was a small girl. I wondered if he was a good banjoist and she said, “Well, he was good for then, about like Grandpa Jones. Dad had a first cousin, Jasper McCune. Me, Dad and Jasper used to go and play music at pie suppers.” Banjos provided most of the second back then, she said. Some of the better players were Willie Smith of Ivydale and Emory Bailey of Shock. Guitars were rare.
I pulled out some of the Haley family photographs, which caused Ugee to ask about Pat Haley, who was coping with Lawrence’s death, her own poor health, and her daughter Beverly’s kidney cancer.
“Well Beverly is in a coma now,” I said. “Pat said she’ll wake up a little bit in the evening and she’ll kind of recognize them a little bit. So in other words, they’ve lost her but she’s still alive. The doctor thinks she’s got about two more weeks. Pat says, ‘We’re taking it one day at a time.’ And Annadeene Fraley, the one who introduced me to Pat, she’s got cancer.”
Ugee said she didn’t know how Pat was making it through all of the grief.
“‘Aunt Ugee,’ she calls me. She’s a fine woman. She’s a strong woman. Well, she had to be strong. She come over to this country married to Lawrence and he didn’t tell her his parents was blind until she got to New York. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got something I’ve got to tell you. My dad and mother is blind and if you want to go back I’ll pay your way back.’ She said, ‘I’ll stay.’ He went to Ed and Ella’s and Lawrence said he was starving to death for a mess of pinto beans. She said she never tasted beans. She didn’t know what they was. They cooked the beans and she tasted them and she thought they was brown mud. Said it tasted just like mud to her. Said they was just eating them beans and bragging on them and she wouldn’t touch them. They made fun of her over it.”
In Search of Ed Haley 275
28 Friday Mar 2014
Tags
Alabama, Arthur Smith, Calhoun County, Clayton McMichen, Douglas, Ed Haley, fiddlers, fiddling, Harold Postalwait, history, Ivydale, John Hartford, John Hicks, Johnny Hager, Josh Joplin, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Minnie Hicks, music, Rogersville, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
Early one fall morning, I loaded up the Cadillac and drove south to the home of Harold Postalwait in Rogersville, Alabama. Harold, I knew, had a very special visitor — his mother, 88-year-old Ugee Postalwait of Akron, Ohio. Ugee remembered Ed Haley as far back as the Bull Moose era when he used to visit her father in Calhoun County, West Virginia. I hadn’t seen her since a visit to her home four years earlier and was anxious to pick her brain for new stories or tunes and show her what I had learned about Ed’s fiddling. Not long after my arrival, after we’d all said our “hellos,” Harold pulled out the picture of Laury Hicks and his family at John Hicks’ in Douglas, West Virginia.
“That’s my dad,” Ugee said, pointing to her father’s image. “I can remember when he wore the mustache.”
I wondered if the picture was taken before Ed was acquainted with Laury.
“Dad met Ed before I can remember,” Ugee said. “I don’t know whether that was before Mom and him was married. It was after Grandpap died, they said. Dad musta been about eighteen or something like that. Josh Joplin brought Ed into that country and told him they was a boy down there he wanted him to hear play the fiddle. Said, ‘He thinks he can play but he can’t play,’ and went in and had Dad to tune up his fiddle and played them two pieces. He played ‘Sally Goodin’ and I think it was the ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. Ed said, ‘Boy he’s showin’ me off.’ That was all they was to it. And that old man you know had told him a lie.”
I asked Ugee, “So Ed was coming to Ivydale before you were born?” and she said, “I have an idea he was because I wasn’t quite old enough to go to school when I first remember him. The first time I ever remember seeing him was when him and John Hager was there. I bet he wasn’t over 27 years old, when I think about it. I would say that was — I was born in 1907 — that was about 1913 or something like that. He was tall, slender. I can remember back when I was four years old real good and I remember him just as plain as if it was yesterday. We had a dirt road to the house and when he went to leave in the spring — they stayed all winter — he was walking behind John Hager and me and my brother Harvey run right to the bank and waved by at him. We’d been crying after him. I can see him walking along… But he carried that there fiddle in a flour bag. I never seen Ed with a fiddle in a case till after him and Ella was married. He always carried it in a flour poke.”
I told Ugee that I had worked a lot with Lawrence Haley in his last days trying to find out about Ed’s technique. Before I could show her what I had come up with, she started telling me what she remembered along those lines. She said Ed played with the fiddle under his chin — he hated when musicians “put the fiddle down low” — and turned it occasionally. He held the bow way out on its end, she said, and played a lot smoother than her father, a tremendous concession for a daughter to make. I asked if Ed played smoothly when she first saw him.
“Oh naturally he got better as years went by, but he was good then,” she said.
She gave me the impression that Ed’s fiddling had a lot of Irish-style “ornaments” in his early days (in the older, more European tradition), which gradually disappeared over the years — probably due to artistic peer pressure from radio fiddlers like Arthur Smith and Clayton McMichen. Smith and McMichen were extremely popular during the last few decades of Haley’s life.
In Search of Ed Haley 211
14 Saturday Dec 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ed Haley, fiddle, fiddling, history, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
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 171
18 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, genealogy, history, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Mona Haley, Pat Haley, writing
“So when Larry and I got there, my mother-in-law, she was the one opened the door. I fell in love with her right away. And I didn’t see Ed until the next day. He was in bed and he was also hard-of-hearing and he didn’t hear us come in. Mom led us inside and, of course, Jack’s wife Patsy had the house very clean.”
One of the first things they did after arriving was eat a meal.
“Mom asked Lawrence, she said, ‘’awrencey boy, are you hungry?’ He said, ‘We’re starving, Mom.’ Well, Mom called upstairs and told Pat and Jack that we was here and they came down and Mom told Patsy we were hungry and Pat said, ‘Well, we don’t have much ready to eat. Would you like sausage and eggs?’ Well, I thought that was fine. But when these little patties came up… There was an oilcloth on the table — everything was clean and nice but the silverware was in a Mason jar in the middle of the table. I was just amazed that nobody set the table like I had been used to. I’d never seen sausage fried black. After dinner, they told us they had the bedroom upstairs fixed up for us. My mother-in-law had bought a new bedspread and new doilies for the dresser and Patsy had bought a lamp and some doilies and a picture for the wall. She’d really tried to fix up the room and make it nice for us. Mom had bought a very nice wardrobe and a dresser. The bed was Mom’s. The other furniture had belonged to Patsy and Jack.”
The next morning, Pat first met Ed.
“He came into the dining room and I was in the dining room, me and Larry. Larry just said, ‘Pop, this is Patricia.’ He just, you know, said, ‘Howdy do.’ And I went up to him to shake his hand. Larry had told me that I would have to go to him. If you looked at Ed Haley, it looked as though he was looking right at you. When I got up to him, Larry put his hand on my head and told him I was as short as Mom. Larry had told me that Pop would put his hands on me and check my head and face and my arms to see what kind of woman I was. He took his fingers — that’s the way he checked your features. And he could tell how you was built. Then he patted me on the shoulder to see what sort of made woman I was. But he had the smoothest hands. They were not a bit rough. Larry took Pop’s hand and put it on my belly and said, ‘See here, Pop.'”
Pat said she met Mona later that day.
“Mona came over the next day after I got here — her and her husband and her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law. Sometime after that, Mona came over and was playing a mandolin and her and Mom was playing. Mom played me some English tunes. And I don’t know how come they played but they got Pop to play a tune or two and he wouldn’t play much because he had whittled on his fingers and made them raw. He always loved my salmon. Course he called them salmon cakes. I call them croquettes.”
In Search of Ed Haley 170
16 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Farmers, immigration, Jim Brown, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Morehead, Pat Haley, writing
Early in March 1995, I fired up the Cadillac and drove the familiar road toward Ashland, Kentucky. After several hours of travel, I entered Rowan County — the place of Ella’s birth — and took the Farmers exit off of I-64. I wanted to get a closer look at Farmers, it being a place where Ella had lived, where Ralph was supposedly conceived, and where Lawrence remembered Ed playing for a dance. At one time, Farmers was the county’s largest town with 1,000 people. At the time of my visit, it was a small settlement, easily eclipsed by nearby Morehead.
A little later, I made my way into Morehead, a small college town with a curvy downtown business district and with most of its historical buildings torn down. It was somewhat disappointing. Triplett Creek, the Trumbo section of town, was dull and uninspiring. Small modern apartments replaced Ella’s old home place. Scenes of the Martin-Tolliver feud were long gone, removed to make way for a new road. At the college library, I found some interesting local history but nothing really pertaining to Ed and Ella’s story.
That evening, I arrived at Pat Haley’s home in Ashland. Pat was really down about Lawrence’s death and the progression of her daughter’s cancer. It was sad to be there – especially in the kitchen where Lawrence and I had spent so much time hashing out Ed’s music. Pat’s grandchildren were around frequently – especially David’s three daughters – but there was a great void in the house. I imagine it was a hundred-fold for Pat.
“We met August 14th, 1948, and he came back to America on November 5th,” she said of Lawrence. “We wrote to each other and I never saw him again until he came back to England and we met on Valentine’s Day, 1949. We married ten days later. I was almost eighteen. He was 21. I was staying with my sister in Hertfordshire, which is just on the outskirts of London. Larry came back to America in May, when he got out of the service. That’s when he told his mother he was married. Although she was writing to me, she didn’t know we were married. And she told him, ‘I suppose there’s a baby on the way.’ And he told her yes.
“I left England September 28th, 1949 on a Danish ship with a Polish crew. I was seven and a half months pregnant. It was a terrible experience. I went into false labor on the way over. The doctor was Polish and I never did understand a word the man said except ‘Haley.’ Had Beverly been born on that ship she could have claimed nationality to any country because we were in international waters. I got in this country on October 6th after eight days of choppy water. Larry met me in New York. We come past Staten Island and Ellis Island. I couldn’t see Larry on the dock but bless his heart he didn’t know he had to get a docking pass. He was stuck up at the barrier and here were all these people getting off the ship. And there was Larry in civilian clothes. It was the first time I’d seen Larry in civilian clothes. And one of the immigration officers said, ‘Why, he’s just a little boy.’
“We spent ten days in New York. Part of my luggage was lost and we were having some problem with some papers Larry should have gotten done. I didn’t know his parents were blind until we were in New York. I asked Larry what his mother thought of the pictures that he had given her of him and I, and he said, ‘She hasn’t seen them.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘She can’t see them. She’s blind.’ And I said, ‘Well, what did your dad think of them?’ And he said, ‘He’s blind, too.’
“We stayed in New York till October 16th. Just before we left, we had enough to buy a Spam sandwich and two apples in the bus station. He gave me the sandwich. It took us 24 hours to get from New York to Ashland. I got deathly sick on that bus ride. It was twist and turn over those mountains. It was about midnight when we got into Ashland and we had three cents in our pocket. Jack thought we would be there in the afternoon so he and Jim Brown had gone to the bus station and looked for us. They were drinking. Well, when we didn’t show up — I think it was between six and eight o’clock — they went back to the house. The bus station was located at 13th Street between Winchester and Carter Avenue. His parents lived at 1040 Greenup Avenue. So we walked and carried our suitcases and I had high heels on. We walked about six blocks — three down and three across.”
In Search of Ed Haley 164
04 Wednesday Sep 2013
Tags
Ashland, fiddling, genealogy, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Morehead, music, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, Ralph Haley, Scott Haley
A few days later, I was in Ashland at Pat Haley’s house, where the Haley clan had gathered in for Lawrence’s funeral. All of Lawrence’s kids were there, of course (Beverly, Steve and David), as was Clyde and Mona. I also spotted Noah, who introduced me to his son, James Edward Haley (Ed’s namesake). Pat made a point to introduce me to Patsy Haley and her son Scott, who were in from Cleveland. A little later, I played Ed’s fiddle for Lawrence’s service and it sounded so good that I seriously considered making it my main fiddle on stage. I quickly slipped into “the zone” and it was the first time I seemed to experience (as crazy as it may seem) the sensation of Ed and Lawrence both whispering in my ear, guiding me along, looking over my shoulder, and saying things like, “Easy now, don’t play so many notes.” “Yeah, try that and see if it works.” “You’re getting too far away from the melody.”
After the funeral, I returned to Pat’s and played for the family in the kitchen. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I mean, with Lawrence gone it would have been really easy for the Haleys to say, “Thanks for showing an interest in Pop, now see ya later,” but instead they took me into their fold — with Pat leading the way.
There were a few new stories. For instance, Patsy’s son Scott Haley told me about “catching” his father Jack in private moments playing a fiddle right along with Ed’s records. I was excited to hear that and could easily imagine that Jack was the child who had inherited Ed’s talent for the fiddle. But when I asked Pat and Steve about it they gave Scott’s claim little credence. They said Jack might have tried to play with the records but he couldn’t really play anything. They fancied Scott’s memory to be a lot like the one they had of Lawrence, who occasionally strung up Ed’s fiddle (backwards because he was left-handed) and attempted to play along with the records. I never forgot the possibility, though, that Jack Haley could play the fiddle, which seemed to irritate Pat.
Before I left Ashland, Pat gave me Ed’s records. She said she wanted me to keep them because I would “know what to do with them.”
“I have a real love-hate relationship with those records,” Steve said jokingly. “When we were kids we had to tip-toe through the house to keep from scratching them.”
Pat also loaned me Ella’s postcards and explained why Lawrence hadn’t wanted me to see them on my first visit roughly four years earlier. Apparently, they alluded to the fact that Ella had conceived Ralph not by a previous marriage — but out of wedlock. Pat said Ella was boarding with a Mr. Payne and giving piano lessons to his five-year-old daughter in Farmers, Kentucky, when she became pregnant. Mr. Payne promptly returned her to her family in nearby Morehead.
In Search of Ed Haley 163
03 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, Cincinnati, Ed Haley, fiddle, history, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, life, music, Nashville, Portsmouth, U.S. South
Once I returned to Nashville, I called Lawrence Haley, who was in the mood to reminisce.
“Me and Pop hitch-hiked to Cincinnati out of Portsmouth a time or two,” he said. “We took old 52. And we’d had about three rides to get there.”
I asked him if Ed took his fiddle on those trips and he said, “Yeah, if he thought he was gonna be in a little bit other than country settings, he would put it in the case. But most of the time, he’d just carry it in his hand, tucked under his arm, maybe, with the bow in his hand.”
I wondered if Ed packed any extra bags on the road and Lawrence said, “Mostly just the clothes on his back, unless he was going on an extended trip — then he’d pack him a suitcase. He’d, of course, fill it up about a third with his homemade tobacco. His own cure — apple or peach or something. He’d take him some of that with him and off he’d go.”
Lawrence Haley passed away on February 3, 1995, the 44th anniversary of his father’s death.
In Search of Ed Haley 160
27 Tuesday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Clyde Haley, family, feud, history, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Lawrence Kirk, life, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, Pat Haley, Tug River, writing
A few weeks later, I called Lawrence Kirk, whose ancestors had played various roles in the story of Milt Haley’s death. I hadn’t spoken with him for several months. We talked more about Milt Haley’s murder.
“Back in the old days, these people’d get into trouble here and they’d run backwards and forwards across that Tug River,” he said. “That was the state line and the law didn’t bother them. If you crossed the state line, you was safe. But they got the papers out and went over there and got Haley and McCoy. Inez is where they went to and got them. Yes, sir. They either came up Jenny’s Creek or Marrowbone Creek. See, they had horse trails all through these woods back in them days. They come right across Twelve Pole and down Henderson up there in the head of main Hart. Come right down and up what they call the Bill Branch — some people calls it the Hugh Dingess Branch — right down Piney Fork. It’s a straight shoot through there. I’ll tell you what. Come up sometime when you’ve got a day or two and we can drive right through there.”
Boy, that sure sounded good to me.
In the meantime, Pat kept me up on everything. She said Mona was helping her look after Lawrence and had even spent the night. Clyde had come in for Christmas.
“They had a red hat on him and a great big sign across the front which said ‘Clyde.’ They had a pair of pants that was rolled over about three times tops, the shoes was way too big, and, I mean, it was sad. The hat was red, his sweater was blue, and his shoes was white. Mona said they got half-way home from Cincinnati, and he was just talking away, you know, about things that had happened in their past, and then he began looking out the window and all of a sudden he turned around and he said, ‘Who in the hell are you?’ And she thought, ‘Uh, oh, it’s gonna be good.’ Larry was very happy to see him.”
In Search of Ed Haley 159
26 Monday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, blind, Ed Haley, feud, fiddling, history, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, music, U.S. South, writing
In one of those “passing the torch moments,” Lawrence reached the telephone to his sister, Mona. I told her about Milt Haley being a fiddler, and she said, “Really? Well we didn’t never know that.”
I figured that Ed had kept all of the details about Milt hidden from his kids, but Mona said, “Well, he talked about it some, because I wouldn’t know what I know about it if he hadn’t. You did find out what I told you was true, didn’t you? It wasn’t my dad’s mother that was killed, the way I heard it. It was one of the Hatfield women. Got half her face shot away and it killed her. That’s why they retaliated against Green McCoy and my grandfather. That’s only hearsay, but it had to come from Pop. I do remember him saying that.”
Pat seemed pleased that Mona was visiting Lawrence.
“He asks for her a lot,” she said.
I wanted to know more about Lawrence’s condition.
“He sits with his eyes closed and he found a pair of sunglasses that look exactly like the ones his daddy wore,” Pat said. “These are a pair that one of the kids bought. They were laying on the dining room table and he picked them up and said, ‘There’s my glasses.’ He insists on wearing them and you would think it was Ed Haley back many years ago. He talks about horse and buggies a lot. He sits with your book constantly. He does not like to look at the picture of his mother’s tombstone. What keeps you in his mind a lot, he listens to the tapes and he knows he gave you the records. Beverly was here this past weekend. He knew who she was but he was still talking in riddles. But today he’s pretty much himself. He got up and got dressed about 5:30 and he’s been roaming ever since.”
In Search of Ed Haley 158
25 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, history, Lawrence Haley, Mona Haley, music, writing
I called Lawrence and Pat to tell them about this new discovery. Pat put me on the telephone with Lawrence, who seemed to be doing better. I asked him why he thought none of the Haley kids ever learned the fiddle.
“I think Pop took interest in us as far as he knew how to take interest in us,” he said. “Whatever he could’ve taught us he most certainly would have. But we’d ruther be out running in the woods than sitting at a table trying to learn ‘Forks of Sandy’ or something like that. He would ruther teach it to the ones who could and who showed interest in it, and let it go at that. Pop never did try to get me to learn the fiddle because I was left-handed. I guess he figured that would be too much of a challenge for him even, to try to teach violin to a left-handed violin player.”
I told Lawrence he knew more about the fiddle than a lot of professional musicians and he said, “Well, I guess I learned just about as much of it as he did. I appreciate any good words that can be said about me and the violin. My sister’s here and if you could get her interested, she might be able to tell you as much about it as I can. She took more interest in the music of our mother, I know that. But she could pick up the fiddle and play the fiddle and play the mandolin and the piano and other instruments.”
Lawrence said, “Now if you want to talk to my sister a minute, maybe she can tell you something. If she can’t, I don’t know who else to tell you. She could probably tell you as much about it as any of us.”
In Search of Ed Haley 156
23 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Mona Haley, Morehead, Pat Haley, writing
I gave Pat a call to check on Lawrence, who was back at home in Ashland. Pat said Mona had been a frequent visitor since Lawrence’s heart attack and was starting to open up about her painful memories of Ed.
“Mona said her father was the cruelest, most horrible man to her,” Pat said. “Even her mother was not the mother to her that she was to Lawrence. And she said Lawrence was always the favorite. And I said to her, ‘I didn’t see any of the ugliness of your daddy or your mother,’ and Larry has never ever said anything about his father except he’ll tell you he got drunk or he’ll tell you he was mean to Mom once in a while. But he has told me he never did see his father strike his mother. Mona said she has heard them and said the things that her daddy has said to her mother were just too horrible for her to repeat. She used to put her head under the covers to keep from listening. But Larry has none of these memories. Memories he has of his dad were always good memories. But Mona will agree: there was two out of all that were the favorites: the oldest boy Ralph and Lawrence. Mona says she is very sorry that in the last years of her mother’s life she did not help me any more than she did. I was very young when his mother passed away and I had three small children.”
Pat said Lawrence was starting to act a great deal like his mother.
“There is so much that is coming back to me that was exactly like his mother,” she said. “For one thing, when I help him to the bathroom, he takes the same little steps. He goes with his eyes closed most of the time, just like he can’t see. And he’ll sit with his eyes closed. You know there is those little things, like he won’t ever eat with a fork anymore — he eats with a spoon. His mother always did. And he drinks a lot of water, just like she did. There’s just so many of his little mannerisms that remind me so much of his mother. He will call me ‘Mom’ a lot. I don’t know if I told you, but one night he was crying and I went in to him and I said, ‘Honey, what’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘Mommy, rock me. Rock me, Mommy.’ He was back in his childhood and it just breaks your heart John when that happens. He’d been talking, he wanted to go to Morehead.”
There was more bad news for Pat. Her daughter Beverly had recently been diagnosed with cancer.
In Search of Ed Haley 154
20 Tuesday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Bruce Nemerov, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, fiddling, history, Jack Haley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Mona Haley, music, Noah Haley, writing
Not long after my call to Wilson, I received word from Bruce Nemerov that he’d finished dubbing about a third of Haley’s recordings. He sent me cassette copies, along with an audio log (which gave detailed information about the records). I listened extra close to the Nemerov copies and noticed how Ed’s playing gave the impression of being very notey, as I had originally interpreted it. This was, I determined, somewhat of an illusion.
“I don’t think your dad played as many notes as he sounds like he’s playing,” I said to Lawrence by telephone. “It sounds to me like he’s putting so much into some of those notes that they sound like they’re more than one note.”
Lawrence said, “He might be doing that, I really don’t know. The only thing I’ll go on is what it sounds to me like. I’ve seen and heard some fiddlers that it just seems like they draw a bow completely just to get one little note. Pop could get a dozen or two out of a draw of the bow. It seemed to me like that his fingers was all the time moving. He was probably touching the strings so lightly a lot of people might not have even heard some of the notes. That’s just my speculation. Pop knew how to use that bow to get force whenever he needed it and when to let up on it and to let a general sweet note come through.”
Lawrence continued, “I guess that’s what helped him in his technique that nobody else seemed to a been able to master. They might have been seeing him make the notes, but how he was pressuring the bow they might not have paid that much attention. You would have to have, I guess, a camera of some sort on it so you could go back and study what was done. You’d hear a note then you’d watch the finger and then you’d go back and hear the note and watch the bow. Maybe the little change in the muscles in his fingers or hand or wrist or something. You’d have to watch all of that and just keep going back and just keep going over it and going over it. But he got them in there, I know that. All of them wasn’t exactly crisp and clear. You could probably hear it in some of the records. I wish you’d been able to have met my dad. I think he’d a liked you and I think he’d a taught you all he could — all you was capable of or all he was capable of teaching you anyway.”
Lawrence said, “I don’t know how many fiddlers that I wouldn’t even have an idea of their names that used to come around to watch Pop play. They wasn’t there all the time, I don’t think, for the entertainment. They was there to learn some of the stuff, too. We used to go out on Route 5 about eight or ten miles. They was an old man out there that played and he said, ‘Ed, come see me whenever you can.’ He had a boy that had polio or something — had a short leg. It was a typical Kentucky hillside home. It had a big banistered front porch. And we used to go out there and maybe spend the weekend with these people. They’d just sit out there and play on the front porch. I can’t remember their name. I remember seeing the boy — he was quite a bit older than me at the time. He was almost a full-grown man. He’d walk with his hand on his knee a lot to keep that leg from giving way. That’s about all I can remember. Course I was probably eating better than I was if I had been home. People out in the country like that have usually got a cow and a good garden or good canned stuff anyway. These people were good people. They liked my dad, too.”
I asked Lawrence how things were going in his family and he seemed a little down about Mona and Noah.
“Mona passes our house just about every day — at the foot of the hill down here — and won’t even stop by,” he said. “Noah, whenever he’s in town, he’ll usually stop by. He’s back in Cleveland and got him an apartment and he likes it back up there. See, Noah gets in trouble every now and then; he has to move. I think he gets in gambling debts. He got down in Newport one year — it might have been eight or ten years after he got married — and got down there on a three or four day drinking and gambling spree and they liked to beat him to death down there, I think, ’cause he couldn’t come up with his tab on his gambling. So I think he gets in that condition every now and then and he has to take off somewhere else.”
I asked if Mona was a gambler and Lawrence said, “Now Mona, she goes over in Catlettsburg and she plays Soda Rum or something like that and gambles on that. I quit gambling of all sorts before I was married. Whenever Noah and Clyde and Jack would come around and want to play nickel-and-dime poker, I’d say, ‘Well, Pat will give you a blanket. You guys go right on outside, spread it out on the lawn, and play your nickel-and-dime poker out there.’ I wouldn’t let them play it in the house.”
A few days after speaking with Lawrence, I received word from Pat that he’d suffered a massive heart attack. It came as quite a shock, even though his health had been failing since my last trip to Ashland. Pat said the doctors didn’t give him long to live.
In Search of Ed Haley 152
17 Saturday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Ashland, banjo, Brown Mule, Ed Haley, Ed Morrison, Ella Haley, fiddling, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, music, writing
I asked Lawrence about Ed’s friends — if he remembered any of the fiddlers who came to see his father.
“I may have met a bunch of them and seen more than what you’ve got named, but as far as knowing them by name I wouldn’t know them by name,” he said. “And I probably wouldn’t recognize 90-percent of them by sight, either. Well Ed Morrison, I know Pop knew him. I didn’t know he was a fiddler, though. I just knew he was somebody that’d come around Pop every now and then. It slowed down quite a bit in my teenage years when we moved down close to town. Now, I don’t know if that was because of his heart condition or what John, I really don’t know. I think Pop had got a little bit grouchy about some things. If it was somebody he appreciated and liked he might play with them, but a lot of times, ‘I just don’t feel like it.’ If they come, they come to get him to get him to go somewhere. It might be 50 miles away or it might be two houses away. That was usually the way it was.”
I wondered if there was a big difference in Ed’s fiddling as he got older.
“Well, not really too much in his fiddling,” Lawrence said. “You know he’d just get tired. He wouldn’t play quite as much a lot of times. I know the last time we took him anywhere my brother Noah wanted him to play for one of his friend’s wedding. I think it was just get-together afterwards — sort of like a reception — only these kids just had a bunch of friends and some beer and stuff. And Pop sat there and he played and played and played and finally — they was giving him beer, I think — and it must’ve worked on him and he just fell over asleep, almost in a semi-doze. You could talk to him and he’d answer you, but he couldn’t hold a bow up any longer. He just more or less sat there in a sleepy daze. And me and my wife took him home, and that was it. He’d play some, but he wouldn’t play much for anybody after that.”
I asked Lawrence if Ed ever just sat around the house and played by himself and he said, “Well, I’ve seen him do that. He’d sit out on the front porch… There at 17th Street, we had a great wide banister and he’d sit up on that banister and play. It was pretty wide. He’d sit on that banister where he could spit out off a the porch and chew his tobacco and play for his own satisfaction. He might’ve been listening to something on the radio and come out and try it a few times and maybe play something he thought he might’ve got rusty on or some of his own music that he thought he needed to practice up on. I’ve seen him do that maybe for two or three hours at a time. The last time I reckon I seen him out like that, he was playing the banjo, though. He wasn’t playing the fiddle.”
Lawrence reminded me that his father liked to chew tobacco.
“He usually carried a can around the house like a brown coffee can as a spittoon,” he said. “He’d go out to farmers he knew and get him a few leaves of tobacco and make him a few twists, you know. It was twisted up like a double roll and he’d cut him off a piece of that and it just dry as a bone and stick that in his jaw. He always carried a little plug of Brown Mule or something like that to kinda take the dryness out of that twist or put a little sweetening in it or something. He would cut him off a little bit of sweetener and use that dry twist he’d twisted up hisself. In fact, he had a little chest he kept most of his tobacco products in. He might have 50 or 75 twists of tobacco and, you know, other products of tobacco. He smoked a pipe too, so he would have crumbled tobacco in cans and things. And he would put slices of apple — certain types of apple — in with it to kinda flavor it and things, and he kept it all in this one chest he had.”
Wow — I’d never heard or thought about Ed having a chest (or really anything else) before. I asked Lawrence if Ed had many possessions and he said, “Not a great deal, John. Just his clothes and just his violin and just his dinner table and I guess a bed to sleep in. What really would a blind man want other than that? Pop carried a good sharp knife. Did his own honing of his knife and things like that. He would whet it on a concrete banister if he couldn’t find a regular rock. He might’ve had a rock in that chest, I don’t know.”
Back to Ed’s chest — how big was it?
“Ah, it was about the size of an Army footlocker,” Lawrence said. “Just a little bit smaller than that, only it was just made out of wood. It wasn’t made out of plywood. It was made out of tongue-and-groove board. It’s long gone.”
I asked Lawrence how many fiddles his father owned in his life and he said, “I really don’t know. I imagine he had four or five dozen somebody had give him, or he’d bought or ordered. The fancy fiddles with all the inlay and all that stuff, I don’t think he’d a cared for that at all. It wouldn’t a made a bit of sense to him to have that. If he could just get the mellow sound or the sound that he liked out of it… Now, I don’t know whether it was mellow he liked or what. It was kind of a harsh music he played, I guess. I know he could get mellow music whenever he wanted it and he could make a fiddle slur or do whatever he wanted to with it.”
Lawrence paused and said, “I’m trying to tell you: a lot of stuff I don’t know about my dad. About the only thing that I really know, they was no fiddler around this area that could come any ways close to him that I ever heard. Other than that, he got out amongst his friends I guess and he came home with stories to tell and stuff, and I guess he told Mom if she wanted to hear them and if he didn’t want to tell her anything he didn’t tell her anything. Sometimes he’d come home with money, sometimes he might not come home with any money in his pockets.”
In Search of Ed Haley 151
15 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
blind, Bruce Nemerov, Cincinnati, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, Jack Haley, Kentucky, Kentucky School for the Blind, Lawrence Haley, Minnie Hicks, music, Patsy Haley
A few weeks later, I gave Lawrence another call. I wanted to update him on Bruce Nemerov’s work with Ed’s records. I’d heard some of the cleaned-up tracks and noticed that Ella’s mandolin was extremely loud at times. I asked Lawrence if it was because she was seated closest to the microphone.
“I’m pretty sure my brother did it all on one microphone,” he said. “But I guess it was placement of the microphone. She was just there to keep a good solid beat going. It wasn’t anybody trying to hog the music someway.”
I really bragged on Ed’s “Fifteen Days in Georgia” and “Over the Waves” — two of the “new” tunes from the Holbrook records. I played Ed’s recording of “Over the Waves” for Lawrence; it was an incredible, up-tempo version with Ella seconding him on the mandolin.
“Well you see, the record I’ve got of that tune she was playing the piano, so they had to be in a studio somewhere for that,” he said, after the recording ended.
“It’s amazing how fast he played back then,” I said.
Lawrence agreed, “Yeah, yeah, it sure was. That was a waltz, and you’d have to waltz the hall if you waltzed that one.”
Lawrence stressed that I had “a lifetime of stuff to study in there.”
I asked him if his father ever listened to the home recordings much and he said, “No, I think Mom put them up and left them up until Pop was dead and then she started dividing them out. You know, letting the kids come in and get pieces that they enjoyed. I had 45 or 50 records that I know of. One or two of them kind of got lost. I think I know who lost them for me. That’s the way things go, I guess. You can’t hold onto every little scrap of treasure all the time. It eventually goes. My mom used to have a whole library — I mean it took up quite a bit of space — ’cause these blind books, the letters had to be big enough to finger them, and they was pretty good size books. When I went into the service, they all left, and her mandolin left, and I guess her accordion went up to Aunt Minnie’s and got burnt up, and some of Pop’s stuff left. They just got rid of it, I guess, just stuff that was in the way for my brother Jack and his wife Patsy. Things like the mandolin and his fiddle I woulda kept.”
I got the impression that Lawrence was satisfied that he had told me all he could about his father, and that his father’s music would have to speak for itself. He was more in the mood to talk about his mother.
“I’m not sure, but I think they put her in school when she’s about four,” he said of Ella. “I think she come out of school when she was nineteen or 20 years old. They must’ve kept them segregated or something. You know, she was in with mostly girls. She had quite a few friends she made while she was at school. I guess they was times when she had bad times, too. Missed her family and missed her friends back at Morehead, Kentucky. She was pretty well-educated. She would read old Chaucer’s English. She’d come out with that on us every now and then when she wanted to really stress something to us. To let us know that she didn’t approve of what we was doing. I don’t know, she was just a wonderful woman to me. She’d sit down and read. You know we’d be laying in a bed in a room pitch black and she’d be a reading that story to us. It didn’t take long to put us to sleep like that. She read the whole Robin Hood stories and Jungle Boy. Stories like that she’d read to us. That was all we had for entertainment. It was a different life for the whole Haley bunch I guess from what most people would realize.”
“I know she had a bunch of friends,” Lawrence continued. “They was one — all I knew her name was was Bridget — and she come right out of school and went to a home-type thing that they had in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Mt. Healthy is just more or less an outlying suburb of Cincinnati. When Mom would be down in Cincinnati visiting her sister or running her newsstand or something, she’d always go to Mt. Healthy to see Bridget. I think we’d ride a trolley bus or something out there. We’d spend the day out there with Bridget. It was a nice home — great big mansion-type home — plenty of grounds and things. And I’d get out in the grounds the biggest part of the time. I’d be out checking things out on the grounds — fishes in the ponds — and I’d check on Mom every now and then and find out when she wanted to leave or something. But we’d spend that day up there just about every time she went up there till I guess Bridget died.”
In Search of Ed Haley 148
11 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Clay County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, Harts Creek, history, Kentucky School for the Blind, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Minnie Hicks, music, West Virginia, writing
Ella provided most of the family entertainment.
“Pop never tried to sing any songs to us,” Lawrence said. “Mom sang songs. She had one she called ‘The Coo Coo’s Nest’. A lot of religious songs, little nonsense songs and rhymes, like ‘The Watermelon’. She had a principal, I guess, or the headmaster of the school — Dr. Huntington, or something like that — he’d come into the class and he’d have a reading session with them. Read them a story and he would read all the parts in different voices. And my Mom kinda got to using inflections a lot more than any of us would. Like, she used to read us Robin Hood from her Braille magazine.”
I wondered if Ed ever entertained the kids with stories.
“Ah, maybe a ghost story or two,” Lawrence said. “He’s telling one time about somebody a riding a… I guess it was a story he heard when he was a kid, too. Somebody was coming down Trace Fork from somewhere riding a horse way up above where Aunt Liza and them lived. Said they began to hear this rattling kind of sound, this guy did. And they said he began to speed up his horse a little bit, and this rattling kept getting louder and louder and he’s a going faster and faster. Said all at once this thing jumped right up on the horse behind him and locked its arms up around him and just stayed with him forever it seemed like. And just all at once got off. Pop could tell stories like that, now. Those stories kinda filled our lonely days, too. That was the thing that they did back in them days, I guess, was tell stories, but Aunt Liza never told any stories like that, or Uncle Peter didn’t.”
I asked Lawrence if Ed “worked on” tunes at home and he said, “Well, yeah, he’d kinda play the general outline and then maybe start working on some of the real, I guess, it would be the depth of a piece of music that he wanted to put in there. Depth or body to it. He’d add to it. But mostly he might just hear a piece of music and maybe just hit every fifth or sixth note or something just to get an outline of how he wanted to play it.”
I don’t think Lawrence realized what an important and sophisticated piece of musical insight that was. What he meant by saying that Ed hit “every fifth or six note” was that he was coming down on the big accent notes that made up the “spine” of the tune. I later wondered if Lawrence’s statement was based on observations or genetic memory or both.
I asked him about Ed playing for dances, but he said those memories had left his mind years ago.
“I was walking from Clay over to Clay Junction there that one night and there was nothing but the moon — it was a full moon — but it was a hazy… It had a big ring around the moon. It was the first time I ever noticed that. Now I can’t remember where we came from, but I know that they had their instruments with them. I guess we’s a gonna go back up on Stinson up there to Aunt Minnie’s. I think this was after the time of Laury’s death, so I guess we’s heading back that way. And if we could get to Clay Junction there, we’s supposed to get a ride or something, I think. Like I say, I can’t remember what kind of function we’d come from, and what we did after that. My recollection of that was walking down this highway — a dark night, except for a hazy, ringed moon. Now that hazy ringed moon kept that in my mind all these years. The rest of it I don’t know. So there’s a lot of stuff that you forget and you never remember.”
In Search of Ed Haley 147
09 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Blue Goose, Brandon Kirk, Ed Haley, Harts Creek, history, Imogene Haley, Joe Mullins, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Noah Haley, Wrigley, writing
Throughout the summer of 1994, Lawrence Haley and I spoke frequently on the telephone. I was excited about some of the information I’d been getting in the mail from Brandon Kirk, the Harts genealogist. Lawrence seemed curious about it too, since Ed’s family background was something he’d never known a lot about.
“I don’t know that much about it, because you know how ignorant I was about the whole affair when I first went up there with you,” he said. “I didn’t know a heck of a lot about my dad’s people or anything. I seen their faces and heard them talked about, but I wouldn’t know them if I’d walk nose to nose with some of them. We never probably asked a lot of the questions we should have asked of Mom and Pop while they were still alive. I know my mother would have told me a heck of a lot more. They wasn’t no reason why I shouldn’t have asked her questions. It was just one of those things you accept, I guess, and don’t question.”
Lawrence paused, then said, “So we didn’t find out a lot about the history of our families. I really didn’t know that much about my mother’s people, either. I know she had some people out in Wrigley, Kentucky. We used to go up there every now and then. Go to a little self-contained train — back in them days, it was just a one-car thing; they called it the ‘Blue Goose’ — and it run on a little ol’ track up into Elliott County, and up through there. And that’s about all I knew. That’s the place where I found the ‘milk well.’ I thought this gal was bringing that milk right up out of the milk well in the yard. And I told Mom about it and she said, ‘Well, that’s the way they keep the milk cool. They stick it in a bucket or something — a lard bucket — and put the lid on it, stick it down in the well, and let it cool like that.’ Anyway, that’s the reason that I guess we just accepted things as children mostly, because they weren’t like that. We accepted it as, ‘That’s life.'”
Lawrence and I got on the subject of Ed’s mother, which led us into a whole variety of topics. I asked if he knew what year she was supposed to’ve been killed and he said, “I really couldn’t tell you that, John. If it happened that way, I imagine they’d been something in The Logan Banner or The Huntington Herald-Dispatch.”
Lawrence said he wasn’t even sure where he got the story of her death.
“No, I never heard Pop talk about it,” he said. “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know who told who and how it got started. Between me and Mona and Jack and Patsy and Noah, I guess. Noah didn’t seem like he showed as much interest in things like that as… I know whenever he’d go up there he’d get homesick. He didn’t like it up there too much. I remember there used to be a paw paw patch we’d all go down to where Trace and Harts join there. We’d go down there and cut slips of that paw paw — eat the paw paws when they’s in season — and make whistles out of them, you know. They had a slick bark. You could skin off a chunk of bark at the right time of the year and then you’d take and plug each end of that bark and make you a nice little whistle out of it. Then take the bark and plaid it into whips and things. Just something to occupy a kid’s time that didn’t have a heck of a lot to do. We invented a lot of things like that. I guess Joe showed us a lot of that stuff.”
In Search of Ed Haley
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Ella Haley with Lawrence Haley, 1950s
In Search of Ed Haley 143
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Ashland, Bake Lee, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Lula Lee, music, writing
After talking with Ugee, I called Lawrence Haley, who’d been “laid up” since my trip to Ashland. He and I talked more about finding the photograph of Ed and Ella getting ready to play music on the street. In no time at all, he was revealing new details about his father’s “street life,” first telling how he’d get a crowd together.
“He might just bow the fiddle a little bit and get a few sweet notes out of it. Stop. And if it looked too dead to him, he’d just get up and leave. ‘There’s no use of staying here.’ Pop wouldn’t play if it wasn’t something that he knew he could make money at. He wouldn’t get out and work for nickel and dime stuff all day long. Maybe ten, twelve cents an hour, just sitting there playing music, and taking requests or something and sitting on the street. But my mother did. She’d get out… I’ve seen her go in times so cold she’d cut the fingers out of gloves so she could play the mandolin, and have a harp and I know that thing’d almost freeze to her lips in weather like that. But Pop, he wouldn’t do that. Of course, I don’t guess a violin player could do too well outside. His fingers’d get stiff as they could be.”
When Ed wasn’t playing on the street in the winter, he would go inside public buildings.
“Well, I’ve seen them inside the courthouse main lobby some,” Lawrence said of his parents. “They played in theaters. Concourses of train stations, and places like that. Anywhere where they’s a lobby big enough to they didn’t interfere… You know, they could get over out of the way of main traffic flow, of pedestrian traffic. Sometimes they’d let them play and sometimes they wouldn’t. He was pretty well known in some places, and they tolerated him — if they didn’t outright appreciate it. They tolerated it anyway, because they knew that that’s how they had to make their living.”
Lawrence gave me more information on Bake and Lula Lee, the “other” blind husband-wife team working on the streets of Ashland.
“Lula Lee was blind and Bake Lee was blind,” he said. “They lived in Catlettsburg, Lula and Bake did, as long as I can remember. They raised two or three kids. Bake Lee was the flower huckster that Pop got accused of being when he died. ‘The Flower Huckster of Winchester Avenue.’ Lula Lee went to school with my mother at the School for the Blind. She played the mandolin and the harp. She had a harmonica rack. My mother played one like that, too. She did a lot of street work like that on her own, too. Pop might be in Logan, she might be in Gallipolis, Ohio, or Ironton or Portsmouth. And Pop might be off somewhere with a bunch of his cronies learning new music up in West Virginia or Kentucky. If the need for money come up, somebody had to bring it in. We didn’t eat quite as good for a day or two or something, but none of us would ever starve.”
Brandon Ray Kirk 