Tag Archives: Lawrence Haley

In Search of Ed Haley 102

03 Friday May 2013

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     Back in Nashville, with Lawrence’s encouragement, I made contact by telephone with Paul Holbrook, a retired general practitioner living in Ashland. Paul’s father, Dr. H.H. Holbrook, had been a good friend to Ed, who once gave him a fiddle and a silver trophy cup for delivering Mona. In talking with Paul, I could tell right away that he was well-educated. He also seemed to be advanced in years; his memory was a little foggy.

     “Well, I think Dad was a friend of his,” he said. “I think he delivered maybe one of his children. Dad fiddled a little bit and he always was interested in hearing Ed play. The fact Dad liked to fiddle and learned to when he was a young boy was the attraction. Other than that, I really can’t tell you a whole lot.”

     I asked Paul if he remembered the names of any of Doc’s tunes and he said, “No, not really. If I heard them I would, but I was never interested much in it.”

     Paul told me as much as he could remember about his father’s fiddling.

     “Dad just played some for his own amusement,” he said. “He must have done most of his playing when he was a young boy or young man maybe playing at some of the country dances. He was from Lawrence County. My grandfather’s farm was between Blaine and Martha.”

     Paul said his father moved a lot after becoming a doctor.

     “Well, he was at Burdine, Kentucky, and Jenkins, Kentucky, many years ago and as far as I know that’s where he first saw Ed Haley. That was up in the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky. And he was in Louisa for a couple of years. And then we moved to Ashland here back in 1922. As far as I know, Ed was down here at that time. I remember seeing him when he and his wife used to play on the street corners back in the twenties. Dad was here for ten years and then moved to Greenup. I believe Ed was down in Greenup once and played some for Dad at home. Now, Dad had made a little recording of Ed in Greenup, Kentucky playing the fiddle on a little old machine and I think I still have the record around someplace. I don’t know what kind of shape it’s in and I’m not even sure I can find it. I can try to find it if you might be interested in it.”

     Lord have mercy.

     What about him giving your dad a silver cup or trophy?

     “I don’t ever remember seeing a cup and I don’t remember ever hearing of it,” Holbrook said.

     What about him giving your dad a fiddle?

     “Yes, Dad had one of his fiddles and my son now has it,” he said. “J.P. Fraley borrowed the old fiddle and I think he used it to make some recordings for the National Archives or someplace in Washington. He had it for a while and brought it back and my son had a friend who had a child who was taking fiddle lessons and he used it some. But I don’t really know what shape it’s in, but the last time I heard my son say anything about it he said it needed some repair.”

     Just before hanging up, Paul gave me his son’s telephone number in Lexington, Kentucky.

     “He teaches some in Lexington at the university and also at Midway College and he comes home up here about every two or three weeks,” he said.

     I asked if he was a doctor, too, and Paul said, “He’s a Ph.D. doctor. He’s not an MD.”

     This was too much: new recordings, one of Ed’s fiddles…

     I called up Paul, Jr. to ask about the fiddle. His speech reminded me a lot of his father, although his mind was quicker, not having been clouded with age. When I mentioned the fiddle, he said, “J.P. Fraley had used it for a while and gotten some blue ribbons with it, but it is in Lexington with me at the moment. It has a very low bridge — a fiddle player’s bridge. I don’t know if it came from Ed Haley in this particular case or not. It is in the case that Grandfather kept it in. It’s difficult for us to say what Grandfather might have done to it. Since Grandfather’s death, nothing has ever changed about it. Grandfather died in 1961. His fiddle playing, I would describe as casual. I don’t think Grandfather was a terribly good fiddler, but he liked to play around.”

In Search of Ed Haley 101

02 Thursday May 2013

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     A few weeks later, I met Lawrence and Pat Haley at my show in Lexington, Kentucky. Lawrence was having more health problems, but he looked pretty good. I told him to stay active — at least walk a little every day — but he said he’d walked enough as a mail carrier to fill several lifetimes. After the show, Lawrence was quick to offer his advice on my playing.

     “That piece you played there at the theatre — ‘Catlettsburg’ — that was a real good rendition to me of it,” he said. “But the only thing, John, that I could see you going wrong on is you’re not using the force that my dad used to have when he’s playing them high notes especially. You’re a little bit too light on the strings with your bow there. You gotta use a little bit more ‘umph’. I really wouldn’t know how to explain it except Pop had the perfect note for everything he played and he played it with strength. You gotta use a little bit more pressure.”

     Lawrence said, “The only time I knew he ever got beaten in a contest was down here… They used to have a big ballpark and things down at the steel mill. They called it Armco Park. And they’s having a contest and old Natchee the Indian come out there playing over his shoulder. He had the hair on his bow strung up underneath and playing it that a way and all that kind of stuff and it pleased the crowd I reckon, and he beat Pop out at the fiddling contest there. He was kinda mad that day. He talked like, ‘I’ll never enter another contest.’ To let somebody like Natchee the Indian beat him out, it kinda made him mad.”

     Lawrence said Ed did something in that contest he’d never seen him do before: stand up while playing the fiddle.

     I asked Lawrence if he remembered a lot of fiddlers visiting his father when he was young — especially the famous radio fiddler, Georgia Slim Rutland.

     “They had a couple of three recording studios here in Ashland back in the early twenties,” Lawrence said. “They was a lot of these fellas passed through Ashland, but I can’t say that I ever met any of them because Pop would get out and go on his own when I was in school a lot of times. And then in summer months, we’d take off to West Virginia or Morehead or Sandy Hook or someplace like that where my mother was from — Wrigley — and we might stay half the summer with Aunt Liza or somebody like that up on Harts Creek or Aunt Minnie. Or we might stay at home and Pop and Mom would take off somewhere, and old Rosie Day would stay with us usually — Jilson Setters’ wife.”

In Search of Ed Haley 96

27 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Nestled in Nashville, I worked obsessively on Ed Haley’s music. First, I made a real effort to transcribe it note for note and break it down “under the microscope.” Initially, I had tried to play it generally the way he did while keeping its spirit — with my own twists, of course, which is nearly impossible not to do. This time, though, I wanted to study it as you might a fabulous book — break it down, look at it mechanically… I made a huge discovery regarding Ed’s bowing during that time. With Lawrence’s help via telephone conversations, I deduced that Ed used what Scotch fiddlers call “snap bowing,” which is when you separate notes by applying pressure (“little stops”) with the bow — not by changing its direction. Of course, Ed didn’t use those patterns exclusively and mixed them with more conventional strokes.

I also spent a lot of time listening to Ed’s recordings and playing my versions of his songs into a tape recorder. One of the first things I figured out was that he used what fiddler Kevin Burke calls the “Irish lilt” to give his music a “dotted note feel.” It would be like playing a tune in triplets with the middle note taken out.

I also discovered that Lawrence was right about Ed not playing so many notes; instead, he created the illusion of doing so by phrasing his tunes in a way that gave them a nice “crooked” flavor.

Throughout these discoveries, Lawrence continued his role as my brutally honest fiddle teacher. His comments were surprisingly musical for someone who kept reminding me that he didn’t even play anything. When I played “Yellow Barber” for him over the telephone, he said, “That sounded right except when you get down to that low end, you’re doing a little skipping in there and it seemed to me like Pop played that a little bit smoother. Like he had a roll to his… And I noticed you had a few jumping notes in there that really I don’t remember hearing. Maybe you can hear them. Other than that, it sounded great to me.”

Lawrence seemed pleased with my playing of Ed’s “Catlettsburg”.

“That was good, John,” he said. “That was really good.”

I told him I didn’t know how Ed was able to get up into second position on that tune with the fiddle sitting at his shoulder.

“I always thought that he kinda controlled the violin with his thumb and the meaty part of his hand between his finger and thumb,” Lawrence said. “He could relax that up and down the neck of the violin or he could tighten that and he could still have the flexibility of his fingers, plus that give him the ability to rock that violin body underneath the bow, too.”

I was trying that and eventually got to where I could will my fingers into third position still holding the fiddle at my shoulder, which if you have to play for a long time is sure easier on the neck of the player.

I told Lawrence about talking with Clyde, especially about his memories of Ed mistreating him as a child.

“I don’t know, maybe my dad was mean to him when he was a young’n,” Lawrence said. “But I can’t remember my dad ever laying a hand on me to hurt me. I musta been a rowdy little kid ’cause it seemed like whenever Pop’d pick me up he’d call me ‘muddy duck’ because I was always dirty, I reckon, whenever he’d get a hold of me. He’d just rub my head or something like that and call me his ‘muddy duck.’ I don’t know where Clyde got his story from.”

Lawrence agreed that his dad sometimes abused his mother, although he placed a lot of blame for their marital problems on her.

“Well, he could be temperamental with my mother at times, but I think she was temperamental, too. I think my mother’s people had higher tempers than Dad’s people did. They seemed to be kinda quiet people. Noah Mullins was supposed to killed a revenuer up there at Harts. They waylaid a revenuer and they laid it on Noah, but Noah Mullins always seemed to me like just as quiet and as calm a fella as could be. But I had some of my uncles on my mother’s side, they were a little bit of a temperamental type of people. So I’d put some of the blame on my mother for her treatment of my dad. You know, a woman can upset a man and whip him quicker with words than he can whip her with his fists.”

I totally agreed, then asked Lawrence if he knew anything about the Muncys from Patsy’s genealogy.

“We’d ride the Norfork and Western train up from Kenova and stop at Kermit and stay there with Muncy people,” he said. “They lived in an apartment up over their store and filling station-type thing and they had one of them small monkeys. I went up there one day and got right at the top of the steps and was playing with that monkey and I musta made it mad and it made a rush at me and I musta jumped back and I went to the bottom of them steps. That made me remember it more than anything else. I can’t even remember that Pop played music while he was there for them. They mighta just talked. We used to stop there maybe and stay all night and Pop and Mom and me would go on to Williamson and they’d play at courthouse days or something there. Pop musta had people up in there, but he never said anything to me about it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 94

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Ed Haley, Music

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Not too long after talking with Patsy, her son Scott sent me a copy of Ed’s genealogy, most of which came directly from Ed and Ella. “James Edward Haley was born in August and was the son of Milt and Imogene (Mullins) Haley,” the notes began. “He died February 4, 1951 in Ashland, KY. He married Martha Ella Trumbo, a daughter of William A. and Laura Belle (Whitt) Payne Trumbo. She was born July 14, 1888 and died November 26, 1954 in Cleveland, OH. At the time of their marriage, Ella had one child from a previous relationship: Ralph A. Payne who married Margaret Ryan and who died on May 22, 1947.”

Patsy listed Milt Haley’s parents as Benjamin Haley and Nellie Muncy, and Emma Jean (Imogene) Haley’s parents as Andrew Jackson Mullins and Chloe Ann Gore.

There was detailed information on Ed and Ella’s children.

“Sherman Luther Haley, the oldest, died as an infant. Clyde Frederick Haley was born on June 13, 1921 and never married. Noah Earl Haley was born on October 26, 1922 and married Janet J. Fried in September of 1951. Allie Jackson Haley was born on April 6, 1924. He married Patsy J. Cox on October 25, 1946 and died on March 23, 1982. Lawrence Alfred Haley was born on January 8, 1928. He married Patricia M. Hulse in February of 1949. Monnie May Haley was born on May 5, 1930 and married in 1945 to Wilson Mullins.”

In Search of Ed Haley 93

22 Monday Apr 2013

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After securing Patsy’s telephone number from Lawrence Haley, I called her up with questions about Ed’s background. Patsy said she first met Ed just after Thanksgiving in 1946 when she and Jack moved in with the family at 105 17th Street in Ashland. At the time, Mona and her husband Wilson Mullins lived there, as did Mona’s son, “little Ralph.” She was in daily contact with Pop for the next three months.

I asked if Ed drank a lot in those days. “Sir, I never saw the man drunk,” she said, in a very pronounced Cleveland accent. “I know one time he went off with his son to play for some people that were having a party and I guess he got kinda high on the horse then, but he never came home.”

Patsy said Ed never played on the street after she came into the family but would play around the house for the kids. She remembered Ed putting the fiddle on his shoulder and playing tunes like “Black Jet” and “Lightning Express”.

“Pop had one special song for me,” she said. “It was, ‘I took a fat gal by the hand the other afternoon and someone yelled out where’s the string that goes with your balloon?’’ because I was a little on the chubby side. Oh, that man could play anything. He could listen to the radio and play popular music. He played the guitar. Beautiful banjo. I don’t think he used a pick.”

Around 1948, Molly O’Day came to see Ed at his home on 45th Street in Ashland. She brought her husband and fiddling brother — and a lot of recording equipment. Everyone settled in the living room, where Ed played the fiddle, “long neck” banjo and mandolin. Patsy said it seemed like they were just “horsing around,” although there was one song that Molly wanted to hear “real bad.” She didn’t recall much else about the visit because she mostly stayed with Ella and little Ralph in the kitchen.

Patsy said Ed never told any stories but she heard from Ella how his parents were killed on Harts Creek. It was a totally different account from anything I’d heard. “Mom Haley told me that they were both murdered in the log cabin,” she said. “Now, that’s not what happened according to what everybody has been telling me from down in Kentucky.”

I asked Patsy why she thought Ella would have told her something that was apparently untrue and she said, “Well, they might’ve just not wanted me to know everything. They thought I was just one of them big city girls from Los Angeles.”

She had also heard how Ed came to be blind.

It was measles that did it — that’s what Mom Haley told me — and that they left him out in his buggy in the sun.”

In Search of Ed Haley 91

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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

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

Ed did talk about other fiddlers, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 88

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Clyde paused, then asked, “Did Lawrence show you them pictures of my dad? Did you ever see him in that big coat?”

Before I could answer, he took off again, “He wore that long as I remember about him, and he’d go to the bootlegger and get him a pint of moonshine — one in each pocket in that overcoat — and he’d go over to Portsmouth. I’ve seen him have an old clay pipe in his coat pocket and he smoked that when he was out playing anywhere. He smoked Strader’s Natural Leaf Tobacco. He’d take out his pocketknife and chop it up real fine and put it in his pipe. He also chewed Brown Mule tobacco and he carried a tobacco can in his pocket to spit in. He always had a cane with him. Always. He’d feel with it. That was his ‘seeing eye-dog.’ And if anybody’d look him in the eyes, his eyeballs were real messed up from the measles. That’s exactly what put him blind. My mother had a accident with her daddy’s wagon. He had a carnival wagon. I think she started out in her life teaching kids, but then she had so many kids herself she got away from that. She could’ve been a music teacher.”

Clyde said, “I wish you could’ve known him personally. He could pin you down somewhere and tell you stories that you wouldn’t believe could happen. And I’ve thought a lot of times about things he told, and it had to be true ’cause how else could they happen without somebody really knowing it?”

I kept hearing these references to Ed’s story-telling abilities and was becoming somewhat fascinated. “What kind of stories did he tell?” I asked Clyde.

“Well, just like a hillbilly mountaineer, you’d get him started on a story and he wouldn’t quit,” Clyde said. “He was a storyteller’s storyteller. I tell you, he could tell some big ones. My dad could walk you down talking the Bible and he wasn’t a religious man. Well, my mother would read that Ziegler Magazine, you know, and that was a lot like blind people’s Reader’s Digest. My mother would read to him. They’d sit for hours and hours at a time and he’d drink and she’d read the magazine to him. Used to be so much of it, it would get monotonous.”

Right away, I thought Clyde’s memory of Ella reading to Ed for hours as he drank was one of the best lines I’d heard up to that point. I mean, it really told an incredible amount about their life at home. As I thought about that image, Clyde told about his father playing music on the streets.

“My dad done most of his street playing over there in Ironton,” he said. “And he didn’t like to go out on the street and play with my mother. He didn’t like to go anywhere with her. It made him feel lower than he was. My mother played a mandolin. She had an old five-string Gibson banjo, too. One of them short ones. Banjo-mandolin, they called it.”

Clyde said Ed sometimes put out a hat for money when he was playing on the street, but never a tin cup. Ella did that.

“She had a Army drinking cup — one of those old-time tin cups,” he said. “My mother would put it out because my mother played an accordion, too. Things like ‘Stackolee’, ‘Black and Jet’… My mother and my father sang that. They had a duo, you know. Did you ever hear ‘The Lightning Express’? About the conductor on the railroad and he got run over by that train in the end of it?”

I hadn’t, so I asked Clyde to name more of his father’s tunes.

“‘Forked Deer’, and all the old-timers,” he said. “He was real well-versed in most of them.”

What about “Indian Squaw”?

“‘Indian Squaw’?” he said. “Yeah, yeah. He knew ‘The Lost Indian’ and all the old tunes like ‘Paddy on the Turnpike’ and ‘Pigeon on the Gate’. And he even made one tune for my brother Lawrence called ‘8th of January’ and that was one of the best tunes I ever heard him play.”

Of course, “8th of January” was an old fiddle tune commemorating Andrew Jackson’s victory against the British at the Battle of New Orleans — not Lawrence Haley’s birthday — but it sure was interesting that Clyde made the correlation.

How about waltzes? I asked.

“Well, he knew quite a few of them, you know,” Clyde said. “He was a fiddler’s fiddler. Most of his tunes that he played, my mother played with him on piano or an accordion. And my dad, you could call the name of a tune, and he knew it by heart. He didn’t have to study about it, he just played it.”

In Search of Ed Haley 87

11 Thursday Apr 2013

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In January of 1994, Lawrence put me in touch with his brother Clyde Haley, an old bachelor who had spent most of his life roaming the country, working here and there and always managing to get into some kind of trouble. Lawrence called Clyde “the black sheep of the family,” while Mona laughingly dubbed him as a “rogue.” He was Ed Haley’s oldest son and some seven years older than Lawrence. Each time I went to Harts Creek, people had asked about Clyde. Apparently, he made quite an impression.

When I first called Clyde, he lived in a minimum-security nursing home in Stockton, California. Our conversation started like this:

“Hello, John!”

     Hey, Clyde.  How’re you doing?

“Well, I’m still in the hospital.”

     Well, all right. I been wanting to talk to you for two years now.

“Who is this?”

     This is John Hartford in Nashville.

“Well, I don’t know whether I know you personally, do I?”

     Well, you may not. I’m a real good friend of Lawrence and Pat’s. And I play the fiddle myself and I’m on television. I wear a little derby hat and I dance while I play the fiddle.

Clyde laughed.

     But the reason I want to talk to you is I think your father was the greatest old-time fiddler that ever lived.

“I do, too,” he said.

Apparently, Clyde spent a lot of time bragging on Ed’s music at the nursing home. I told him I would send him copies of his father’s music and he got really excited.

“Okay,” he said. “We do a lot of little dancing here in our recreation periods. I think I’ll be outta here in March. It’s not a jail or anything — it’s a hospital.”

I told him I would be touring California in June and he said, “Well, you’ve got my address. Drop by and see me. I’m in Stockton.”

In the meantime, there were a lot of things we could talk about over the telephone. I could tell early in our conversation that Clyde was sometimes right on with his stories, while at other times he was completely out to lunch. His memories were sporadic — in no particular order — like bits of broken glass in a huge pile of garbage that you have to sort through and put back together.

I knew Clyde was Lawrence’s oldest living brother, but wasn’t exactly sure of his age.

“I was born in 1921,” he said. “That’d make me about 73.”

Clyde said he went with his father on trips more than any of the other Haley children.

“When my dad wanted to leave Mom and get away from her for a change, he’d always take me as his crutch,” he said. “I was his favorite son outside of Ralph. He called me ‘Reecko’. That was his nickname for me. I used to carry the fiddle case for him. And I went with him when he’d go to Logan County and go up on Harts Creek and up in Dingess and up that way. And he’d go over around Wayne County. He knew people up there.”

I asked Clyde to describe his father and he said, “My dad, he was about 6’2″ and he had real small feet. He had feet like a dancer would have and he wore a size six shoe. I remember that because I used to wear his shoes. I never saw him with a suit on in my life.”

In Search of Ed Haley 86

07 Sunday Apr 2013

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Around that same time, I called Brandon Kirk, a great-nephew to Lawrence Kirk. Brandon was into genealogy and local history; for the past several years, he had been heavily researching the Brumfields. A college student and library assistant at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, he spent his weekends at Harts interviewing neighbors, gathering up old photographs and documenting cemeteries. He said his family had told him about my recent trip to Harts; he was eager to make contact and compare notes on the story of Al Brumfield’s trouble with Milt Haley, especially since I represented a “non-Brumfield, non-Harts Creek” perspective.

After my initial call, Brandon sent me detailed letters in giant manila envelopes full of information about the Brumfields, the death of Milt Haley and the Adams and Mullins families on Harts Creek. It went a long way in explaining who some of the people were in the stories Lawrence and I had been hearing. It was clear that Brandon had a lot of information to offer. He knew all the genealogies, geography, and chronology that we’d been lacking to completely understand the story of Milt Haley and Ed’s connection to Harts Creek.

At the time of the Haley-McCoy murders, according to Brandon, Harts was in the midst of a timber boom. It was a tumultuous time: a whole new economic system had descended on locals who’d previously been primarily small farmers. Competition and the desire to accumulate wealth and status had created a lot of jealousy among and within local families. This new way of life was made worse by the arrival of “new faces” in town, many of whom were transients from Kentucky looking for work. Brandon figured that Milt Haley and Green McCoy were among these immigrants, as their family names were absent from the old records around Harts Creek. In his estimation, Milt and Green may have been like so many of the new arrivals: outlaws trying to escape a seedy past in a somewhat isolated but moderately booming town. He cited at least one such example in his own family tree.

As for the Haley-McCoy murders, Brandon and I seemed to have traced down roughly the same versions of the story. He said it was just one of many murder stories in Harts’ past that had caught his interest — and only one of several involving his ancestors. As a result, he had neglected to hunt down many possible leads regarding it. It was one of probably a hundred incredible stories pertaining to Harts.

I told Brandon about my recent trip, how I had gone to Milt and Green’s grave with Lawrence Kirk. He said he had never been to the grave but had heard that Milt and Green were buried together in a single hole. I wondered why they were buried together and he suggested that if they were handcuffed together at the time of the murders maybe it was a practical decision; or maybe their mutilated bodies warranted a “rushed job.” There may have also been a customary aspect to the burial: in 1882, during the Hatfield-McCoy feud, three of Randolph McCoy’s sons were buried together after their single-night execution.

Around that time, I compiled Xerox versions of my notes on Ed’s life and sent it to Lawrence Haley and Dr. Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe showed his copy to Judy McCollough of the University of Illinois Press who immediately called and told me that I had a book in the works and that she wanted to print it. It was the first time I had really thought about my research regarding Ed Haley as anything more than an obsession to totally immerse myself in his life. I told her that it wasn’t a book yet, but if it was gonna be there was a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done.

In Search of Ed Haley 85

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Harts, John Hartford

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I returned to Nashville talking not so much about new musical developments but rambling on to my wife about murders and the people I’d met in Harts. I spent a lot of time studying over Joe’s photographs, especially the faded family group shot. One of the boys in the picture was propped inside a young woman’s arms and appeared very much to be blind. Was it Ed and his mother? Unfortunately, since the woman was almost completely faded away I couldn’t make a positive identification of her, even when I compared it to the photo of Emma Jean found by Lawrence and I on our first trip to Harts.

There was another interesting development: when I removed the picture of Bill and Peter Mullins from its frame, another equally large picture of the “old couple” kind of popped out from behind it. That made three pictures of those folks and it sure seemed logical to me that Joe Mullins would’ve had three pictures of his grandparents — meaning Ed’s grandparents — and not of an uncle and an aunt.

I sent copies of Joe’s old pictures to Turley and Violet Adams to see if they could show them around for identification. A few weeks later, we spoke over the telephone and they said Liza McKenzie had fingered Ed as the child to the right in the faded group picture. She also said the old folks in the back row were Jackson Mullins and his wife, Chloe.

In Search of Ed Haley 84

01 Monday Apr 2013

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     Lawrence, Clifton, and I headed back down to Joe’s in order to see more of his pictures. We first looked in a smokehouse near Joe’s trailer. As Clifton took hold of the door, he proudly mentioned that it had come from Uncle Peter’s old log home. Almost as soon as I stepped inside, just back of an ancient spinning wheel, piles of rotting furniture and bags of god-knows-what, I spotted the large framed photograph of Bill and Peter Mullins — two very serious young men with thick mustaches. Thinking that the picture showed Peter and his brother Weddie, Clifton began to tell of Weddie’s death.

     “They went over to Dingess and they got into a fight about an election or something and one of them got shot over there and they brought him back across the mountain, you know, on the horses. Weddie, he got killed.”

     Nearby this picture was a faded one of equal size featuring what appeared to be a whole family of people. My first inclination was to assume it was the Jackson Mullins family, maybe even showing Milt Haley and Ed somewhere in the shadows.

     Clifton said we were welcome to borrow the two large pictures. He then fetched a box from which we borrowed 22 small photographs. Satisfied, we headed down to Turley’s for his input on their identification.

     Turley was very interested in the large photo of what we thought was Weddie and Peter Mullins, since Weddie was his grandfather.

     “They shot and wounded a constable or sheriff or something another over at Dingess,” he said. “John Dillon was the sheriff over there, or deputy-sheriff. He killed Weddie, and Peter, he got away. Peter come home and Uncle John went back over there and Peter went with him but he didn’t go in, I don’t think. He went in, said this guy was laying there dying, said he asked him how he was. They said, ‘Well, seems to me like he’s a dying.’ Said he just pulled a gun there and shot him and said, ‘He’s dead now.'”

     I was most interested in the large faded photo of what I presumed to be the Jackson Mullins family. The picture showed a very old couple, who I figured to be Jackson and Chloe, Ed’s grandparents. There was another smaller picture of the couple, which we had borrowed from Joe’s box. Turley, though, didn’t think it was Jackson and Chloe Mullins.

     “I can tell you who I think that is,” he said. “Lude and Van Mullins.”

     Van Mullins, he said, was a brother to Peter’s wife Liza.

     “So Aunt Liza was a Mullins before she married Peter Mullins?” I asked.

     “Yeah, I guess so,” Turley said, as if he’d never thought of it before.

     After looking at more of Joe’s pictures, I asked Turley about the location of the old Milt Haley house. He said it used to sit at the site of his present-day home.

     “When I was a little boy I could remember it,” he said. “They was a big old log house front and they was a big long porch. And they had guest rooms. And then the kitchen was back there. Had a big chimney in it. And then they had that porch and everything back through there. Had that big kitchen in it and big fireplace. They could just put a big kettle in there and make a whole big kettle of stuff.”

     It resembled the old Stonewall Workman home, Turley said, although I had no idea what that meant.

     “The year I was six years old is when they remodeled that house — seven,” he said. “I remember after they took a part of it off the top, made it a story and a half.”

     I drew out a floor plan of “The Milt Haley House” based on Turley’s memories.

In Search of Ed Haley 83

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Green Shoal, Lincoln County Feud, Spottswood

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We found Bum on our way up the hollow and went to sit on his porch with his aunt, Liza McKenzie, two of his sisters, Alice and Dicy — and of course Shermie. As soon as Liza figured out who we were she looked at Lawrence and said he was just a small boy the last time she’d seen him.

“Yeah, I guess around 1940 or ’41 was the last time I come to this area,” Lawrence said.

Liza said, “Well, I lived in Kentucky about sixty years. Perry County, up in Hazard.”

I said to her, “Is that where Milt Haley was from?” and she said, “I don’t know but now Ed Haley was borned and raised right around here. When he was a boy, he got up on top of that house down there where Aunt Mag used to live — in that old two-story house — and rolled off in a box. Mother said, ‘Lord, Ed, are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, God no. It’s give me eyesight.’ He said he jarred his eyesight back.”

I liked Liza right away.

I asked her if she had any pictures and she said, “Loretta’s mother had all the pictures of Ed Haley I ever did know. They used to have a picture down there at Loretta’s of Ed’s mother. She was a pretty woman.”

She looked at Clifton and said, “Clif, I believe your mother had a picture of Ed Haley that was made down there at the old home where he was born and raised. Down there where Aunt Mag used to live. I know they had them.”

Clifton remembered it.

“Yeah, they was sitting out in the yard,” he said. “They was together. She was in the chair and he was standing. He didn’t have no pants on.”

Clifton said, “Yeah, you’re right. They was a picture down there. But I looked; they was so many pictures in that box.”

     Box of pictures? I thought.

Before I could ask about them, Clifton said, “There’s one down there faded out. It’s in a big frame. I got it in another building.”

He told me, “I can show them to ya.”

About that time, Cas Baisden came up to the porch. Bum said he was Liza’s 83-year-old twin brother. I asked Cas if he remembered Ed and he said, “I knowed him, yeah. He was raised up here. Old man Peter lived down at the mouth of the holler and his boy lived up the road here and old man Ed’d go up there and he’d come down that road a running and jumping just like he could see and cut the awfulest shine that ever was.”

Lawrence joked, “That’s probably how Clyde got to be the way he was.”

Cas said, “Yeah, I guess Clyde took after him. Clyde went out here and got down in a well once and they had the awfulest time that ever was getting him out. Way back in top of a mountain.”

I asked Cas about the first time he ever saw Ed and he said, “It’s been many a year ago. He stayed down here, him and his wife and them. They’d play music and drink and fight and scratch with one another and them boys was so mean… He’d get so drunk he couldn’t walk.”

Bum knew that Ed was real “easy to get mad about music,” but said he could get him to play nearly anything he wanted because Ed liked him. He’d ask Ed to play something like “John Henry” and he’d say, “Are you sure that’s what you want me to play? You know, I was just thinking about playing that.” If Ed didn’t like someone Bum said he’d “goof around” and not play for them.

Things kinda tapered off after that. Nobody knew anything about Ed having any brothers. Cas had heard about Ed’s father, who he thought was named Green.

“You know, he got killed when I was a little fella, I guess,” Cas said. “His name was Green. They took him over yonder on Green Shoal, they said, and killed him. Walked him down here and up Smoke House and over and down Piney and across the river.”

I asked if Lawrence looked like Ed and Liza said, “Yes, he does. Ed was a bigger man than he is. Ed was a big man.”

But Lawrence looks like Ed in the face?

“Yeah, he looks like him all over.”

Cas said, “Ed was a taller man. I guess he takes after his mother. She’s a little short woman.”

Lawrence agreed: “Yeah, she was about five feet tall — not much bigger than Aunt Liza.”

In Search of Ed Haley 82

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

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

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I told Turley that Lawrence and I needed to visit Joe Mullins, who had been gone during our last trip to Harts Creek. Turley completely deflated us: Joe, he said, had recently suffered a stroke. He now lived with his daughter Connie Mullins in a trailer just up the creek. Turley pointed the way. Driving a short distance, Lawrence and I parked our car by the creek and walked over a little narrow bridge where an army of barking dogs greeted us. At the porch, Connie introduced us to her brother, Clifton. We stepped on inside and found Joe seated in a wheelchair, surrounded by more dogs. His mind — or at least his ability to communicate a great deal — was all but gone due to the lingering effects of his stroke. Lawrence sat next to him with his hand on his arm. Almost in tears over Joe’s condition, he tried to rekindle Joe’s memories by saying, “I’m Ed Haley’s boy.”

I hung out with Joe’s kids — Connie, Clifton and Loretta. While all were reasonably young, Clifton and Connie had Parkinson’s Disease.

“They’s four of us got it,” Clifton said. “They said it runs through the family some way another. Musta come down the tree somewhere.”

I asked him how old he was.

“38,” he said.

Clifton had just moved back to Harts.

“I got hurt in Michigan and Daddy was sick so I said, ‘Well, it’s a good chance for me to go help my daddy and my sisters.'”

Clifton’s sisters said he was the one who found Ed’s smashed fiddle years ago in the rafters of Uncle Peter’s old smokehouse.

“I was up in there — we was playing around one day — and it fell out on me,” he said. “And I just looked at it and I said, ‘Well, I’ll try to glue it together.’ I started gluing it and it wouldn’t glue so I dumped it into the creek. I didn’t know whose it was. I was about eight but all the pieces wasn’t there to it. When it hit that guy it just splintered everywhere.”

Clifton suggested that we visit Bum and his family just up the hollow. Two years earlier, Bum had told originally Lawrence and I how he had witnessed Ed smash the fiddle over a man’s head while at a tavern on Crawley Mountain. Bum lived only a short distance from Joe’s trailer, up the hollow past Uncle Peter’s old homeplace, in a house situated near Enslow Baisden’s log cabin.

In Search of Ed Haley 81

18 Monday Mar 2013

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Back at Iris Williams’, we met another of her brothers, Shelby Kirk. We told Shelby a little of what we’d heard about Milt’s death from Roxie Mullins, who he said had recently died, then listened to his version of the trouble.

“They brought them in there sometime that night and they said they was killed at the edge of daylight,” he said. “There was a boy John Fowler told me once, he said, ‘I’ve heard my aunt Belle Fowler tell about that.’ Said she was there, a little girl. Said in one of them rooms they had apples picked off of a tree and had them stored, poured out you know, up there in a room. And said she got in that pile of apples and covered her head up with them apples to keep from hearing that when they was getting ready to kill them. They said they was a crying and a begging, wanting not to be killed away from their families and their children but they went right on and did it anyhow. They said they led them out the back door one at a time and as they come out that back door they was a fellow hit them with a double-headed axe — sideways, top of the head.”

I asked Shelby where the killing took place and he said it occurred on the Green Shoal side of the river, opposite where Mr. Kirk had showed us.

“The old house is still standing right there,” he said. “It’s just got some weather-boarding on it. An old log house.”

Shelby tried to describe the way law and order worked around Harts in Milt Haley’s day.

“Boy, they used to have mobs,” he said. “Used to have an outfit called the Night Riders down in here. If they got it in for me or you one — if we’d done something, you know — why, they’d pull straws to see who was gonna do the killing.”

In Search of Ed Haley 80

15 Friday Mar 2013

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     Mr. Kirk hopped in the car with Lawrence Haley and I and guided us to “Presto’s garden,” a small corn patch located just off of the hill from the Haley-McCoy grave. It was late afternoon: the air was clear and the remains of the sun slanted through the trees on the hillside. Lawrence Haley chose to stay at the garden due to his heart condition, but I made the steep climb toward the grave with Mr. Kirk just behind me. A few minutes later, we stopped at an indentation — a round shallow crater about seven feet in diameter. It had a little pile of stones on each end and was just as Bob Adkins had said it would be. We walked back and forth studying the “bowl” and the markers and I took some pictures.

     At the bottom of the hill, we got back in the car and rode up Low Gap Road to the site of Milt Haley’s murder. On the way, I told Mr. Kirk what we’d heard about Ed’s mother Emma Jean Mullins being shot in the face.

     “See, I hadn’t heard that part of it,” he said. “Well now, you know them Adamses and Mullinses up there on Hart married back and forth for generations. That’s quite possible. Of course, them Brumfields and them Adamses had trouble over that log boom they had had there at the mouth of Hart. It’d catch water and hold it back like a dam. They’d float them logs all out of Harts Creek back in yonder, then when the backwater come up in the spring of the year they’d make them into a raft and float them out of here and take them to the town of Guyandotte. That’s the market. They claimed the Brumfields got to sawing the ends of them logs off and re-branding them. I don’t know what the extent of their trouble was but they had some misunderstanding over that lumber and then Runyon and whiskey got involved in it down on that houseboat where they’s selling whiskey. All of them drinking, you know. They’d all go down there and get drunk and talk this shit up, you know, and get it started, get it going, down there where the booze was. Things were getting out of hand. Whiskey’s destroyed an awful lot of people in this country. A lot of my relatives.”

     Mr. Kirk said, “They’s supposed to killed them at daylight or immediately after daylight. The story that I’ve heard on it has been that they were both knocked in the head with the flat side of a double-bit axe. Killed them separately. Hit them right in the top of the head there. And I’ve heard people say they was shot up you know, and some said they were chopped up with an axe. But my grandmother, she was awful critical of the Brumfields and their conduct. She was an Adkins — part Dingess. Bill Brumfield’s widow. By her being pretty critical of them, I feel like she handed me what she had as being true. But now they was organized into kind of a posse. She said they called theirselves ‘The Night Riders.’ Vigilante group. Operated all the time at night. They were pretty sneaking in what they did.”

     They must’ve had some serious shortcomings, because Mr. Kirk said they “tried to organize themselves into the Klan, but the Klan wouldn’t have them.”

     After surveying the site of Milt’s murder, we drove down to the mouth of Harts Creek where Mr. Kirk pointed out the site of the recently burned Al Brumfield house.

     “Except being a landmark, it wasn’t worth much,” he said. “They used to have a meal-house out there to ground meal for people. Had a store in here. That’s Al Brumfield and Aunt Hollene. He was in his fifties when he died of typhoid fever. Watson Adkins later bought his house and lived there. Had a store over here for years. Now, Runyon had a boat down yonder — great big boat — barge built in there and had a store in it. He run poker games. Selling whiskey. Had a few groceries in there. Al and his bunch trying to do the same thing over here.”

     All during our ride with Mr. Kirk, he kept pointing out spots where murders had taken place. As we made our way back up West Fork, I asked him why there’d been so many killings around Harts Creek. He didn’t hesitate in saying, “Whiskey. Whiskey’s caused it. This section of country up through here — this West Fork section — has had a few killings. It wasn’t as bad as back yonder. Whiskey involved in every bit of that.”

     Lawrence Haley agreed that whiskey was the primary cause of trouble in the old days, even mentioning how one of Uncle Peter Mullins’ boys once killed a “revenue man” around Trace Fork. He said it “it took just about everything Uncle Peter had to keep him out of jail.”

     Mr. Kirk said, “Is that the one they called ‘Reel-Footed’ Peter? Ewell’s daddy?”

     Lawrence confirmed that it was — and that it was his great-uncle — and Mr. Kirk said, “I can remember old man Peter. I believe it was his right foot that was curled in. Man, he’d work in the woods, draw a team…”

In Search of Ed Haley 78

07 Thursday Mar 2013

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The next day, Lawrence and I went to find Milt Haley’s grave on the West Fork of Harts Creek. It had been two years since our initial trip up the Guyandotte Valley and I was excited to once again plant my feet on the grounds of Ed Haley’s childhood. We followed Bob Adkins’ directions to the West Fork of Harts Creek, where we found a confusing sign labeled “East Fork Road” pointing us across a stone bridge and past a somewhat large red brick church. Lower West Fork was very much different from my memories of main Harts Creek — more sparsely settled. It was surprisingly beautiful farm country with a view of an almost-forgotten agrarian way of life. There were old barns, cattle and tiny farms all along the nice little road.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence and I were unable to find the Milt Haley grave, which we figured was located in a thicket on top of one of the surrounding mountains. Hoping for the best, we decided to ask for directions at a nice-looking house. We chose a neat little white home, where an older lady came out and showed almost complete confusion as we asked about Ed Haley, Milt Haley and a grave. Once she figured out what we were talking about, though, she introduced herself as Iris Williams, said she was part-Brumfield and pointed toward the grave just down the road and to the right on a hill. She said her older brother Lawrence Kirk would know all about it. She went back inside and called Lawrence, who said he’d come right over and tell us what he knew about Ed Haley and the Haley-McCoy murders.

It wasn’t long until Lawrence Kirk pulled into the driveway and popped out of his car. He was a short stocky 70-something-year-old fellow with thinning hair and glasses. He made his way toward the porch, grinning and waving a newspaper. He said he had seen me on TV and unraveled the paper, which featured a front-page story about our recent visit to see Lynn Davis in Huntington.

In one of those “strange contact moments,” I introduced him to Lawrence Haley. It was a first-ever meeting of men whose ancestors had shot it out along Harts Creek over one hundred years earlier. They seemed to like each other right away and made it clear they held no grudges over their ancestors’ troubles. This was great news — no barriers to information flow. However, I have to admit, I got a little adrenaline rush in thinking that Lawrence and I were now in “enemy territory.” In my mind, the 1889 feud was still smoldering in the hearts and minds of at least a few people.

Instead, we all sat on Mrs. Williams’ front porch with Mr. Kirk, who remembered Ed well.

“I’ve heard Ed Haley play up there at the courthouse square many of a time in Logan with Ed Belcher,” he said. “They’d get together up there sometimes and play all day. I’d be with my dad up there when I was a youngster. I kinda got acquainted with the old man, enough to speak to him. He’d always ask you who it is. ‘Yeah, I know some Kirks,’ he’d say.”

Mr. Kirk said he used to see Ed and his wife on the Logan-Williamson bus that ran between the coalfields and Huntington.

“I felt sympathetic towards them,” he said. “They were blind — handicapped — and I’d notice them. I can’t remember that well about him. I can’t remember too much how he was dressed. It bears on my mind about ever time I ever saw him he was bald-headed. I’m not sure…but he played that fiddle.”

Mr. Kirk last saw Ed play music on a Sunday just before the election of 1948 or ’50 at the Harts Tavern. His uncle Taylor Brumfield was the owner of the tavern. Ed was there with Bernie Adams, who Mr. Kirk called “a pretty good guitar player.”

“Bernie was bad to drink,” he said. “He just drunk liquor until it finally killed him, I reckon.”

Ed was “being pretty sassy” at the tavern.

“They wasn’t giving him enough money to please him, you know,” Mr. Kirk said. “They was buying him a few drinks but he felt like fellows ought to throw him in a few dollars of money along. But that bunch there, they had to have their quarters to buy some beer with.”

Ed told Bernie, “Well hell, let’s go. This tight bunch here won’t buy a man no beer. Can’t get a crowd together no how.”

Bernie said, “Now, Ed. Don’t get to talking too rough about these fellows around Harts. Some of your folks didn’t have too good a relation with these Brumfields around here.”

“Aw, to hell with these damn Brumfields,” Ed said. “There’s nobody afraid of these Brumfields.”

I almost fell off the porch laughing.

In Search of Ed Haley 77

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Cemeteries, Ed Haley, Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 76

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat promised to ask Patsy if she had anything.

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

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

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

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

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

There was a noble boatsman.

Noble he did well.

He had a lovin’ wife

But she loved the tailor well.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 73

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in African American History, Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, Logan, Music, Sports

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Mona’s memories were really pouring out, about a variety of things. I asked her what Ed was like and she said, “Noah is a lot like Pop in a way. He always liked the outdoors, Pop did. He’d get out and sleep on the porch at night. He could peel an apple without breaking the skin. There was an old man up on Harts Creek and I’m almost sure that his name was Devil Anse Hatfield and Pop trimmed his fingernails out on his porch with his pocketknife. Aw, he could trim my nails or yours or anybody’s.”

Ed was good at predicting the future.

“Pop said machines was gonna take over man’s work and we was gonna go to the moon one day,” Mona said. She figured he wrote the song “Come Take A Trip in My Airship” because it sounded like his kind of foresight.

Mona said she remembered some of Ed’s stories but warned me that I wouldn’t want to hear them.

Of course, I did.

I asked her if they were off-color and she said, “Well, not really, but he was kind of an off-color guy. I can’t really remember any of the tales about him. What was that one about him dreaming he was on Fox Cod Knob and dragging a big log chain and he fell over a big cliff and when he come to hisself he was standing on his head on a chicken coop with his legs locked around a clothes line?”

What?

“He told some weird stories sometimes — ghost stories and things that I can’t remember,” she continued. “He told that story about Big Foot up in the hills of Harts Creek. A wild banshee. Pop talked about it. Clyde said he saw a Big Foot.”

Lawrence said, “It was up in the head of the Trace Fork of Harts Creek somewhere. Pop was on the back of this horse behind somebody. They was coming down through there and all at once something jumped up on back of the horse behind him and it was just rattling chains all the way down through there and the more that chain rattled the faster that horse would go. They absolutely run that horse almost to death getting away from it.”

I asked about Ed’s travels. Mona said her parents walked and hitchhiked a lot. Along the way, Ella sang to occupy the kids. Lawrence remembered buses and trains, where Ed sometimes played the fiddle for a little extra money from passengers. I asked if he ever talked about playing on any boats and Mona said, “No, but I know they did because I was with them on the ISLAND QUEEN that was going back and forth to Coney Island. Up by the calliope on the top deck.”

Mona said Ed always set up in towns near a movie theatre so the kids could watch movies.

“Every time he played he drawed a crowd,” she said. “He was loud and he was good. I never seen him play any that he didn’t have a crowd around him — anywhere.”

Ed was “all business” but would talk to people if they came up to him.

“One time we went in a beer joint up in Logan, West Virginia, that sat by the railroad tracks,” she said. “They played over at the courthouse and we walked over there. Pop wanted to get a beer while I ate supper. It was back when Roosevelt was president I reckon and he got in an argument with some guy about President Roosevelt. That was his favorite fella, you know. This guy started a fight with him and he backed off and walked away. Pop just let the man walk the length of his cane, hooked it around his neck, brought him back and beat him nearly to death. He was strong. He was dangerous if he ever got a hold of you, if he was mad at you. He always carried a pocketknife and it was sharp as a razor. He whittled on that knife — I mean, sharpened it every day.”

“Everybody liked Pop — everybody that I ever knew,” Mona said. “He had some pretty high people as friends.”

In Logan County, Ed visited Pink and Hester Mullins on Mud Fork and Rosie Day’s daughter Nora Martin in Aracoma. Mona said Ed was also friends with a famous boxer in town whose father played the fiddle, but she couldn’t remember his name. I later learned from Lawrence that it was Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1919-1926. Dempsey wrote in his biography that his father had fiddled “Turkey in the Straw” so much that all the children thought it was the National Anthem.

Ed mixed freely with some of the colored folks in Logan, and sometimes even left Mona at a “bootleg joint” operated by a black lady named Tootsie. She and Lawrence both felt Ed absorbed a lot of the Blues from the blacks in the coalfields. Mona sang one of her father’s songs — which I had never heard — to make the point:

Done got the [ma]chines in my mind, Lord, Lord.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

‘Chines in my mind and I can’t make a dime.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

 

My old gal got mad at me.

I never did her any harm.

‘Chines in my mind and I can’t make a dime.

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.