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In Search of Ed Haley 72

24 Sunday Feb 2013

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We all met up with Mona later in the day. She acted surprised that I was even interested in seeing her again, joking, “I’m good for something, aren’t I?” She was extremely talkative and almost immediately took over the conversation in a way that gave me the impression she really knew a great deal about Ed and Ella’s music. It was quite a different presentation than my first meeting with her.

“See my brothers don’t know about music like I know about music,” she said right away. “They know the tunes and they know the keys and stuff, but I don’t think they listened like I did. I paid attention to Pop’s music because I love music. I always loved music.”

She told Lawrence, “You don’t have the ear for it like I do.”

It was the first time I had heard someone be so candid with Lawrence. He seemed a little put off by it, muttering, “Probably not.”

We told Mona about talking with Bob Adkins and she said, “Pop’s mother was supposed to had the whole side of her face blown away. Now whether she was killed or not, I don’t know. That happened on Harts Creek and that’s what made Milt Haley get in with Green McCoy ’cause one of the Hatfields shot my dad’s mother’s face away. Side of her face. Well now, that’s how I understood it. But I’ve heard it said about that sinkhole that fills up with blood where that Milt Haley and Green McCoy was beat to death — buried in the same grave — and every time it rains, the grave fills up with blood.”

Noah said of Milt, “Well, ain’t he the guy that shot the person that shot Pop’s mom in the face? I thought Pop’s dad shot and killed the guy that shot his mother in the face.”

Mona wasn’t sure about that but said, “I know that Pop said that if he could see, he would get the guy that hurt his mother. Shot her. Her name was Emma Jean.”

Mona was sure the measles had caused her father to go blind, not Milt or ice water.

“No,” she said emphatically, “Ice water wouldn’t make you go blind. He had the measles.”

She said Ed started playing the fiddle when he was small and never talked about learning from anyone.

“Did you know that he started out on a cornstalk homemade fiddle?” she asked me. “I heard that his uncle or somebody up in the hills made him a cornstalk fiddle. Musta been Uncle Peter, I don’t know. Uncle Peter was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards.”

Noah said, “He was a mean one, too.”

Mona knew little else about Ed’s life on Harts Creek.

“I don’t know if I told you about him talking about… As a young boy he was sitting on one of those log fences that goes this way — zig-zag, I call it — and it was a bull pasture inside. And he always carried a pistol with him. For what, I don’t know. It was a bull pasture fence he was sitting on and he was playing his little cornstalk fiddle and somebody come back behind him and was playing a joke on him by acting like a bull — you know, making noises like a bull. So Pop pulled that pistol out and shot and missed him by about an inch.”

Mona was quick to mention Ella, pointing out that “she figures in a lot of this, too.” I agreed, of course, but hadn’t been able to find out much about her from Lawrence, who seemed to keep his memories of her to himself. Every time Pat brought her name up, he said things like, “John doesn’t want to hear about Mom — he wants to know about Pop.” He always said it in a straightforward way that I knew to basically avoid the subject, as did Pat.

Mona said her parents met when Ella came to one of Ed’s “concerts”.

“I remember a lot of things about Mom,” she said. “Me and Mom was close. She walked around to feel if there was dirt on the floor — to see if it was clean — and if it wasn’t heads would roll. And she could cook. I remember back, I guess, during the Depression, her making lard cans full of soup so she could feed the neighbors and she had big bread pans full of cornbread for the dogs. And she could type as good as any typist.”

Mona looked at Lawrence and said, “Remember that whistle she had for us? It was like a calliope whistle. It was plastic or tin or something. And every one of us had a different tune. Each one of us knew our tunes. Different note.”

Mona’s pride in Ed and Ella seemed a little more on-the-surface than what I had detected with Lawrence.

“If there was a movie made, then there should’ve been one made about that — two blind people raising kids,” she said. “I’m just in awe of them and how they took care of all of us kids. They kept food and they kept shelter for us and we never went hungry. And they kept clothes on us. And I just don’t know how they done it. We always had a stable home. They always kept us occupied. We’d sit around in the wintertime and they’d give us soda crackers and apples and tell us to take a bite of one of them and then try to say a tongue twister.”

Mona said, “And we’re all reasonably intelligent,” although she jokingly pointed out that there were “some rogues in the family.”

Noah smiled and said, “I don’t know but one rogue.”

Mona knew exactly who he meant, so she told me, “That’s my other brother Clyde he’s talking about. He’s a rogue, but he’s all right.”

She said she was probably the real rogue of the family.

“Mom was real strict with me, but I was pretty head-strong,” she said. “I was rougher than all the boys put together, I reckon. At least that’s what they told me.”

In Search of Ed Haley 71

23 Saturday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Make two notes in other words?

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

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

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

     Noah remembered Ed living at several different places around Ashland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Noah didn’t hesitate to brag on his father.

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

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

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

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

Parkersburg Landing 70

22 Friday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

     What about Noah?

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

Parkersburg Landing 69

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 68

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

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The next day, Al and his posse headed for Hugh Dingess’ “great old big house” on Harts Creek. Bob’s mother Brooke Dingess was a witness to events that followed.

“They stayed all night there and they wanted to be awful sure that they were right, you know,” Bob said. “See, they didn’t want to kill somebody that was innocent. Well they took Haley outside and put handcuffs behind him and gagged him so he couldn’t make a noise and stuck a gun in his back and told him if he made any noise they’d shoot him, see? And a funny thing happened out there, though. He broke loose from them and pretty near got away.

“And then they told McCoy that they had taken Milton down there to hang in the orchard, and if he had anything to say he had better be saying it, see? He broke down and cried and he told them the truth about it. And he told them that they pulled straws on which one would do the shooting and it fell on Green and he got sick — vomited — and he just couldn’t do it. So Haley said, ‘You ain’t got no nerve. Give me the gun and I’ll do it.’ And he claimed Haley was the one that shot. He didn’t do it.”

As if to prove his story, Green then said something to the effect of, “You go down there and check at that sinkhole and you’ll see a pile of shavings that I whittled with my long razor.”

Bob said, “Well, Haley came out and cursed McCoy and told him he didn’t have any nerve and said everything to him. Said that fellow just cried and said, ‘Now, you know I’m telling every bit the truth.'”

Bob said the mob was convinced by McCoy’s confession, but I felt it had a few holes in it. First of all, what if Green skewed the truth by blaming everything on Milt — who he thought was dead — in the hopes of saving his own life? Second of all, why would he and Milt have only had one gun between them for their ambush? Of course, maybe these details were worked out by subsequent confessions not remembered by any living person today. In any case, the mob was apparently satisfied.

Bob said, “They didn’t do anything to them there. They weren’t nobody’s fool, now. They didn’t want any murder going on around their home; then it would be too easy to pin it on them. They’d go to somebody else’s home.”

Bob said his aunt Catherine Fry — an eyewitness to subsequent events — told him the rest of the story about Milt’s murder. He said she was nineteen years old at the time and lived at the mouth of Green Shoal on the Guyandotte River. She said a mob arrived at her home during the night and woke her from her sleep.

“Well, Cat said the first thing she knew she was sitting in the living room — the front room, you know,” Bob said. “They had whiskey there. A lot of drinking going on and a whole bunch of them… Must have been ten to fifteen maybe. The Brumfields and Dingesses all mixed up, you know. Haley and McCoy were back in the bedroom under guard. They had them both in bed.”

Milt continued to verbally abuse Green for admitting their guilt.

“Around ten o’clock, somebody shot the lamp out and Cat run and jumped behind a flour barrel over in the kitchen corner until the fracas was over.”

Milt and Green were shot in bed then pulled out in the yard where the mob “took an axe and cut their heads open and shot them all up — shot them all to pieces.”

I asked Bob what happened next and he said, “They got on their horses and left — walked off and left them. Al Brumfield was one of the head fellows who was there and he was a first cousin of Dad’s. Evidently somebody else took his horse. He came down to Grandfather’s house, which was his uncle by marriage and he told Grandpaw what they had done. Grandpaw told him to go on upstairs and go to bed. No, he did not want to do that because he was afraid those McCoy and Haley people might come in on him, friends or something, [and trap him in the house]. He slept up in the hollow under a beech tree up there. It was summertime, you know. I bet he didn’t sleep good and if he did he shouldn’t have. And the next morning he got out and he ate his breakfast with Grandpaw and then he went on to Harts — home, you know?”

In the next few days, someone hauled Milt and Green’s bodies to the West Fork of Harts Creek and buried them in a single, unmarked grave.

Bob gave us directions to the grave, which he’d last seen as a boy.

“You go up main Harts Creek. It’s not over a mile, I don’t think. It’s the first big creek that turns off to your left. You turn to the left there across the creek and go up that road about a mile or a mile and a quarter and they’s a little hollow there and they’s a house right in there. It’s been a good while since I been up there. If you’ll ask some of them people there, they’ll tell you right where it is.”

Lawrence and I planned to go to Harts in a few days and find it.

Bob said, “We lived there in a house right down below there for one year before we came down here. We sold our old farm up there and we had no where to go and we moved over there on an uncle of mine’s farm. And I farmed one summer right down below there. I went up there and saw that. Had just a little stone. Two of them there. They was buried in the same grave. Them stones may be torn down and gone now. We left there in 1919 or ’20.”

Bob Adkins Interview, Part 1 (1993)

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Hamlin, Harts, Huntington, Lincoln County Feud

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The next day, Lawrence and I decided to go see 89-year-old Bob Adkins in Hamlin, West Virginia. In a recent Goldenseal article, Bob had given his biography, including his family’s connection to the story of Milt’s murder. Since reading his narrative, I’d been anxious to ask him about Milt, as well as to confirm or disprove my suspicion that his father’s first wife Emma Jane Hager was the same person as Ed’s mother.

To get to Bob’s house, we took Route 10 out of Huntington to Lincoln County. We turned off onto Route 3 just inside the county line at West Hamlin, then drove on for about ten minutes, crossed a hill and cruised into Hamlin — Lincoln County’s seat of government. Bob Adkins’ nice two-story house sat just past a block of small struggling businesses and through the only red light in town. We found Bob out back relaxing on a patio near a flower garden in full bloom.

After all the introductions, I mentioned my theory about Ed’s mother, which Bob shot out of the water right away. He was positive that Emma Jane Hager was not the same person as Emma Haley.

“No, Emma Jane Hager was old man Philip Hager’s daughter,” Bob said. “Dad got her from Griffithsville, 10 miles toward Charleston. Dad come down there and stole her.”

Bob knew all about Milt’s death but stressed that what he knew about it was hear-say, that he didn’t want to get sued and that we couldn’t take his word as gospel because there was “so dern many of ’em a shootin’ and a bangin’ around amongst each other” in Harts that he sometimes got his stories confused. Maybe Bob did have a foggy memory, as he claimed, but I found him to be a walking — or rather, sitting — encyclopedia of Harts Creek murders.

“I was born and raised up there until I was nineteen years old, but I was never afraid,” Bob said. “I walked all hours of the night and everything and do as I please, but I always tended to my business, you know. Kin to most of them. I never bothered nobody. Nobody never bothered me, but that doesn’t say they wouldn’t shoot you. Well, all you had to do was tend to your own business.”

Bob eased into the story of Milt’s death by giving Lawrence and I some background on the Brumfields. He knew a lot about them because Hollena Brumfield, the woman Milt supposedly shot, was his mother’s aunt and “about half way raised her.” She was a Dingess prior to marrying Al Brumfield.

“Now those Dingesses up there, I never knew of them to bother anybody much,” Bob said of his kinfolk. “Some of the older ones shot and banged around a little bit. But look out for them Brumfields. They was into it all the time. If they couldn’t get anybody else to shoot, they’d shoot theirselves — their own people.”

Al Brumfield’s father Paris was the most notorious of the old Brumfields.

“Well, one thing, he killed an old pack peddler up there at Hart, took his stuff and threw him in the river,” Bob said of the Brumfield patriarch. “And he killed another man, too. I forget the other fellow’s name. Son, he was a mean old man, I’ll tell you that. Why, he’d kill anybody. He lived about three quarters of a mile from the mouth of the creek down the river there in at the end of a bottom, see?”

Bob kind of chuckled.

“Yeah, killed that old pack peddler,” he said. “That’s what they said he did. I don’t know. He was a mean old devil. And boy, he’d killed two men.”

I wanted to know more about the Brumfields since they seemed to have been so wrapped up in the story of Milt Haley.

“What happened to Paris Brumfield?” I found myself asking.

“I tell you, old Paris, he got what was coming to him,” Bob said. “He was as mean as a snake and he would beat up on his wife every time he got drunk. And Paris’ wife got loose from him and she came down to her son Charley’s for protection. Charley was a grown man and was married and had a family and he lived down the road a quarter of a mile. Charley told her to come on in the house and there’d be nobody to bother her there and he told her to stay back in the room and he would take care of it. Old Paris, he was drunk and he didn’t get exactly where she was and he finally figured out where she was and old Paris come down there to get his wife. When he come down, Charley, his son, was setting on the porch with a Winchester across his lap. A Winchester is a high-powered gun, you know? And that day and time, they had steps that came up on this side of the fence and a platform at the top of the fence and you walked across the platform and down the steps again. That kept the gates shut so that the cattle and stuff couldn’t come into the yard. Well, he got up on that fence and Charley was setting on the porch with that Winchester. He said, ‘Now, Paw don’t you step across that fence. If you step across that fence, I’m going to kill you.’ And Paris quarreled and he fussed and he cussed and he carried on. That was his wife and if he wanted to whip her, he could whip her. He could do as he pleased. He was going to take his wife home. Charley said, ‘Now, Paw. You have beat up on my mother your last time. You’re not going to bother Mother anymore. If you cross that step, I am going to kill you.’ And he kept that up for a good little while there. ‘Ah, you wouldn’t shoot your own father.’ Drunk, you know? And Charley said, ‘You step your foot over that fence, I will.’ Paris was a little shaky of it even if he was drunk. Well, after a while he said, ‘I am coming to get her,’ and when he stepped over that fence, old Charley shot him dead as a doornail.”

You mean he killed his own father?

“His own father,” Bob said. “He killed him. That got rid of that old rascal. And that ended that story. They never did even get indicted for that or nothing. Everybody kept their mouth shut and nobody didn’t blame Charley for it because old Paris had beat up on his mother, you know? Everyone was glad to get rid of him.”

Parkersburg Landing 65

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     “Anger?” I asked.

     “Anger, yeah, maybe.”

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

In Search of Ed Haley 64

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of stories?

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

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

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

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

Lynn was on a roll.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 60

30 Wednesday Jan 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 56

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Huntington, Music

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 55

21 Monday Jan 2013

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     I asked Mona and Lawrence how they passed the day when they were young and traveling with Ed.

     “Oh, I’d probably go to a movie,” Mona said. “Mom would give me money and send me to a walk-in movie. Just go get something to eat. Or sit around and watch them. All the people was standing around and most of them was dancing.”

     She and Lawrence said Ella kept a cup attached to the head of her mandolin to catch the money; Pop only put a hat out when playing by himself. He was very serious about his work, Mona said.

     “Most of the time he worked hard,” she said. “When he was working he wouldn’t drink.”

     Lawrence agreed, “He didn’t get much to drink, you know, when he was sitting out on the courthouse square — they wouldn’t have stood for that, for one thing. Maybe at a fair or something he might take a drink or two. Or out on the streets.”

     “Or unless he was at a square dance and somebody would bring him a beer and that’d get him started,” Mona added.

     Mona remembered Pop getting in “a lot” of fiddlers’ contests but didn’t recall any specifically. She said he paid Doc Holbrook for her delivery with 25 dollars and a silver cup he’d won in a contest.

     “We never could get that silver cup back,” she said.

     Lawrence figured Doc’s son had the cup.

     “He’s got a fiddle of Pop’s, too,” he said. “He’s right in Ashland.”

     I wanted to know more about Ed being in contests but everyone kind of drew a blank about it. Mona joked with Lawrence about a time they were in a contest as children.

     “Mom made up a song for me,” she said. “Had me a dress made.”

     I got her to sing it for me.

See my pretty ruffled dress.

See my pretty pocket.

See my pretty handkerchief.

See my pretty locket.

     Lawrence said Mona won first prize in the contest and I was very quick to tell her that to be Ed’s daughter she probably had a lot of musical talent. She wasn’t willing to admit that but said, “I think I got more than any of the boys had.”

     I asked if she ever tried playing the fiddle and she said, “Yeah, I could play ‘Over the Waves’ on a fiddle and that’s it.”

     Okay — I was very curious.

     I asked if she could show me how Ed held the bow and she said sure — that he held it like she holds a pool stick, “real loose with straight fingers.”

     I reached my fiddle and bow to her and she showed me how Pop held the bow (little finger on top of the stick), then started playing “Over the Waves”. Her hands had an incredible economy of motion — almost as if they were “miniaturizing” the music. In watching her, I got a real feel for Ed’s technique and it was hard not to imagine Ed playing in a way similar to Vassar Clements. Mona clapped when I played for her but said I only played “a little bit” like Pop.

In Search of Ed Haley 54

20 Sunday Jan 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I noticed again how much Mona looked like her dad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parkersburg Landing 53

18 Friday Jan 2013

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     We drove over to Noah’s rented apartment and parked near a Chrysler with “NOAH HALEY” emblazoned on its bumper in big stick-on letters. At the door, Lawrence told Noah, “I got a fella here that wants to talk to you.” Noah was surprised but seemed happy to see Lawrence. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ll just straighten up in here a little bit, but come on in.” He led us into a living room where the TV was blaring. It was a real bachelor pad. We all sat down and Lawrence introduced me. It was the first time I had met any of Ed’s children other than Lawrence and I was very curious to watch Noah for clues about his father and to shore up his memories of his dad with what Lawrence had told me.

     “I’ll tell you anything I can,” Noah said. “It’s been so long ago, I’ve just about forgot everything.”

     “I told him you probably couldn’t tell him much because you went into the service in 1939,” Lawrence said.

     Noah said, “Right. I stayed in the service nine and a half years — from 1940 until 1949. And then in ’51 I went to work on the railroad in Cleveland and I worked there until I retired. The only thing I know is they made their living by playing music on the streets and at fairs and churches and everywhere else. We’d go with them — one of us kids — to lead them around. And they would go to Logan, West Virginia. They used to set out on the street and play music at the courthouse, and we’d just wait till they got done. They would play sometimes all day long on Saturdays in the courtyard. People’d come along and give them money. That’s about all I can remember about them.”

     I asked if Ed ever talked about any older fiddlers he learned from and Noah said, “The only thing I ever heard him say was he taught himself. He couldn’t read music or nothing but my mother could read music by Braille. She was pretty well-educated. Pop played by ear.”

     The room got a little quiet for a few seconds — we were waiting on Noah to tell us something (anything) about Ed. Instead, he kind of laughed and said, “I’m not gonna be much help to you on this.” Lawrence asked Noah if Pop ever talked about his parents and Noah said, “The way I understood it, this guy shot his mother and… I don’t remember now how it went. Whether his dad got a gun and killed him or how.”

     Basically, Noah was saying just enough to confirm that he’d “been there,” but his memories were so vague that I wasn’t getting any great insight out of them. I wasn’t ready to give up though, next asking him about his share of Ed’s records. He assured us that he didn’t have any, which caused Lawrence to say, “You know, when Mom divided those records out, she gave you so many, she gave Mona so many, she gave Jack so many, and she gave me so many of them. And the only ones that was left, Jack had eight or nine left, I think.”

     “I don’t have a one of them,” Noah said. “The only ones I had I give them to Pat. She made tapes of them.”

     Pat, Lawrence explained, was Patsy Haley — his sister-in-law.

     “My sister, she could tell you more than I could,” Noah said to me. “Mona knows all them things. And she’s even got records of Mom and Pop’s music.” He looked at Lawrence and said, “I think she’s got some like you have — round and aluminum.”

     That was all I needed to hear.

     Looking back, I realize I lost almost all interest in talking with Noah — sacrificing his memories — at the prospect of getting to hear more of Ed’s records. That’s a strange thing to consider from a biographical standpoint but I was just so into Ed’s music.

In Search of Ed Haley 52

18 Friday Jan 2013

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     Lawrence Haley and I spent an hour or so driving around Ashland looking at many of the sites where Ed had lived in town. Not one single residence was still standing. As we visited each site, I noticed that the Haley residences seemed to have been in poor areas of town…although I didn’t suggest this to Lawrence.

     “They never did own a home,” Lawrence said of his parents. “They always rented. About eight different places in Ashland and one in Catlettsburg that I can remember.”

     In 1933, according to city directories, Ed and Ella lived at 805 45th Street. The next year, Ella received a postcard at 1030 45t Street. The 45th Street area of Ashland — renamed Blackburn Avenue in recent years — was a long street situated to the back of town, with schools and churches intermixed occasionally with small residences. It was the longest street in town.

     Lawrence guided me to 37th Street, also known as Ward Hollow, where the Haleys settled around 1937-38. Ward Hollow, I discovered, was recently cleared entirely of homes and filled with dirt as part of some planned business development. It was nothing like Lawrence or Curly Wellman remembered it.

     “This was a two-lane road at that time,” Lawrence said, looking up the hollow where he once lived. “And they was a bunch of houses sat up on the bank. There wasn’t too many trees up through there. About twelve to fifteen houses — small homes, twenty-five or thirty foot long. We lived in a three-bedroom house. I was just a kid then.”

     In 1944, the Haleys moved downtown to 105 17th Street, the spot where Haley made his home recordings. From this location, presently occupied by a dull gas building and a partially empty lot near the floodwall, Haley could easily walk up 17th Street past City Hall to the post office or Central Park.

     In 1947, the Haleys were briefly at 5210 45th Street, before settling at 1040 Greenup Avenue. Two years later, Ella was listed in city directories at 932 45th Street. Today, this spot is almost wiped out, although a Little Caesar’s pizza is on the corner of a modern building at 933 45th Street.

     Around 1950, the Haleys lived at 2144 Greenup Avenue. This spot, where Ed Haley died in 1951, is the current site of a Boyd County Ford parking lot and Pathways, Inc. “They’ve got a mental health center there where Pop died,” Lawrence said.

     In 1952, Ella lived at 932 45th Street.

     As Lawrence and I made our way around town, I suggested going to see his older brother Noah who had recently moved back to town.

     “Well that’ll be fine John, but if he’s playing cards I ain’t even gonna go around him because that’s one of his vices,” he said. “He used to go down there to Covington, Kentucky, some and lose his shirt. Two or three shady people have been after him to collect his debts.”

     It seemed as if each of the Haley children had some kind of a major hang-up, which kept me thinking about Milt Haley’s genetics — as well as Ed’s. I asked Lawrence if Noah was a drinker and he said, “He doesn’t drink any more. I think he’s got to the point where drinking aggravates his system too much.” There was also the restlessness. Milt Haley came to Harts Creek from “over the mountain” — probably the Tug Valley — and married a local girl. After the trouble with Al Brumfield, he hid out in Kentucky. Ed Haley, perhaps taking a genetic cue from his father, left Harts Creek at a young age and roamed throughout West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Even after marrying and settling down in Ashland, it was a Haley ritual to always be on the go — moving through town or taking off on a season-long jaunt. Lawrence Haley did not seem to “inherit” that desire, preferring to live the quiet life of a laborer and postman in Ashland. But his half-brother Ralph had went overseas during World War II and then on to live in Cincinnati. His brother Clyde had been all over the United States — everywhere from Alaska to New Orleans. Likewise, Jack had moved away to Cleveland and Mona had been in different cities in Ohio.

     Noah, a veteran of the Pacific Theater and longtime resident of Cleveland, was apparently a roamer, too. “He moves around,” Lawrence said. “The last place he lived was up on Winchester Avenue in an apartment out over a garage. He’s getting ready to go out to California, I guess. He’s about 71.”

In Search of Ed Haley 51

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Catlettsburg, Kentucky — the place where Ed Haley lived from the mid-twenties until the early thirties — was a booming timber town in its hey-day. Located at the mouth of the Big Sandy River and across the Ohio River from Kenova, West Virginia, it was laid out in 1849 and incorporated in 1858.

Catlettsburg is a blue-collar town. As of 1990, its population was 2231 with 98% registering as white. Downtown Catlettsburg extends from the courthouse area on Louisa Street between 30th and 28th streets to the vicinity of the Elks Building on 26th street, with evidence of old structures just beyond. The courthouse, which was erected in 1930, is neat and surrounded by a spacious yard. It is flanked by annexes, a few small new buildings, and an old red brick two-story building on 28th that offers apartments to the public. On a moist day, the smell of wet garbage or a strong musty odor pervades the central part of town. Down Louisa Street from the courthouse exist a few churches and a couple of old buildings now occupied by an antique store and pizzeria. Across the street, toward the river, sits a string of more old buildings, but mostly newer stuff. Continuing toward the Elks Building is Center Street. The floodwall — a hideous but necessary structure — is positioned to the right, with a few old storefronts and a bingo place where Pat Haley runs a kitchen business. On its Center Street side, the Elks Building has a carving that reads: “Gunnel Block 1906.” Toward its back is a tall slender addition called “The Yates Building 1911.” Across Center Street, evidence of a business district extends one more block to 25th Street. The town continues on but the old downtown seems to end there. Near the floodwall, just back of the old district are the backs of little houses and a few narrow two-story frame houses facing the river — or wall. On 26th Street up past the Elks Building is City Hall and a beautiful little church. The street ends at four sets of railroad tracks. Turning left onto Chestnut Street, which runs east to the back of the courthouse are nice two-story white or red brick residences with a funeral home and law office. Across the tracks, which are elevated slightly above the old part of town, is Route 23 and beyond are larger homes on the hill.

While Ed Haley spent countless days walking on most of these streets, especially in the vicinity of the courthouse, he actually lived at the western edge of town on Horse Branch. Today, Horse Branch offers a flood-prone playground, a Freewill Baptist church and old single story frame shacks crowded together against a narrow paved road. The only thing new on the creek seems to be trailers. Lawrence Haley said the old family home there was long-gone.

In Search of Ed Haley 50

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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I asked Curly if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “Ah, I remember ‘Forked Deer’ and I remember ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and I remember the ‘Old Sledge’ and I remember ‘Poplar Bluff.’ ‘Blackberry Blossom.’ The longer he played a tune, the meaner he got on it. If he got the feel, it hit him. And the more he played the better he got and the more tunes come to him. He played one waltz — ‘Westphalia Waltz’ — and that’s really the only waltz that I can recall that he played. And it was all double stop fiddle.”

Curly never heard Ed sing a note — a very surprising recollection considering the way that Ugee Postalwait had hyped Haley’s singing abilities.

“I got a copy of a song from him,” Curly said. “He had somebody to write it down. Because at this time, out at Morehead, Kentucky, they had a feud out there. And they had a shoot-out there on the steps and then somebody wrote this song called ‘Rowan County Crew.’ And Ed, they tell me, would sing that at different places throughout Kentucky. At that time, it was like Floyd Collins that was in the cave and like the Hatfields and the McCoys — only this was called the ‘Rowan County Crew.’ Well, at that time it was hot as a pistol through the state. Now evidently he sang that song, but he never sang it for me.”

Curly said, “Ed could have been as great as the Blue Yodeler or any of those people. He could have been right on those records with them but under no reason did he want to record commercially. Had he been living today and with the equipment they’ve got today, he would’ve been in more demand than Elvis Presley ever was. Nobody played ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ like him. And a very humble man. I never heard Ed down anybody else, I never heard him put anybody below him and I never had him to tell me how good he was. In fact, I wonder sometimes if he knew how good he was. But I knew it. He was a brilliant man. He’d just about keep a check up on everything during his lifetime. He knew the news, he knew the political field, he knew what was going on in the state.”

I asked Curly about the first time he ever saw Haley play.

“I played with Ed when I was a kid — twelve, thirteen years old — and we lived at a place called Horse Branch. That’s as you enter Catlettsburg, Kentucky. And I was a kid carrying an old flat-top guitar — no case — trying to learn how to play. In the evening, he’d come out on the front porch after dinner and Ralph would get the guitar and the mother would get the mandolin and the neighborhood would gather because at that time radio was just coming into being. And I’d go down there and sit and bang while they were playing. And that’s where I first heard Ed Haley.”

Curly lost track of Ed when he started playing music out on his own at the age of fifteen. Throughout the mid-thirties, he played over the radio on Huntington’s WSAZ and Ashland’s WCMT with the “Mountain Melody Boys,” then made several appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and Knoxville’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round with Curt Polton’s band. It was during that time, he said, around 1936, that Ed got into a contest with Clark Kessinger and Clayton McMichen at the WCHS radio station in Charleston. Clayton was the National Fiddling Champion, while Clark was the National Fiddling Association’s champion of the East. The whole thing was “built up for months — it was a showdown.” In the contest, each fiddler got to play two tunes and someone named Banjo Murphy seconded every one using a three-finger picking style on a four-string banjo. First prize was a “live baby” (a little pig) and the winner was determined by a clapping meter. Curly wasn’t sure what tunes Ed played (probably “Cacklin’ Hen,” his contest specialty) but remembered the results clearly.

“Ed Haley beat the two men on stage,” he said. “McMichen was out of it in a little bit but it took several rounds to eliminate Clark Kessinger.”

Curly returned to Ashland in the early forties and found Ed living in the bottom of a weather-boarded, two-story apartment building on 37th Street (Ward Hollow). He started visiting Haley again, usually on cold days when he knew that he’d be close to home. He’d put his D-18 flat-top Martin guitar in the trunk of his car and “go pick up a pint or a half a pint of moonshine,” then head on over to Ed’s house.

I’d go in. I wouldn’t take the guitar in at all. I’d just knock on the door and go in and I’d say, “Hi, Uncle Ed.” “Hi, Curly.” He knew me by my voice. And I’d go in and sit down, you know, and say, “How’s the weather?” and “How’s things?” and “How’s the family?” and so forth and so on. We’d sit around there and talk a little bit. I’d say, “Ed, been playing any lately?” “No, I haven’t felt like it. I just haven’t felt like it.” I’d say, “Well, how about a little nip? You think that would help?” “Well now you know you might have something there.” So I’d go on to the car and I’d get the bottle and come in and we’d sit back down and I’d pass it to him. He’d hit it. He’d sit right there a little bit you know and I’d say, “Take another little nip, Ed.” “Well, I believe I will,” he’d say. “It’s too wet to plow.” And he’d sit there and he’d rock a little bit in that chair and… Being blind, he talked a little loud. “Hey, did I ever play that ‘Old Sledge’ for you?” I’d say, “Well, I can’t remember Ed. Just can’t remember.” Well, he’d get up and he’d go over and he’d lay his hand right on that fiddle laying on the mantle of the fireplace. By that time I’d be out the door and getting the Martin. I’d come back in and he’d tune ‘er up there and feel her across you know and touch her a little bit here and there. He’d take off on it.

Curly and I got our instruments out and played a few of Haley’s tunes. He showed me the type of runs he used to play behind Ed and gave me a few more tips about his fiddling. He said Ed was “all fingers…so smooth” and could play all over the fingerboard — even in second and third positions. He “put a lot of his upper body into the fiddling” and patted one foot to keep time. If he fiddled for a long time, he put a handkerchief under his chin for comfort (never a chinrest) and dropped the fiddle down to his arm and played with a collapsed wrist.

Just before Lawrence and I left, Curly said, “I’ll tell you somebody that’s still living in Charleston and he’s a hell of a fiddle player — or was. They called him Slim Clere. He’s about 82. He knew Ed. In fact, he was the man that Clere looked up to as he was learning. And he could probably give you more information than I could because he’s followed the fiddle all of his life.”

Curly also recommended Mountaineer Jamboree (1984), a book written by Ivan Tribe that attemped to detail West Virginia’s contributions to country music. It briefly mentioned Ed: “Blind Ed Haley (1883-1954), a legendary Logan County fiddler who eventually settled in Ashland, Kentucky, repeatedly refused to record, but did belatedly cut some home discs for his children in 1946.”

Parkersburg Landing 49

11 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     Not long after meeting with Lawrence Haley in Tennessee, I found myself heading toward his home in Ashland. As soon as I arrived in town, he suggested that we speak with Curly Wellman, a local musician who had often visited his parents’ home during the Depression. Lawrence had no memories of Curly’s visits but listened as he told all about them at a recent chance-type meeting at a local grocery store. “I was too young to remember him coming,” Lawrence said to me. Curly had told Lawrence to be sure and visit anytime, so we made a quick call to make sure it was okay for us to drop in, then headed out the door.

     “I used to see him on the Ralph Shannon Show years ago,” Lawrence said, as we piled into the car. Curly was still quite the entertainer. We found him more than ready for us — wearing a big grin and dressed in a fruity-striped button-up shirt with a large medallion around his neck. There was no real need for questions or prompting on our part. His memory was very clear.

     “I don’t think there was anybody that ever drawed a bow that played country like he did,” Curly said of Ed. “The biggest finger on his hand wasn’t as big as my little one. Smallest hands you ever looked at in your life. Just a natural touch. I mean everything — tone, ear, perfect pitch… The whole thing. I would carry my flat top and I’d go up to Uncle Ed’s and go in and he’d grab the fiddle. Well, all he would do was throw the fiddle under his neck and run his fingers across the strings — before he ever heard my guitar — then all I had to do was rake across it and we were together. That was Ed Haley. I’ve followed him since I was about twelve or thirteen and I’m 74 now and I’ve worked with a lot of them and, well, I think he was the greatest.”

     Curly didn’t even catch his breath in bragging on Ed.

     “The bow work is the secret to Ed Haley’s music,” he said. “All of the bow work was strictly in the wrist. More like watching an artist that plays classical stuff — the bow arm. He could get more notes out of the length of the bow than any other man I ever watched or heard in my life. It was all fingers. Just so easy. And double stops were nothing for him. I’ve heard him catch three notes on a fiddle. Terrific! Terrific! I started playing when I was about fourteen and I played for him just for pleasure and lived close to the family and knew them all personally — marvelous people. He had a boy that played the guitar pretty fair. Now there was one other fiddle player in this country that thought he was that good, but he wasn’t. His name was Clark Kessinger. Now Clark played a lot of fiddle. I have to give him credit for what he did play. But I don’t believe he could tune Ed’s fiddle. Clark’s a good imitation of Ed.”

     Curly said he’d give anything to hear Ed’s music again.

     Just then, Lawrence, who’d been sitting quiet as a mouse, pulled out some of his father’s tapes and said warmly, “Hey, put these on.”

     Curly got everything set up and stood mesmerized listening to Ed’s music. He kept saying things like, “Listen how true his notes are. The tone quality. And when this was taped, they didn’t have this stuff to work with that they’ve got today. They make you sound like what they want you to sound like. Ah, he was a fine man. Is that his wife playing the mandolin? She could do it. I used to watch that poor old soul down here in town and she’d bring one of the little girls with her to take her to and from places. She’d sit down there on a little folding stool with her mandolin and play for change and this and that. They were hard-working people.”

     Ed’s music gave Curly’s memories a boost.

     “At the time that I knew him, I was a kid. The thing between me and Ed was just love for one another, I suppose, and love for music. And he loved a guitar that could back him up. And he didn’t want no sixth-string chord — you better not strike one in his presence because he’d tell you to crawl back down on the neck. He said if he wanted a snare drum, he’d get one. He was the type of guy that said what he thought. That was his nature. And if you didn’t like it, you’d just well to get up and go out. He was a man that had the flattest delivery with speech when he said something to you. I mean it was just flat out straight. It didn’t make any difference to him.”

     Ed hated to be pitied or touched and liked to get around by himself. Because Curly had seen his “vicious temper,” he never asked him about his background.

     “I was a kid and as blunt as he was there was a lot of things I would like to’ve known that I wouldn’t even ask,” he said. “In other words, I might just say something that he would completely turn me off, me being that young. But, well, he had a big heart.”