In Search of Ed Haley 48

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Alaska, blind, California, Cleveland, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, genealogy, Harts Creek, Hawaii, history, Japan, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Louisiana, Milt Haley, Montana, New York, Noah Haley, Ohio, Pacific Theatre, Pike County, Scoffield Barracks, Virginia, World War II

I asked Lawrence if he’d heard from any of his brothers or sister and he said, “I’ve got one that lives in town now. He moved back from Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in town. Noah was a little bit… You might want to talk to him, I don’t know. But Noah, he went away, I guess, in 1939. He went in the service. He was at Scoffield Barracks in Hawaii when the Japanese… He was in all that Pacific Theater. I think he was wounded a couple of times. The Japanese bayoneted him one time in a bonsai attack or something. It left Noah a little bit shell-shocked or something. He gets a pension from it. He’s not together all there, I guess. You know, in a way, if you talked to him you’d never notice it. He was married to a woman of Hungarian descent and raised a family — a boy and a girl. He had a problem with the girl, too. She was having a problem with a boyfriend or something and her boyfriend was there at the house. Well, the boy had a pistol or some sort of a gun and she went and got that pistol and said, ‘If you don’t love me,’ or something and she shot herself. She committed suicide. I think it was non-intentional. It was just a bluff.”

I said to Lawrence, “Well now, aren’t your other brothers, they’re all kind of hard to get along with, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, a little bit odd,” he answered. “Clyde just moved out and took off and went his way, I guess. Followed the sun, I call it. We’d hear from him in Louisiana one year and the next year he might be in Montana or Upper State New York. He did hobo. Noah went to see him about ten years ago out in California and they started back and Noah was going to stop and get some gasoline. Clyde said, ‘No, don’t stop here and get gas. I’ll get your gasoline.’ He went over to this big church and told them he was on the road back to Ohio and didn’t have money to get there. I guess they give them a tank of gas and they come all the way back from California like that. Clyde was good at that. He did work and we’d get his W-2 forms. He never did turn in his income tax, I don’t think. He’d send his W-2 forms home. Some years he was out on an oil rig in Louisiana. Apparently during the time he was working for them they had rigs off the coast of Alaska.”

Hearing Lawrence speak of his brothers caused me to ask if maybe any of Milt Haley’s “stuff” — which I now presumed to be sort of bad — might’ve come down in their genetics.

“I don’t know, John,” he said. “I couldn’t say. They never met their granddad. I don’t think… My dad, if he’d been a sighted man, he’d probably been as gentle as a lamb. But he had frustrations in his own life.”

“Sometimes in a situation like that, sometimes a gene will come and it won’t get everybody,” I said, pressing Lawrence a little further. “Like it’ll skip your dad, and like skip you, but pick out a brother there and one over there.”

Lawrence totally disagreed.

“Well, I don’t think any of them… And I really don’t think my grandfather, from what I’ve heard of that tale… It was caused by hard times. I’m not trying to defend my grandpa because, hell, it don’t make any difference to me now.”

Milt in so many ways seemed like a critical character in the story: an ambiguous rogue — a key player in causing Ed’s blindness and inspiring his music, whose very genetic attributes or deficiencies might still live on strongly in his grandchildren.

I wondered if Lawrence knew where Milt came from before his settlement on Harts Creek.

“I think maybe over in Old Virginia or over in Pike County,” he said. “I understand there’s some Haleys in Pike County. I’d ask Aunt Liza, ‘Where’d Milt Haley come from?’ ‘Well, he come from over the mountain.’ Now, that’s as far as I could get from her.”

Lawrence thought his father had resolved his hard feelings toward the Brumfields in later years.

“Pop was supposed to have made the remark that if he’d had his eyesight he’d hunted down the people that killed his dad,” Lawrence said. “But afterwards, him and one of the Brumfield sons, they settled their trouble.”

I said, “Well obviously if your grandmother was at the Brumfields’ house the night she got shot, there was no animosity between her and the Brumfields.”

I was starting to understand how the tragedies of Ed’s early life, as well as the legacy of his father, had manifested itself into the pain, rage, and lonesomeness I’d been so drawn to in his music. I kept telling Lawrence, “We’re gonna have to go back up Harts Creek,” but it would be a year before we actually did so.

In Search of Ed Haley 46

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Bob Adkins, feud, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, Henderson Dingess, history, Hollene Brumfield, John Hartford, John W Runyon, Lincoln County, Milt Haley, West Virginia, writing

Several months later, I spotted a follow-up article about Milt Haley’s murder in the Spring 1992 edition of Goldenseal titled “Settling Family Differences.” It was based on an interview with Bob Adkins, a Lincoln County gas driller born just after the turn of the century at Ferrellsburg, West Virginia. It was rough country in there during his childhood.

“I know of 18 murders within ten miles of where I grew up,” Bob said. “Never knew of anyone to kill a stranger. They were settling their own family differences. People lived by the gun. Never saw but one fistfight. I made it a point to tend to my own business.”

Bob’s great-grandfather Henderson Dingess was the father of the Hollena Brumfield (spelled “Haline” in the article) shot in the face by Milt Haley and Green McCoy. Henderson and his wife Sally (Adams) Dingess lived on the Smoke House Fork of Harts Creek in what was then Lincoln County (but is today Logan County).

“The Dingesses made part of their living floating logs downstream,” Bob said. “They also had an orchard and a federal licensed brandy making operation.”

Al and Hollena Brumfield were wealthy businessmen at the mouth of Harts Creek on the Guyandotte River. Al’s father Paris Brumfield “lived half a mile below there on good bottom land,” Bob said. Al and Hollena “built a boom across [Harts] Creek to catch logs that were floated into the Guyan in the spring. Al charged by the log and prospered. They built an eight-room house and put in a store. Haline ran the store and offered food and lodging to travelers.”

There was a picture of the Brumfield home in the article — it was the same place where Lawrence had said his grandmother was shot in a feud.

Bob gave a great account of Milt’s murder, expounding on what I already knew while opening up a few new leads.

A fellow named Runyan [spelled “Runyon” in other sources] came in from Kentucky and put in a store and saloon and made competition for Haline and Al Brumfield. Well, when that fellow came and put in a store it was believed that he would like to get rid of Al.

Every Sunday Al and Haline rode up the hollow to Harts Creek to see her daddy, Henderson Dingess. They both rode on one horse. Runyan gave some men a side of bacon and a barrel of flour to kill them. They got in a sinkhole and shot at Al on the way back. Al jumped off, but they hit Haline in the cheek and the bullet went out the other cheek. Al ran and got away and then came back for Haline. She knew there were two men but she didn’t know who they were. Thought it was Burl Adams but became convinced it wasn’t him.

The men got away, but when it was found out that Milt Haley and Green McCoy had disappeared suddenly that night everyone agreed that they had been hired by Runyan to kill Al Brumfield. Runyan also left Harts that night. Runyan just left, and they looked for him the rest of their lives. Then they missed Milt Haley and Green McCoy. They just left their families and disappeared. Figured it was by steamboat on the Ohio.

News got to Cincinnati that $1,500 was offered for Haley, Runyan, and McCoy. A detective there found [Haley and McCoy] and when Al heard they had his men he went down posing as sheriff, paid the reward, got them on the N&W train to Wayne County by Kenova, then up Twelve Pole Creek to Tug River. Breeden was a railroad stop and they walked from there to Harts by Left Fork of Twelve Pole.

Haline’s brother, John Dingess, had a saloon at Dingess on the way. They stayed there and stayed the next night at Grandpa’s [Hugh Dingess]. His daughter Brooke was 14 at the time. That night they took Milt Haley out, told McCoy they had hanged him, then McCoy told the whole story. Haley was held and made to listen to McCoy. Then they brought Haley in and he called McCoy yellow and still denied all of it.

Next day they went along West Fork of Harts to Fry. Stayed at Aunt Catherine Fry Adkins’s house at Fry. She was in the kitchen with the two men tied together, everyone drinking. Someone shot the lamp out over her head. Then they shot the men and took axes to their heads. This wasn’t much strange. They took the law into their own hands but made sure it was the right people.

Al Brumfield come to Grandpa [Adkins]’s that night but slept up the hollow. [They] took the bodies to West Fork of Harts and buried them in the same grave. Their relatives kept quiet.

After repeatedly studying Bob Adkins’ story in Goldenseal, I concocted a theory about Ed’s mother that coincided somewhat with Lawrence’s story about her shooting at the Brumfield place. Bob told in the article how his father Albert Adkins met his mother Brooke Dingess while boarding at Hollena’s in the 1890s. They were married after Albert’s first wife Emma Jane Hager died of tuberculosis in 1901. Well…what if this Emma Jane Hager had been Emma Jean Haley? Had Emma Haley abandoned Ed and changed her last name so as to lose her identity as the widow of a man accused of attempted murder? Was the transportation slow enough and the memories of locals distorted enough by time to make such a transition of identity? It seemed a plausible enough theory, so I resolved to explore it by contacting Bob the next time I was in West Virginia.

In Search of Ed Haley 44

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Al Brumfield, crime, George Fry, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, Hollene Brumfield, John W Runyon, Kentucky, Lincoln County, Lincoln County Crew, Milt Haley, Paris Brumfield, West Virginia, writing

Meador’s article was my first real glimpse into the story of Milt Haley’s death since talking with Roxie Mullins. I read it carefully and often.

“In 1889, around the time the Hatfields and McCoys were killing each other along the Tug River, another less known family war was occurring, not too far away, in Lincoln County. The details of the feud are sketchy today, and would be all but forgotten had its events not been recorded in a ballad known as ‘The Lincoln County Crew.’ In 1923, the text of the ballad, attributed to George Ferrell, and a brief explanation were published in The Llorrac, a Lincoln County historical journal published by the students and faculty at Carroll High School in Hamlin.”

Meador began with a somewhat interesting description of Harts at the time of Milt’s death.

“The community of Harts, isolated in southern Lincoln County near the Logan County line, was one of the places where citizens occasionally had to take the law into their own hands. Harts, on the Guyandotte River about midway between Huntington and Logan, was a convenient stopping place for travelers journeying between the two towns. Also it played host to the teams of rough-and-tumble men who rafted logs down the river to ports on the Ohio. Because of its location and because whiskey was sold there, Harts attracted more than its share of troublemakers. Differences were often settled with a gun, and killings sometimes avenged by the family of the murdered person.”

The impetus for the feud that claimed Milt’s life, according to Meador, was trouble between Allen Brumfield and John Runyon, two merchants at the mouth of Harts Creek.

“In Harts, in the latter decades of the 19th Century, lived a man by the name of Allen Brumfield. According to Irma Butcher, Brumfield lived in a large white house near the Guyandotte River bridge. The Llorrac relates that Brumfield operated a store near Harts and sold whiskey from a houseboat in the river. Allen Brumfield, according to The Llorrac, was not the only whiskey merchant in Harts. At the mouth of Harts Creek, a man by the name of John Runyons operated a store and saloon. For some reason there were hard feelings between Runyons and Brumfield, and Runyons is reported to have hired Milt Haley and Green McCoy to kill Brumfield. Payment for the two men is supposed to have been a barrel of flour, a side of bacon and $25.”

Now that was a real interesting twist to the story — no mention of Milt’s wife getting shot at the Brumfield place. Milt was apparently a hired gunman. In a way, I wasn’t surprised. From the very beginning, I had the impression that Milt was a bad character. Roxie Mullins had said he was “awful bad to drink and kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door. A whole mob killed him. They was afraid of him because he had a pretty bad name.” Lawrence had said, “When my dad was very young he didn’t like the whiny way my dad was acting so to make him more of a man he took him out and dropped him in a rain barrel through the ice.” And then there was the poverty aspect: I mean, to kill someone for a barrel of flour, a side of bacon and twenty-five dollars?

According to Meador’s article, Milt and Green supposedly ambushed Brumfield, a very common thing to do in those days.

“The day chosen by McCoy and Haley for their grim deed was a Sunday afternoon in mid-August of 1889. Allen Brumfield and his wife, Hollena, were returning on horseback from a visit to Mrs. Brumfield’s father, Henderson Dingess, who lived on Harts Creek. Mrs. Brumfield was on the same horse, behind her husband. From ambush and without warning, McCoy and Haley fired at the couple as they rode down the river. Their aim was good but not fatal. Allen Brumfield received a bullet in his arm and his wife was shot in the face. Brumfield jumped from his horse and by running was able to make his escape. Mrs. Brumfield also survived but was disfigured for life. Irma Butcher, who knows little about the history behind the ballad, remembers as a young girl visiting in the home of Allen Brumfield’s widow, Hollena, at Harts. Mrs. Butcher relates that widow Brumfield had a hole ‘the size of a quarter’ in her nose, where she had been shot during the feud.”

After the shooting, Milt and Green fled across the Kentucky state line to escape from the law.

“Haley and McCoy fled to Martin County, Kentucky, but in mid-October of that same year were captured and lodged in the Martin County jail. Their captors were no doubt attracted by the reward offered by the state of West Virginia and supplemented by Allen Brumfield.”

A posse fetched Milt and Green and brought them to Lincoln County.

“The accused gunmen were returned to West Virginia by way of Logan County, which was then a border county including what is now Mingo County. There they were turned over to a party of Lincoln County men headed by the aggrieved Brumfield himself. The group journeyed as far as Chapmanville by mid-afteroon and tried to find lodging for the night among the families there. No one would take them in, evidently because of a fear of mob violence. Still looking for overnight shelter, the party continued down the Guyandotte River. For some reason, the guard split so that a portion crossed to the other side, leaving but an officer and three men in charge of the prisoners. A few miles below Chapmanville this small company entered into Lincoln County, soon finding lodging at the house of George Frye. The Frye house was located near the mouth of Green Shoals at Ferrellsburg.”

At Green Shoal, Milt and Green were brutally murdered by a mob.

“About eight o’clock that evening, according to the Logan County Banner of October 31, 1889, an armed mob estimated at 20 or more men surrounded Frye’s house and demanded that the prisoners be turned over to them. Frye and his family were ordered into the kitchen and the guards were allowed to leave the house. The mob then rushed in, firing their guns. McCoy and Haley were dragged out into the front yard and shot several times. The angry crowd then took rocks and smashed in the skulls of the two men. Their bloody work accomplished, the mob disappeared into the darkness, leaving the neighbors to take care of the bodies.”

No one was brought to justice for the killings.

“The Logan County Banner, in relating the story of the murders of Haley and McCoy, said that there had been no arrests in connection with the killings even though it was generally well known in the area who had been involved. The paper also gave the impression that most local people were in agreement in condoning the action of the lynch mob. The paper itself seemed to justify the unlawful treatment of Haley and McCoy on the grounds that they had shot an innocent woman.”

At the end of Meador’s article was an interesting note about Paris Brumfield, father to Al, hinting at past trouble between the Brumfields and McCoy.

“Another mystery concerns a man by the name of Paris Brumfield, who is mentioned in Professor Cox’s version [of the song] as being murdered by his own son. A story quoted in the November 7, 1889, edition of the Logan County Banner, says that Paris Brumfield was engaged in a shooting scrape with Green McCoy about a year before the attack on Allen Brumfield.”

In Search of Ed Haley 43

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Al Brumfield, Ed Haley, feud, fiddle, George Fry, Green McCoy, history, John Hartford, Kennie Lamb, Lincoln County Crew, Milt Haley, music, Paris Brumfield, Stephen Green, writing

When I arrived back in Nashville, I set about lining up Ed’s fiddle as close as I could to how he would have wanted it. I had John Hedgcoth make a duplicate bridge, then strung it all up so that if he were to walk in the room it would suit him. After about a week, though, the neck started pulling up. I loosened the strings and called Kennie Lamb, a violin expert and craftsman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Kennie picked the fiddle up in Nashville and hand-carried it back to Louisiana for minimal restoration.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from him:

John,

The Markings in Red Corrspond to the Haley Bridge. The only exception being that the D string on the Original Bridge has two notches very close together. I have Marked a D notch in Red but the unmarked D notch will line up with one of the Original notches so you can take your choice on where you believe Mr. Haley Kept the D String.

I have noticed one other interesting thing: Mr. Haley “or Some one” has played this fiddle with the bridge set Almost 1/2 inch to the rear of where it should be set. NOTe: the Markin[g]s where the feet of the bridge once stood. The bridge was in this position for Many a year: Before the neck was out of Alignment and probably before the damage and subsequent repair to the back button the Original bridge may have been tall enough to sustain the rearward Position. The Old Gentleman may have positioned it to the rear in Order to lower the strings or being blind he may not have known exactly where the bridge was supposed to stand. Of course the fiddle would off note badly in the Position but I have seen many such “And Worse” Positions. I hope I have Accomplished what you wanted.

Around the time Kennie’s letter arrived in the mail, Stephen Green, an archivist at the Appalachian Center Sound Archive in Berea, Kentucky, sent me a Summer 1986 article from a West Virginia magazine called Goldenseal. It told all about Milt Haley’s murder and was based on a song called “The Lincoln County Crew”, as sung by Irma Butcher of Bear Creek in northwestern Lincoln County. The song was very similar to Cox’s “A West Virginia Feud-Song”.

Butcher first heard her version around 1910 from fiddler Keenan Hunter, a friend to her banjo-picking father, Press Blankenship. In 1978, she played it for Michael M. Meador at the Vandalia Gathering, West Virginia’s annual statewide folk festival in Charleston.

Come all dear friends and people, come fathers, mothers too;

I’ll relate to you the story of the Lincoln County Crew;

Concerning bloody rowing and many a thieving deed;

Come friends and lend attention, remember how it reads.

‘Twas in the month of August, all on a very fine day,

Al Brumfield he was wounded, they say by Milt Haley;

The people did not believe it, nor hardly think it so,

They say it was McCoy that struck the fatal blow.

They shot and killed Boney Lucas, a sober and innocent man,

Who leaves a wife and children to do the best they can;

They wounded poor Oak Stowers, although his life was saved,

He meant to shun the drug shop, that stood so near his grave.

Allen Brumfield he recovered, in some months to come to pass,

And at the house of George Frye, those men they met at last;

Green McCoy and Milt Haley about the yard did walk,

They seemed to be uneasy and no one wished to talk.

They went into the house and sat down by the fire,

But little did they think, dear friends, they’d met their final hour;

The sting of death was near them when a mob rushed in at the door,

And a few words passed between them concerning the row before.

The people all got frightened and rushed clear out of the room,

When a ball from some man’s pistol lay the prisoners in their tomb;

Their friends had gathered ’round them, their wives did weep and wail,

Tom Ferrell was arrested and soon confined in jail.

Confined in jail at Hamlin to stay there for awhile,

In the hands of Andrew Chapman to bravely stand his trial;

But many talked of lynching him, but that was just a fear,

For when the trial day came on, Tom Ferrell, he came out clear.

I suppose this is a warning, a warning to all men;

Your pistols will cause trouble, on this you can depend;

In the bottom of a whiskey glass, a lurking devil dwells;

And burns the breast of those who drink, and sends their souls to hell.

Parkersburg Landing 39

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Appalachia, blind, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing

The next thing I knew, Ugee was up at the stove cooking a big meal and singing “Maggie and Albert” — Haley’s version of “Frankie and Johnny”. When she was finished, she said, “Now that’s some old songs. Ed played them and when he played them, you’d be glad to sit and listen to them, too. And he patted his foot.”

During dinner, Ugee told me about her own musical experience.

“I started off on the five-string banjo then graduated myself to the guitar,” she said. “The first guitar that I ever seen, Howard Alexander brought it in the country. He’d been over to his mother-in-law’s around Rosedale and when he come back he brought a guitar. Howard didn’t play the guitar or banjo either. He come down and said, ‘Ugee, I brought you something. A guitar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I never tuned one of them things.’ I suppose I’d been playing the banjo about three or four years. Dad said, ‘Well, you tune the banjo. Go ahead and tune it up there.’ Howard said, ‘Aw, just keep it as long as you want to. I’m in no hurry fer it.’ He’d traded something for it. I forget what it was. I went to fooling with that guitar, you know, picking around with it, this that and another, running a knife down it. Well, I tuned it up like a banjo. First thing you know I found me a chord, and then Dad come in with a mandolin.”

“We went to play music around at the schoolhouse and places like that for pie suppers and cake walks,” Ugee said of herself and her father. “My dad thought there wasn’t nobody in the world like me. Nobody could do like I could. We went to a place and played for a schoolhouse and the teacher down there… He was a Glenville graduate — you know, went to college and everything — thought he knew it all. He said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. So Dad played it for him. Just as soon as he got done playing it, he said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. Dad played it for him again. I think he played it about five times. By that time, Dad was getting tired of it. And he come there and said, ‘Mr. Hicks would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’? Dad said, ‘Hell, I’ve played it for you five times and you didn’t know it when you heard it.’ Made Dad mad. Every once in a while, me and Dad’d be a sitting playing, practicing, you know, and I’d look over, I’d say, ‘Dad, would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’?’ He said, ‘I’ll mash you in the mouth.'”

Ugee said, “One time, a teacher taught at our school and he made me mad the way he treated me in school. He was having a doing going on at his school and Dad said, ‘I’m supposed to play at the White Oak School.’ And I went to the White Oak School. Well, me and Dad went over and I decided I wasn’t gonna play any music. When I sat down, the teacher said, ‘Oh, I’m so proud you come to play, Ugee,’ and just going on. I just reached down with my finger on that guitar and I broke that string. Dad reached down in his pocket and pulled out another one and said, ‘Now put that on and don’t you do that again, either.’ I never will forget it as long as I live. Jasper McCune was playing the five-string banjo. He was Dad’s first cousin. He said, ‘Why don’t you do that again, Ugee? Laury’ll slap your ears, too.'”

After supper, I asked Ugee what she knew about Ed’s blindness.

“They said Ed went blind when he was three or four years old. He had the measles. Well, he was sick and had a high fever. I don’t know whether you ever knowed it or not but the gypsies used to come around in the country and he had a high fever and they told his dad and them to take him down to the creek and throw him in the cold water and that would break the fever on him and he’d never have a fever again. And that’s what he done and it put him blind. But you know measles will put you blind because I almost went blind too when I had the measles. I was about twelve years old. And that’s what Ed said that put him blind. I asked him, I said, ‘Was you born blind?’ He wasn’t.”

Ugee said Ed occasionally talked about his father — a growing source of interest for me — although she didn’t remember much about it.

“I think his dad was a pretty mean man, the way he talked. And the way I understood him to say his mother got killed by some of them Hatfields and McCoys or some of them when that feud was going on. But I believe he said his dad was a pretty mean man. I don’t know what he meant by that. I never did hear what happened to his dad. I never heard him say about that. I believe he said he was raised by a aunt.”

I told Ugee about Lawrence and I going to Harts Creek and she said, “Lawrence, he was little all the way around. He thought an awful lot of his dad and mother. Larry’s the only one that turned out real good. Noah, he gambles and I don’t know what all. And Clyde, he’s been in a little bit of everything. Mona’s been the same way. Poor old Larry, he’s looked after all of them. He don’t care whether he hears from them or not because every time he hears from them it’s money or have to help them out or get them out of something. Jack died. Jack was a nice looking man, too. He was taller than Lawrence. He was a nice boy like Larry.”

I asked Ugee if she thought maybe some of Ed’s kids took after his father Milt, who she called “a pretty bad feller.” She said, “I have an idea they did. And I heard Ed say one time that Ella had some awful mean people on her side. He said Noah was turned just exactly like his mother’s people. They was a lot of mean people down there in Kentucky. Lot of murdering and lot of killing.”

Parkersburg Landing 32

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Charles Wolfe, Ed Haley, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, music, Paris Brumfield, West Virginia, writing

I was elated the entire trip home. As soon as I got back in Nashville, I called Dr. Wolfe and said, “I don’t even know where to begin to start telling you everything. I’ve got records and I got leads on where the rest of the recordings are. They just took me in and everything and as I got ready to go they gave me one of his canes for a souvenir. I’ve held one of his fiddles in my hand and looked at it. Now the other thing that Lawrence let me bring back are his reel-to-reel dubs of everything the Library of Congress has. There’s a bunch of tunes on there we haven’t heard: ‘Sourwood Mountain’ and ‘Dora Dean’.

“Yesterday we went up to Harts Creek in West Virginia, his birthplace. He’s a West Virginian; he’s not a Kentuckian. And in fact, Lawrence, because of the way his dad was treated when he was alive around Ashland, says he prefers to think of him as being a West Virginian. Lawrence, being the youngest of the five brothers, he’s kind of the keeper of the flame more or less. I think being around him I really get a flavor of what the old man was like. Even when we went up into Harts Creek, why the old-timers up there said he talked just like Ed.”

Dr. Wolfe asked me what my intentions were and I said, “I think what it amounts to is doing everything we can to preserve the music and the history because the story is incredible.”

I wasted little time in listening to all of Ed’s recordings on a reel-to-reel player borrowed from Doug Dillard. It was an incredible experience. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I immediately focused in on Ed’s recording of “Brownlow’s Dream”, the tune Roxie Mullins said was Milt Haley’s last tune. It was an amazing four part version of a tune I had learned from Elmer Bird called “Jimmy Johnson”. Lawrence had recalled his father singing, “Old Jimmy Johnson bring your jug around the hill. If you can’t bring your jug, bring your still if you will.” Not long after going through the reels, I took them to Bruce Nemerov at the Center for Popular Culture in Murfreesboro. I had promised Lawrence I would get him good copies.

A few weeks later, Dr. Wolfe called me with news of an old West Virginia ballad that mentioned the name of Milt Haley. It was titled “A West-Virginia Feud Song” and published in Professor J.H. Cox’s Folk-Songs of the South (1924). T.M. Martin of Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, informed Cox about the tune in 1916, while S.S. Workman of Seebert, West Virginia, was the source for events surrounding it.

“The fight, out of which this song grew, occurred, as near as he could remember, in 1890, at the house of George Fries, eleven miles east of Hamlin, Lincoln County, and the trial took place at Hamlin,” Cox wrote. “The trouble between the factions was of long standing. The McCoy mentioned was a close relative of the McCoys that fought with the Hatfields. George Pack helped Mr. Workman get this song together. They never saw it in print.”

Events chronicled in the song lyrics seemed to be about Ed’s father, who was reportedly killed with a McCoy, but the account was so confusing that I really wasn’t sure.

Come all you men and ladies, and fathers and mothers too;

I’ll relate to you the history of the Lincoln County crew;

Concerning bloody rowing, and a many a threatening deed;

Pray lend me your attention, and remember how it reads.

It was all in the month of August, all on a very fine day,

Ale Brumfield he got wounded, they say by Milt Haley;

But Brumfield he recovered; he says it was not so,

He says it was McCoy that fired that fatal shot.

Two months have come and passed, now those men have met at last,

Have met at George Fries’ house, at George Fries’ house at last;

McCoy and Milt Haley, it’s through the yard did walk,

They seemed to be uneasy, with no one wished to talk.

They went into the house, sit down by the fire,

But little did they think they had met their fatal hour.

As the mob came rushing on them, the ladies left the room;

A ball from some man’s pistol lay McCoy in his tomb.

They shot and killed Boney Lukes, a sober and innocent man,

And left his wife and children to do the best they can;

They wounded old Ran Sawyers, although his life was save[d];

He seems to shun the drugshops, since he stood so near the grave.

Tom Feril was soon arrested and confined in jail;

He was put in jail in Hamlin to bravely stand his trial;

The Butchers threatened to lynch him, and that was all his fears;

The trial day it came on, Tom Feril he came clear.

There is poor old Perries Brumfield, he died among the rest;

He got three balls shot through him, they went through his breast.

The death of poor old Parris so lately has been done,

They say it was a hired deed, it was done by his son.

So go tell the nation around you it will never, never cease;

I would give this whole world around me to reach my home in peace;

In the bottom of a whiskey glass there is a lurking devil dwells,

It burns the breath of those who drink it and sends their souls to hell.

In Search of Ed Haley 31

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Appalachia, Arthur Smith, Ashland, Cincinnati, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Hamilton, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, love, Milt Haley, music, Ohio, Pat Haley, ragtime, Ralph Haley, Roxie Mullins, Scott Joplin, Sugar Foot Rag, writing

Back in Ashland, Lawrence and I told Pat all about our trip to Harts Creek. We had some great photographs — including the one of Ed’s mother — and all kinds of new information. One of the first things Lawrence did was joke Pat about seeing “that funny boy” who nearly scared her to death forty years ago. I told her about Milt Haley’s murder, the possibility of Milt having been a fiddler and about our interview with Roxie Mullins. Lawrence liked the story about his father breaking a fiddle over someone’s head, although it kind of bothered me to think he would do such a thing.

At some point during the evening, Pat suggested showing me Ella’s postcards, but Lawrence quickly dismissed the idea. I could tell there was something in those postcards he didn’t want me to see, which of course only peaked my curiosity. It was clear by his negative response, though, that the issue was closed so I didn’t mention it again.

Instead, I pelted him with very specific questions about his father. I wanted to know how Ed Haley felt about different types of music.

Did your dad like the Blues? I asked.

“I guess he liked, uh, Joplin,” Lawrence said. “He liked a lot of that ragtime. ‘Sugar Foot Rag’, he liked that.”

What about something like Hank Williams?

“No, I don’t think he cared too much for that.”

Otis Redding?

“Well, he might have liked some of it.”

How about Dixieland Jazz, somebody like Louis Armstrong?

“No, not too much of that.”

How about bluegrass?

“No, he didn’t like that.”

How about Arthur Smith?

“That was a fiddler, and he had nothing for him, I reckon.”

Clayton McMichen?

“Well, I never have heard him mention him.”

How about Georgia Slim Rutland?

“I really can’t remember him ever mentioning that guy, either.”

Did he ever know about Benny Thomasson or Major Franklin or any of those Texas fiddle players?

“John, I wouldn’t say one way or the other,” Lawrence finally said. “It’s just like you keep asking me, did he play this tune, did he play that tune? I guess my best answer whenever you started that shoulda been what didn’t he play in the way of this old-time music. And that’s the same way, who didn’t he know if they was into that and they was around this area he probably found out about them.”

Early the next morning, Lawrence and I went to see Ed and Ella’s graves in Ashland. Along the way, I asked him if he remembered all the places where his father had lived in town.

“Aw, we lived in half a dozen different places,” he said. “All we did was rent. We lived in a couple down on Greenup Avenue, 10^th Street, 22^nd Street. Then we lived in one on Halbert and about three different ones on 45^th Street and one up on 37^th Street. That’s about it.”

None of Ed’s former dwellings were still standing.

Lawrence told me about the time his brother Clyde almost got married: “That’s one of those deals where I told you he was afraid of women. He was courting a lady up in Detroit or somewhere and she told my sister-in-law, Patsy — Jack’s wife — said, ‘He run off and left me practically at the alter. We had made all the plans and everything.’ Next thing we knew, he was working on a platform out in the Gulf of Mexico out of Louisiana. I don’t know where he was when Mom passed away.”

After we got back to the house, Lawrence explained why he’d ruled out showing me his mother’s postcards the night before.

“Some of the old postcards that Mom used to receive kinda had a flavor of real broken love,” he said.

They also revealed that Ralph Haley actually belonged to Ella by a previous marriage.

“I don’t know what his name was, her first husband,” Lawrence said. “Apparently it was somebody that she met either in school or after she come out of school and went back to Morehead. I think Ralph was born around 1914, ’15, somewhere along in there, ’16. He was approximately ten years older than me, twelve at the most.”

For the first time, I thought, Lawrence was opening up about his mother. He said she used to type letters to her friends.

“She had a friend, I guess she must have been pretty well Irish. Her first name was Bridget. I don’t remember her last name. She never married. She went into a home and kept people up at Hamilton, Ohio. Every time we went to Cincinnati, Mom wanted to go see her.”

I listened quietly before saying, “I wonder what happened to your mom’s letters? I bet they would tell a lot of history.”

Pat said, “They probably would but it would mostly be my mother-in-law’s. You know, her life.”

I said, “But women invariably talk about their husbands a lot,” and Lawrence agreed.

“Women can pass along more information between them in five minutes than two men can all day long,” he said.

Still, he never offered to show the cards so I just kind of left it at that.

Just before I headed back to Nashville, Lawrence reached me his father’s walking stick. “Here’s something I think you’d like to have,” he said. He also loaned me the four Library of Congress reel-to-reel tapes, containing over 100 recordings.

Parkersburg Landing 30

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Ed Haley, feud, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, music, Peter Mullins, Ralph Haley, Roxie Mullins, Ticky George Adams, West Virginia, writing

It was clear to Lawrence and I that Roxie really knew her stuff. Her memories went back to the Bull Moose era — some twenty years before Lawrence’s — and while they were a little hazy they were clearer than anything else we had heard up to that point. I think Lawrence was satisfied with Roxie’s stories but maybe a little intimidated because she just knew things about his father that went beyond his years. He really wanted to keep everything we heard about his dad in this certain context and someone like Roxie could really just carry it outside of his realm of knowledge.

“John keeps asking me about my dad,” he said. “I told him I couldn’t tell him too much about my dad, because half of his life was over before I was ever born.”

That got Roxie going again.

“All of his fun days was all over. I know he played music right on, but I mean all of his fun — when he married, he laid down part of it.”

Roxie caught Lawrence and I off-guard when she said Ed tried to get a local preacher to baptize him one time. “He joined the church once down on the hill with Cecil. And Uncle Charley Curry said, ‘Ed, will you lay down your music?’ and Ed said, ‘No, Uncle Charley. That’s the only way I’ve got to live is my music, but I can just play sacred songs, good songs.’ And Uncle Charley said, ‘Now listen, you’re drunk. You go off and get sober and come back to me tonight. I’ll take you in but I can’t take you in like you are.’ Sure did. Ed shook hands with him but I don’t guess he ever went back.”

Lawrence said, “Well, that’s news to me. I’m not sure he was ever baptized. The only baptism he got was Milt Haley’s baptism, and that didn’t amount to much.”

That got us to talking about Ed’s father again. I really wanted to know why he was killed, but Roxie had no idea.

“I don’t know why they killed him, son. They was just all into it. Now, Aunt Liza coulda told you all about it.”

She looked at Lawrence and said, “You’re like me. You waited too long to come to talk to any of his people to find out anything about it. All the old people’s dead, you see, and gone. My mother, she was a Hager, and her mother went to the Western States and died there and was buried on the banks of the Wabash River. Uncle John told us — he was with her. He said she just lived there six months till she died. I know who my grandmother was — she was a Baisden — but I don’t know a thing on earth about my grandmother, and I don’t know nothing about Joe — that’s my grandpa — nothing about who he was, who his brothers was. Daddy died in ’40 and my mother died in ’42. I’m the only one that’s living. I can’t go ask nobody nothing. People never ask nobody nothing when they’re young.”

Lawrence agreed, “That’s right. That’s exactly why I didn’t find anything out. You’re just young, happy to be alive.”

Roxie’s mind was still on her father, Ticky George Adams.

“My dad could play the accordion,” she said. “He could play ‘The Golden Slipper’ and he could play ‘John Morgan’. He could play ‘John Henry’. He could play just anything he wanted to play and how he learned it I just don’t know. And ‘Old Joe Clark’, that’s another one he could play. ‘Nelly Gray’, that’s another one he played. He could make them ring.”

I asked Roxie if Ticky George ever played with Ed.

“No, he never played with Ed. He wouldn’t let Ed hear him play, I guess. He could really play and sing. He had a song he sung. ‘Nothing Between My Soul and Heaven’ is the name of the song. They was four verses to that and buddy he could sing every word of that, and how he learnt that I don’t know. He couldn’t read. He didn’t know his letters.”

Roxie told us about her uncle Peter, saying, “Uncle Peter, you know, was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards. When he bought him a pair of shoes, he had to cut the toe off here and sew it up, and his foot turned back in here.”

I said to her, “And that’s the man that raised up Ed Haley?” and she said, “Yeah, he helped raise him. He stayed with Uncle Peter’s fellers and Grandma and Grandpa Jackson. See, she was married twice. When John Adams was killed, she married Andrew Jackson Mullins, and he kept Ed a long time, him and her. And he stayed with us. He just stayed with first one and then another. Wherever he wanted to go, he went. He was just his own boss.”

Okay, so the Jackson Mullins I’d heard about from Bum was Ed’s grandfather and the John Adams involved in Weddie Mullins’ death must have been a Jr.

I asked Roxie if she knew how old Ed was when he stayed with his grandparents and she said, “Well, when he was with Grandpa and Grandma Jackson, he was a young man. I guess he was twenty years old, maybe more. Grandpa and Grandma kept him a long time, and then he stayed with Uncle Peter and Aunt Liza. And he stayed with us some every now and then. He come and stayed with us two or three days at a time — with John and the boys. He musta left here about the age of thirty and went to Ashland, Kentucky. West Greenup, Kentucky, is where I wrote to them. I wrote to Ralph, Ralph wrote to me. Man he was smart, I’ll tell you that. Take anything you wanted to ask him about the books.”

Roxie bragged on how smart Ella was, saying she tried to get her to move to Kentucky with the Haleys.

“She graduated from college, she told us. She said The Pied Piper of Hamlin – they’s eight pages of it, on both sides. She’d beg me and Annie to go home with her and said she would learn us to play the piano. Man she could make that harmonica… Listen, she could put it in her mouth and she had things fastened under here. She didn’t have to have her hands on it. Man she’d just run that mouth over that the best you ever heard in your life. She played that mandolin right along with her fingers and then had that harp in her mouth.”

Right before Lawrence and I left Roxie’s, she asked my name again and said she’d be watching for me on Hee Haw. She said Roy Clark used to come through “back when he was a chunk of a boy,” but Violet said she was confused — that it had been Roy Acuff.

“That was back when he traveled through here some. He had some people or something that lived up on Buck Fork.”

To say that Lawrence and I were blown away by our experience with Roxie would be a huge understatement. Lawrence had never heard anything about his grandfather being murdered. Maybe Ed had wanted to distance his kids from that part of his painful past on Harts Creek.

In Search of Ed Haley 29

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Appalachia, Brownlow's Dream, Ed Haley, feud, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Roxie Mullins, U.S. South, West Virginia, writing

Roxie wasn’t sure how Ed learned to play the fiddle.

“It was just gifted to him, I guess. Lord man, he could make that fiddle talk. He had one song he sung, I’d give anything in the world to know it. If I could remember now… Man, it was really pretty. People’d ask him every now and then to play it but man listen, he got mad if you asked him to play again something when he got tired. He’d get tired. He’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ He’d jump up man and maybe get a knife man and go to quarreling with a knife. Yes, sir. He told me, he’d say, ‘I ain’t no steam engine.’ And your mommy man she stayed with us some.”

I asked Roxie if she remembered Haley playing at any dances on Harts Creek and she said, “Well, I don’t know. We never had many dances around here nowhere. He always played away from here. He went several places — big dances, you know — dance halls and played. We had a few little dances here, but he never was at them.”

Roxie remembered Ed playing “Blackberry Blossom”.

“Yeah, Lord he could play that, and he could play anything on earth you named to him. Anything. He played the ‘Brownlow’s Dream’. I could pick it on a banjo when I was young, but I ain’t picked none in a long time, honey.”

I offered Roxie my banjo to see if she could play out any of “Brownlow’s Dream” (I’d never heard of it), but she said, “I belong to the church now and I don’t fool with no banjo or nothing like that.”

I asked if she remembered Ed playing the banjo and she said, “I never did see Ed play no banjo. Uncle John Hager’s the one played the banjo. He run around with Ed a long time. I’ve got his picture a sitting in there. He was funnier than a monkey.”

I asked Roxie more about Haley’s tunes.

“Ed would play ‘Old Joe Clark’, you know, and pluck up on them strings. He had one he played he called ‘Devil in the Yearlings’. I don’t know what it was, but boy he could pluck up on them strings and Ralph would jump up. That little boy’d hop up and dance. Man he beat anything I ever seen in my life a dancing. Ralph was about eight years old or ten when they was at our house — Ed and his wife. First time we ever seen her. And they stayed two or three nights with us then they went to Uncle Peter’s and stayed all night. And that woman really had them trained. She had a whistle she could blow. Didn’t matter where they was at buddy, they’d come up in line.”

I asked if Ed played “Ragtime Annie” and Roxie said, “‘Ragtime Annie’ — I heard Bernie Adams talk about that, but I don’t know whether Ed played that or not. Can you play ‘Red Wing’? That’s one of his tunes. ‘Blue-Dressed Girl’. He had something another about ‘Blue-Eyed Beauty’. Aw, he played all kinds of tunes. He’d tell us the names.”

Talking about Ed’s tunes caused Roxie to say, “‘Brownlow’s Dream’ — it was the last tune his daddy ever played on the fiddle. Ed told us that. Right down there in Hugh Dingess’ house they was kept upstairs till they took him to kill him. French Bryant was the man that was in it — he’s dead. They said they was thirty of them, man, a whole mob of them that killed him. They was afraid of him, you see, because he had a pretty bad name.”

I asked Roxie how Ed’s father was killed and she said, “Beat them to death, I reckon, ’cause they said the chickens was running through the yard and a pecking their brains laying in the yard. That’s what people told us children when we was little.”

Listening to Roxie tell all these tales found me wondering about her life. I asked if she’d lived “here” — meaning Harts Creek — all of her life and she said, “No, Lord, no. We’ve lived different places. We lived across the creek there over yonder on that bank. George Baisden’s home, I bought there and lived there awhile. Moved out here on a point and the State came in and told me they’d have to condemn me if I didn’t sell to them and move out. Well, I just sold it to them and bought this then. When Floyd left me — he left me in 1940 — I been a widow woman since that. I’ll soon be 86. I didn’t have no divorce from him, and I got his railroad retirement. That’s all we had to live on. He’s been dead now — he died in ’86 — and his woman he left here with’s been dead fifteen year or sixteen, about eighteen. She didn’t last very long. I told them the Lord don’t let things prosper like people thinks they will. The Lord has blessed me a long time to live a man’s life and a woman’s life, too. I’ve raised three children myself and helped Violet raise her three.”

At that point, I heard Violet singing to Lawrence off in the corner. She said it was one of Ed’s tunes, “The Drunkard’s Hell”, then sang it again for me, this time with Roxie:

I started out one stormy night

To see my poor neglected wife.

I found her weeping by her bed

Because her only babe was dead.

I started out one stormy night.

I thought I saw an awful sight.

The lightning flashed, the thunder rolled

Upon the poor old drunkard’s soul.

Roxie stopped and said, “We can’t remember it. You might find that in libraries in books or something another but honey we don’t know it. It’s been fifty or sixty years since he sung that to us.”

Parkersburg Landing 27

11 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Appalachia, crime, Ed Haley, feud, Harts Creek, history, Imogene Haley, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Roxie Mullins, West Virginia, writing

From Enslow’s, Lawrence and I drove out of Trace Fork and up Harts Creek to find the home of Turley’s aunt, Roxie Mullins. We stopped to see Louie Mullins, a grandson to Uncle Peter, who said Roxie lived just up the creek and to the right, kinda down under the road. We thanked him for directions and drove on until we turned off onto a rough driveway with jutting rocks and an intimidating grade leading down to a small wooden dwelling with a chicken house built almost against it. We had found Roxie’s.

At the front door, Roxie and her daughter Violet greeted us and told us to come on inside. As we made our way, Lawrence motioned toward me and told Roxie, “This man would like to talk to you for a few minutes about my dad if you can tell him anything. He wants to know from me and I tell him that I don’t know anything about Ed Haley.”

Violet said, “Sit down over there on the couch Mommy and he can sit down with you and talk to you and that way you can hear him.”

I planted myself beside of Roxie — a tiny wisp of a woman weighing no more than ninety-five pounds who was dressed in an old-timey brown dress with a white butterfly collar.

I told her, “I just want to know everything I can find out about Ed Haley,” and, thinking that I was Lawrence, she began to talk to me in a high-pitched, thick mountain brogue.

“Well honey, I don’t know too much about him. I just know he was Ed Haley. And Emmy Mullins, she was my daddy’s half-sister. And Milt Haley married Emmy Mullins and she and him was Ed’s father.”

I asked Roxie if Emmy had any children aside from Ed and she said, “I don’t know as she had any other child. I reckon that’s the only one they had. If they ever had any more I never heard nothing about them. Milt Haley was his daddy. They was Emmy and Weddie and Peter was my daddy’s half-brothers and sisters. And Emmy was Ed’s mother.”

Roxie told a slightly different version of the story about Haley’s blindness than what I had heard from Lawrence.

“When he was a little boy, they said it took some kind of a fever. I don’t know whether it was the typhoid fever, brain fever or what. And said its daddy took it to the creek and busted the ice and put it under the ice and that made him go blind. That’s how come him to be blind. They wasn’t no doctors then. We never heard tell of a doctor till I was grown. And he had such a fever, he thought that’d kill his fever, you see, and it went to its head, you see, and put his eyes out.”

Lawrence didn’t hesitate.

“I get different flavors why Milton Haley did this to Ed,” he said. “I get the flavor that he did it because he was trying to stop a whiny kid from crying continually. You think he did it because he was trying to break his fever?”

Violet said, “That’s what we always heard. My grandmother always told he had a fever.”

Lawrence said, “That’s a better explanation,” seemingly preferring that version of the tale to that of his own.

Roxie said, “There is men does their children like that. I don’t think he’d a done that. I don’t know.”

Lawrence said to Roxie, “You know, the only thing I could get from Aunt Liza about my grandfather was that he come from across the mountain. He was a stranger here in this area until he met Emma, my grandmother. Can you tell me anything about that?”

She said, “I don’t know a thing in the world about him.”

I asked if he was a musician and she said, “I don’t know about that. Ed was a real musician. I don’t know whether your grandfather was but he was awful bad to drink they said and he kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door they said. People was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill people before they did kill him.”

I’d never heard that Ed’s father was killed, so I asked Roxie if she knew who killed him.

“I don’t know that,” she said quickly. “Whether the Brumfields killed him or the Conleys… I know the Conleys killed John Brumfield, Cecil’s daddy. My sister’s husband’s daddy. And then they shot Hollene Brumfield. She was on behind her husband. Shot her through the jaw, and that hole was in her jaw when she died. Some of them killed Milt then I think. Milt Haley, he was took… Now you’re getting me into it just right. Him and McCoy was captured and took in a house ’round here over on Smoke House where Sallie Dingess’ home is. They was took in there and put upstairs and kept till supper. And when they got their supper ready, they brought them down to eat their supper and Milt looked over at McCoy or McCoy looked over at Milt and said, ‘Eat a good supper, Milt.’ Said, ‘This is the last supper you’re gonna ever eat.’ They kept them there at that house and they give them their supper and they played their last tune on their fiddle, they said, and they took them to Chapmansville and killed them. And Grandma’s the one told me this.”

I was blown away. So was it Ed’s father or this McCoy who played the fiddle before being killed?

“Milt, I guess. I never did see him. I was born before he was killed, but I was little. And they said when they took them in the house to kill them, they told everybody to go out. And they was a little girl or a little boy one — I forget which Grandma said — hid in behind the stove and they killed them men and throwed them out in the yard and that little young’n run out right over the top of them and run and hid and got away.”

We told Roxie what little we had heard about Emma’s murder at the mouth of Harts Creek and how we had no idea about Milt’s murder. She had never heard of Emma’s murder but seemed sure that Haley and McCoy were killed together.

“They said Grandma went to see them put away,” she said. “They was both buried in one casket — their caskets right side by side in one grave, I mean. Grandma went and seen them bury them.”

While trying to digest Roxie’s story about Milt Haley, I asked if she knew anything about the rest of Ed’s family — starting with his mother, Emma. Roxie said Emma died young — “she died before I’s ever born, honey,” which was 1905. She didn’t know of Ed having any brothers or sisters but said, “Now Uncle John Adams, he had a house full of children. He was Grandma’s child but he was them boys’ half-brother. My daddy knowed a whole lot about Ed. He traveled around a whole lot with Ed. And Uncle John Hager, he traveled with Ed and made music. But now Milt… You see we didn’t know nothing about him. We was all little when Milt was killed.”

In Search of Ed Haley 25

10 Monday Dec 2012

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

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Appalachia, Ashland, blind, Cleveland, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Enslow Baisden, fiddler, fiddlers, fiddling, Harts Creek, Hell Up Coal Hollow, history, Huntington, Jack Haley, Jeff Baisden, John Hartford, John Martin, Kentucky, Las Vegas, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Nevada, Noah Mullins, Ohio, Oklahoma, Peter Mullins, Robert Martin, Sherman Baisden, Sol Bumgarner, Trace Fork, Turley Adams, U.S. South, West Virginia, writing

After visiting with Turley and Joe’s girls, Bum guided Lawrence and I up a nearby hollow to see his uncle Enslow Baisden. Enslow lived in a newly built single story log cabin. He said he’d gone blind recently due to sugar and cataracts. At Enslow’s, we met “Shermie”, who Lawrence indicated was the “funny boy” that chased the Haley women off of Aunt Liza’s porch in 1951.

“A lot of times I wouldn’t have no company if it wasn’t for him,” Enslow said of Shermie, who was epileptic. Shermie wasted little time in pulling out a few cards from the pocket of his overalls and sputtering toward me, even reaching for my fiddle case. I knew right then I was surrounded by “good people”: they had kept Shermie under their care all of these years as a valued member of the family in lieu of institutionalization.

When I mentioned Ed Haley’s name, Enslow said, “I was young but I can remember him all the time a coming. They was some Martins lived on top of a mountain out here — Robert Martin and John — and they fiddled all the time, and he’d go out there and fiddle with them. I don’t know how he walked from up this creek and out on that mountain and him blind, for I can’t find my way through the house.”

Enslow said he didn’t know much about Ed because he left Harts during the early years of the Depression.

“See, I lost all time, about everything nearly. I left here in ’35 and went up to the northern part of the state here and then went out in Las Vegas, Nevada, a while. Then, when I come out, I went in the Army in April of ’41. I stayed in there four and a half years and got married out in Oklahoma and we never did come back but just on visits. And Ed, he died in ’51.”

Enslow’s recounting of his travels was sort of an interesting revelation since it reminded me that these folks on Harts Creek — like many mountain people — were not as isolated as some may think. Ed Haley himself left the creek and traveled widely with his music just after the turn of the century, while Lawrence and his siblings had lived in Ashland and Cleveland and served overseas in the armed forces. Several of the people I had met on Harts Creek had been to faraway places and lived in big cities but chose at some point to return to the grounds of their ancestors.

I asked Enslow how old he was the first time he saw Haley and he said, “Oh man I was about nine or ten years old. He all the time played that fiddle. He used to come down here to old man Peter Mullins’ and Liza Mullins’. I guess they was real close kin to him. And Ed’s daddy’s name was Milt Haley. I don’t know whether Lawrence knowed that or not.”

Lawrence said, “Yeah, I knew that. But I understood from the way Aunt Liza told me, he came from over the mountain and I think that she was talking about from up around Williamson or over in that area. My dad, he was born right down here below Uncle Peter’s, where Turley’s at now, in the old house.”

Lawrence’s mentioning of “the old house” really got Enslow going. He remembered it well.

“There used to be an old log house there he was born in and they had a chimney outside on that old house down there — just an old rock chimney. Dad all the time talked about it. He said Ed got him one of them little old homemade sleds, you know, and he got him a ladder and put it on top of that house. And he got right up by that chimney and then when he come off’n there on that sled he knocked the rocks off with him.”

What? Why would he have done such a thing?

“I’ve always heard my dad tell it,” Enslow said. “Said that rock just barely did miss him.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of such a story but before I could really ask anything about it Enslow was off on another tale.

“Dad said one time they sent Ed down there to get some milk or butter or something. When Ed got out there on his way back he got in a briar patch. Dad took a notion to have some fun out of Ed. They had an old horse they called Fred. Dad got to stomping and snickering like that old horse and Ed said, ‘Old Fred, don’t you come here, now. Don’t you come here, Fred.’ Dad said he kept stomping and Ed throwed that stuff at him and tore hisself all to pieces in them briars.”

I asked Enslow to describe Haley and he said, “Well, he just always dressed pretty nice. He was a big man, too. They used to buy him these plugs of tobacco and these guys would get this beech bark and whittle it out about the size of a plug of tobacco and let Ed have that bark and they’d take his tobacco. If he ever got a hold of you, though, he’d eat you up, see. They said you couldn’t get loose from him.”

Apparently, Ed and his wife were so self-sufficient that locals sometimes forgot they were blind. Enslow told a great story about Ella and Aunt Liza, who were sitting by a lamp together one night. “Well, Mrs. Haley, I’m going to bed,” Liza said. “Well, just blow out the light,” Ella answered. “I’m going to read a while.” Liza said, “How’re you going to read in the dark?” Ella said, “Well, I can’t see no way.”

Enslow’s mentioning of Aunt Liza conjured up a great memory from Lawrence.

“Uncle Peter liked to wore me to death one time. Me and my brother Jack went with him up there behind his house and he had a old team of oxen we was snaking logs out of a hollow with. These oxen got hot. One of them got in the creek trying to cool off. Well, Uncle Peter couldn’t get him to move, so he went over underneath a tree and sat down. Well, me and my brother Jack was a cutting up, you know. He was teasing me. I was younger than he was. And I picked up a big rock and throwed it at him and hit Uncle Peter right where it hurts. And he got up. I knowed I could outrun him. My brother — I looked at him — he took off. And I was afraid to move. Uncle Peter come up there. I thought, ‘Well, I’m dead meat.’ It looked like he pulled down a half a tree and got a hold of me and he didn’t let go until he wore that limb out.”

I asked Enslow about Ed Haley’s music.

“I used to hear him play all them old tunes,” he said. “He’d sit and play for hours and hours at a time, him and her.”

Enslow motioned toward Lawrence, saying, “His mother played a mandolin and had a thing on that sat on her shoulders there and had a harp and played them both at the same time.”

He leaned back a little, reflecting, “Yeah, he played all the old music. He’d make up songs. Be sitting around and just directly he’d write a song. Like ‘Hell Up Coal Hollow’ and two or three more he made up that way. You’d come up and say, ‘What was that Ed?’ He’d just tell them what it was.”

Enslow and Bum said Haley made “Hell Up Coal Holler” and named it for Cole Branch, a tributary of Harts Creek. I didn’t know if Ed was the source of that story but I later learned that “Hell Up Coal Hollow” (at least the title) actually predated Haley’s lifetime. As I was gradually learning, Ed wasn’t preoccupied with historical accuracy and was good at creating temporary titles and weaving stories based on coincidence.

Enslow said, “Ed had some kind of saying he always said when he played on the radio down there about ‘carbide acid and acifidity gum’ or something.”

Lawrence said he’d never heard anything about his father playing on the radio but Enslow seemed sure of it.

“He played on the radio down there at Ashland or Huntington or somewheres way back there. I’m pretty sure they said he did.”

I wondered what acifidity gum was and no one knew, although Lawrence had heard Ed talk about it. (We later learned it was an old folk remedy for treating asthma.) Enslow said Uncle Peter asked Ed about it one time and he said, “Well, you have to get a little comedy with the music.”

Wow — so Ed told jokes?

Enslow said, “I guess to draw their attention or something.”

I asked Enslow if he’d ever heard Ed play for a dance and he said, “Well, I used to go to lots of things he played for, but I can’t remember now. They’d go out there on that mountain and play all night at Robert and John Martin’s. They’d be maybe two hundred people out there. Robert Martin all the time played the fiddle and I don’t know whether John played or not.”

Enslow thought Ed and Robert played their fiddles “together,” but Bum added, “Bob played a little different than Ed did. He played newer stuff.”

Enslow thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, my dad, he used to play the banjo all the time, him and his nephew. They used to play for dances way back years ago.”

What was his name?

“Jeff Baisden.”

Bum said, “I was telling him about Grandpaw taking them two little sticks and beating on the fiddle for Ed.”

Someone said, “He’s the one had the big old feet and he’d get up and dance and play the banjo.”

Enslow said, “They called him ‘Jig-Toe’ Baisden. He wore a twelve or thirteen shoe and he’d get up on his toes and dance. And Noah Mullins, Uncle Peter’s son, he could flat dance. He’d get on his heels and dance all over. He called their square dance about all the time.”

In Search of Ed Haley 23

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley, Spottswood

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Adeline Adkins, Appalachia, blind, Buck Fork, Connie Woods, Ed Haley, George W. Adams, Harts Creek, history, Jack Mullins, Joe Mullins, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, Lawrence Haley, life, Logan County, Louie Mullins, Milt Haley, music, Peter Mullins, Roxie Mullins, Trace Fork, Turley Adams, U.S. South, Victoria Adams, Violet Adams, West Virginia, Yellow Leg Spaulding

Connie suggested we go see her neighbor Turley Adams, who lived just down the creek near the mouth of a branch. She pointed toward a man working in his yard a few hundred yards away at his one-story white home. That’s Turley? We took off right away. As we approached the place, Lawrence mentioned that Turley lived at the same approximate location of Milt Haley’s old cabin. While the cabin was long gone, I noticed the front yard still had the same beautiful roll to it I had seen in an old picture at Lawrence’s house. I tried to imagine how the cabin would have looked in Ed Haley’s day.

Turley met us near the porch, where Lawrence introduced us and told our reason for visiting him. Turley was immediately friendly and, in his gruff voice, invited us inside. At first, our conversation went pretty slow. Then Lawrence said, “I never did get much about my granddad, Milton Haley. Joe said he’s buried down here somewhere in a graveyard and I thought maybe he was talking about down at the mouth of Trace somewhere.”

Turley’s wife Violet said there was an old cemetery just back of their house, although it had been in terrible condition for many years.

“Well now, they was some graves out there. Turley’s mom told me that some of them were Mullinses and some of them were Haleys. They was some babies and then they was some older people. All unmarked. They was sort of in a row and they was rocks up to them but by the time I married Turley they’d rolled down the hill so you couldn’t tell where the graves really were.”

Oh god. I could just imagine someone finding a Milt Haley tombstone (probably no more than a rock with “MH” carved on it) lying at the foot of the hill and just tossing it in the creek.

“Well one grave we could tell pretty well where it was at, the others we couldn’t,” Violet said. “It had all growed up so we started cutting the bushes and keeping it mowed and cleaned up but we still don’t know where the graves are.”

We walked outside briefly to survey the site.

“They’s eleven graves,” Turley said. “I used to help Uncle Jack Mullins keep them cleaned up a little bit.”

Was this little embankment with a sunken spot the final resting place of Ed Haley’s parents?

Back inside, Turley said he remembered Ed, which seemed to please Lawrence somewhat. He told this story about a local girl who danced to Ed’s music.

“When I was in high school, Ed was around my house and he said, ‘I’d like to fiddle for somebody to dance.’ And I asked this girl, Adeline Adkins from around here on Buck Fork, if she could dance and she said, ‘I can dance to anything.’ She danced three or four tunes and my dad come in. Ed said, ‘By god, John, she’s just like Yellow Leg Spaulding. She can hit ever thing I do on this fiddle. And Dad said that they was a guy that used to go with them and dance that he called Yellow Leg Spaulding.”

“Well I didn’t know whether we’d even find anybody up here now, except Joe,” Lawrence said. “I thought I’d come up and see if I could find him, maybe introduce John to somebody that could give us some information on my dad. I know they couldn’t be very many people old enough to probably appreciate his music.”

“He come to my mom and dad’s house one time and played music all night,” Violet said. “Robert Martin was with him. I guess they’d been drinking or whatever because they was gonna take him out to the toilet and instead of taking him to the toilet they took him into the chicken house. They didn’t pay no attention to what they was doing. But they played all night. I never will forget.”

I had never really considered the possibility that Ed’s cousins and neighbors played jokes on him. I saw him as this great musician — an elevated status that may not have been shared by many of his contemporaries. All of a sudden, I was flooded with images of this little blind orphan — alone in the world — victimized mercilessly throughout his childhood. How did he take it? And how would Lawrence react to hearing these kind of stories? In quick time, I had this latter question answered. Lawrence immediately countered Violet’s story about the outhouse with a tale that cast his father in a more triumphant light.

“Joe said when Pop was just a little kid he got to the point to where he could travel from this house over to Uncle Peter’s,” Lawrence said. “Uncle Peter kept cattle in the field out here or something — a bull or two. Well, the boys teased him. You know, he’d get about half way across that field and then they’d go to snorting like a bull — scare him — and then stand way back and laugh at him. Pop took that for a while and finally found a pistol over here at the old house and he went across the field and they started doing that to him. Well, he just pulled that pistol and, where that sound was coming from, he started shooting that pistol. I guess that broke that little game up.”

Lawrence was obviously determined to guard his father’s legacy, which was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Violet got out a few albums filled with old photographs of Ed’s kinfolk from up and down the creek, which stirred Lawrence’s memories.

“Seemed to me like we walked down here to Trace to go up the hill there and there was a store down there,” he said.

Violet said, “Turley’s dad run a store around on Hart at one time and Ewell Mullins had a store up here.”

Lawrence remembered Ewell’s store. “Yeah, he had a store up here, I know that. And then they was one on up and over the hill there where you could go and buy a nickel’s worth of brown sugar. We’d get one of them little penny-paper pokes full of brown sugar and we thought we was having a big time.”

Lawrence’s mind was starting to click in high gear. “I heard Pop talk about how he’d ride a horse up the hollow going up through there,” he said.

Lawrence asked Turley if he knew anything about a George Adams. Turley said his grandfather was named George Washington Adams but he went by the nickname of “Ticky George” to distinguish him from a cousin, “Greasy George.” Ticky George spent most of his life in the woods hunting for ginseng where he apparently acquired a great number of ticks.

“He didn’t have good mind,” Violet said later. “He just knowed enough to get by.”

Turley said his grandmother Adams was a sister to Ed’s friend, Johnny Hager.

“Well, there’s how Johnny Hager came into this,” Lawrence said.

Turley didn’t know much about his genealogy but said his aunt Roxie Mullins could tell us the “whole history” of the Hagers.

“She lives around there above Louie on Harts Creek there,” he said.

Louie Mullins was a grandson to Uncle Peter, making him a third cousin to Lawrence (at least by our count).

This was sort of a confusing moment. Names of people I’d never heard of were popping into the conversation and converging upon one another in seemingly irrelevant connections.

It was great.

There was an unmatchable poetry in it: Turley, Yellow Leg Spaulding, Ticky George… I mean nobody could make this kind of stuff up.

In Search of Ed Haley 14

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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2144 Greenup Avenue, Appalachia, Ashland, Ashland Cemetery, Bake Lee, Bill Bowler, Charlie Ferguson, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddle, fiddler, fiddling, Freeman's Shoe Store, Ghost Riders in the Sky, guitar, history, Imogene Haley, Ironton, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Colliver, Lawrence Haley, Lazear Funeral Home, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Noah Haley, Ohio, Over the Waves, Pat Haley, Patsy Haley, radio, Steve Haley, The Shadow, U.S. South, West Virginia, Winchester Avenue, writers, writing

I asked about Ed during that time period. Lawrence said he stayed in a little room just back of the kitchen, which was furnished with a chair, cot, wardrobe and small radio. His fiddle was always on top of the wardrobe, although he seldom played it.

“He listened to the radio quite a bit,” Lawrence said. “You surely have heard of Vaughn Monroe, his version of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop had a transistor radio he carried up to his ear. ‘Goddamn,’ he’d let out, ‘That’s some tune.’ Cause he felt hell was a place where you had to do something you done all your life. I never heard him try to play it but he’d listen to it and listen to it. He’d say, ‘That’s some hell, ain’t it?'”

Pat said, “Pop would shiver when he would hear ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop heard it once or twice on that little radio he carried, and he kept his ear right to it.”

I found it strangely odd that Haley had such a high opinion of the tune — maybe he just liked the words.

The cowpokes loped on past him and he heard one call his name,

If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range,

Then, cowboy, change your ways today, or with us you will ride,

A-trying to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo, ghost riders in the sky.

Lawrence said Ed eventually gave up on music broadcast over the radio and started tuning in to programs like “The Shadow.”

“We had a great old big crank-up record player and we had a great old big stack of thick RCA records a quarter of an inch thick, I guess,” he said. “They played a lot of them. I guess they learned some pieces of music off of that. ‘Over the Waves’, I guess that’s been around for a hundred years. Pop was pretty good at those slow pieces, too.”

Pat said she never had a real conversation with Ed, so I guess he kind of kept to himself. She remembered him having a white, foot-long beard, which he was very proud of and combed out every day. She said she had a picture of him with Lawrence and Ella in the back yard at 2144 Greenup but couldn’t find it. It was taken in the fall of 1950, when Lawrence was called back into the service.

Around that time, Bill Bowler, a blind guitar player in town, came and asked Ed to play a gig for the grand opening of Freeman’s Shoe Store in Ironton, Ohio. It was kind of a big deal — there was some type of parade going on. Pat said, “We were so happy somebody had finally got him out because he just all of a sudden stopped playing.” Lawrence drove the two over in his brother Noah’s car, then came home. Pat said, “Larry had hardly got back and was telling his mother, ‘Yes, he sat Pop down with Bill Bowler,’ and the next thing we knew Pop came through the front door just cursing a blue streak.” Something had really upset Ed at the shoe store, but the family never did know what happened or how he made it home. Lawrence said, “He just saw that they wasn’t nothing over there for him. He didn’t tell me that I done wrong by taking him over there or anything. He just wasn’t happy, so he didn’t stay.”

Not long afterwards, Lawrence saw his dad play for the last time at Charlie Ferguson’s. He said Noah got him so drunk that he sat down on the floor and played until he fell over. I wanted Lawrence to show me how Ed was playing at Ferguson’s, which he did after joking, “Now John, I don’t want you to involve me in what my dad did.” As he sat there in the floor with my fiddle, Pat laughed and said, “Oh boy, this was a good idea.”

Pat told me about February 3, 1951, the snowy day Ed passed away at home.

“It was very, very cold. My son Stephen was born January 27^th, and it was exactly a week later. Pop was in the front room listening to the radio and he came through our bedroom around three o’clock. He had my daughter Beverly on his shoulders and he took her off and he rubbed his head in her tummy and he said, ‘Mmm, you smell so good. You don’t smell like those pissy-ass babies out in the country.’ The children in the country apparently didn’t wear diapers a lot of times and we always kept rubber pants on Beverly and of course the baby powder. After my father-in-law had played with my little girl, he went through and asked my sister-in-law, ‘Patsy, when will supper be ready?’ She was fixing dinner and she said, ‘Aw shortly, Pop.’ And he said, ‘Well I’m going to take a nap.’ He had a room in the back of the house. And we had a nephew Ralph Mullins living with us. He was born in 1946, so he was about five years old. And he took little cars and he was running them up and down while Poppy was napping.”

Pat said, “And when Patsy got dinner ready, she called for Pop to come to the table. My mother-in-law got a little bit irritated because Pop didn’t come. Larry and his brother Jack had been working on a car outside and they went in to check Pop.” Lawrence said, “Mom went in and lifted up his hand and said, ‘Ed.’ Shook his hand, you know. She said, ‘I can’t get him awake. I know he’s alive. I can hear him breathe.’ Well, when she was lifting up his hand, you know, she was pumping out his last breath of air.” Pat said, “And the boys told their mother then that Pop was dead. But the whole time Ralphy had been playing with his cars, so Pop apparently did not cry out in pain. That was it. He just passed away. It was a massive coronary that took him.”

“Pop died just as peaceful a death as could be, I reckon,” Lawrence said. “He died in his sleep.”

When the Ashland newspaper ran Ed’s obituary on Sunday, February 4, 1951, it mistakenly referred to him as the “flower huckster” of Winchester Avenue. Much to the embarrassment of the family, the newspaper had confused Ed with Bake Lee, a blind man in the area who sold pencils and flowers on sidewalks. Bake usually worked the streets with his wife, Lula Lee, an old schoolmate of Ella’s who played the mandolin and French harp.

“Mr. Haley, who had been blind for 65 years, was a familiar figure on Ashland’s streets, having sold flowers in the 1400 block on Winchester Avenue for several years,” the paper partially read. “A resident of Ashland for 35 years, he was born in Logan County, W.Va., a son of Milton and Emma Mullins Haley.”

Lawrence showed me a copy of his father’s corrected obituary: “HALEY: Funeral services for James Edward Haley, 67, retired musician, who died Saturday at his home, 2144 Greenup Avenue, will be conducted at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Lazear Funeral Home with the Rev. Lawrence Colliver officiating. Burial will be in AshlandCemetery. The body is at the funeral home.”

No one played the fiddle at Ed’s funeral.

“Had a little organ music,” Lawrence said. “I don’t reckon they was anybody he’d care for playing at his funeral.”

Pat said she heard that Ed didn’t look “natural” because the funeral home had shaved off his white beard. Ella had his favorite flower, morning glory, carved on his tombstone.

In Search of Ed Haley 12

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Brandon Ray Kirk in Ed Haley

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Appalachia, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, feud, fiddler, Harts Creek, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, history, Imogene Haley, Joe Mullins, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Liza Mullins, Logan County, Milt Haley, music, Pat Haley, Peter Mullins, Stella Mullins, Trace Fork, U.S. South, West Virginia, writing

I told Lawrence that I wanted to know about Ed Haley’s early life but he said he really wasn’t old enough to know much about his father’s younger days.

“My dad was 45 years old, I guess, when I was born,” he said. “He was born in 1883 and I was born in 1928. That was about 45 years. I know my mother was 40 years old and to the best of my knowledge my dad was five years older. She was born in ’88 and he was born in ’83.”

Lawrence said his father was born on the Trace Fork of Harts Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. He was the only child of Milt Haley and Emma Jean Mullins. Milt was partly responsible for causing Ed’s blindness, according to one story that Lawrence had heard on Harts Creek, which he reluctantly told.

“We was up there approximately seven years ago and we stopped over on Harts Creek and visited with my dad’s first cousin, Joe Mullins,” Lawrence said. “He told me that when my dad was very young — he couldn’t a been over two or three — he had the measles or some childhood disease. And when his father came in from working in the timbers that evening he didn’t like the whiny way my dad was acting. It was the dead of winter. They was ice on the creeks. So to make him more of a man and cut out his babyish crying, he took him out and held him by the feet and dropped him in a rain barrel through the ice. Now according to my cousin Joe that’s partly what caused my dad to go blind.”

What? That wasn’t in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes.

“Now, I don’t know for sure about that,” Lawrence said. “That’s hearsay. I don’t want to bad-mouth anybody — my granddad or anybody — this many years after everybody’s in the ground and forgot about.”

Lawrence said Ed’s mother Emma Jean Haley was killed not too long after the rain barrel incident. “During the end of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, other families became involved. Pop’s mother Emma Jean was down at the mouth of Harts Creek visiting some feudists — seems like they were Brownings — when two or three people came to the door looking for somebody. I don’t know his name, whether he was a McCoy or Hatfield or some other person that had allegiance to one of them. And when my grandmother opened the door, they thought that he was going to answer the door so they just shot her and killed her. Now, that’s hearsay. I heard that story and that’s all I can tell you about that.”

I asked if the house was still standing and Lawrence said, “I don’t think so. It was a big two-story house. The best I can remember, it had a double porch on the front. It was standing there when I was just a little small child.”

Pat said she’d seen a picture of Ed’s mother during a visit to Joe Mullins’ place on Harts Creek several years ago. “Joe and his wife Stella had this beautiful enlarged picture and it was framed,” she said. “It was laying in some back room up there in Joe’s house. I don’t think it was on the wall, because it was very, very dusty when she brought it in to show me. And she said, ‘This is Larry’s grandmother,’ and she made a statement to the effect of, ‘We’ve no use for it.’ This lady has since passed away, but Joe should have the picture because it’s just been a few years ago.”

Already, I could see plenty of inspiration for a musician: tragic blindness — a cruel father — a murdered mother — an orphan alone in the world.

I asked Lawrence what happened to his grandfather Milt Haley and he said, “Apparently he stayed around there. Joe told me he’s buried somewhere down on Harts Creek in a cemetery. He apparently didn’t raise his child. Uncle Peter Mullins and Aunt Liza Mullins raised my dad after his mother was killed. My dad’s mother must have been an older sister to Uncle Peter.”

Uncle Peter, Lawrence said, was nicknamed “Club-Foot Peter” because one of his feet was “turned in.” He was the father of Joe Mullins, the source for many of Lawrence’s stories. “I guess Joe is about as old as my brother, Clyde. He might be around 70 now. He was a lot younger than my dad.”

Lawrence wasn’t sure when his father left Uncle Peter’s household.

“I guess he left when he got old enough to get out and start playing music,” he said. “I would say he was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. People’d come after him to go play music.”

Brandon Ray Kirk

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

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