Tag Archives: Mona Haley

In Search of Ed Haley 93

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had also heard how Ed came to be blind.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 87

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

“Hello, John!”

     Hey, Clyde.  How’re you doing?

“Well, I’m still in the hospital.”

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

“Who is this?”

     This is John Hartford in Nashville.

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

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

Clyde laughed.

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

“I do, too,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 77

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ashland, Cemeteries, Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 76

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat promised to ask Patsy if she had anything.

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

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

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

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

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

There was a noble boatsman.

Noble he did well.

He had a lovin’ wife

But she loved the tailor well.

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

In Search of Ed Haley 75

04 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Talking about Ed’s records caused me to ask Mona about his technique and tunes. She said her father was a long bower – that he used “one end of the bow to the other,” except on songs requiring short, quick strokes. Interestingly, she had no recollection of him ever “rocking” the fiddle while playing (as is so fondly remembered by some eyewitnesses) and said he patted his foot softly in half-time (never picking up his whole foot and stomping). He didn’t keep a chin rest on his fiddle because “it got in his way.”

Mona said Ed knew “millions” of pieces, including “Hell Among the Yearlings” (her favorite), “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Sourwood Mountain”. She recognized “Carroll County Blues” (what Ugee Postalwait called “Calhoun County Blues”) as a Haley tune when I played it for her. She said Ed played “Pretty Polly” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike” drop-thumb style on the banjo (no fingerpicks). He loved “Ghost Riders in the Sky” — which he never could learn — and would say of the tune, “Lord god almighty, would you listen to that?” When Ed thought about or heard a tune he liked, Mona said he would pat his hands together.

In Search of Ed Haley 74

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

     Mona said Ed loved playing for square dances because he could have a few drinks. If he drank too much he “slid” a lot of screeching notes, seldom finished a tune and cursed like he was “disgusted with the whole world.”

     Noah, who had been sitting quietly by, said Ed didn’t play “real good” when he was drunk — that he played “real slow.”

     Lawrence said, “I was telling John that Pop could cuss a man all to pieces with his fiddle if he wanted to.”

     Mona laughed, “Yeah, or with his mouth either. Pop could cuss the hat off your head. One time we lived there on 17th Street. The railroad trains went by and there was a crossing there, of course. They blew at every crossing. He’d get so mad sometimes, he’d say, ‘Them god almighty goddamn trains just stick their horns in these windows and blow as loud as they can.’ And that was his kind of talk.”

     Mona had terrible memories of Ed mistreating her mother. It was a tense moment as Lawrence listened to her reminisce about a part of Ed’s life that he would have probably rather kept secret.

     “That’s what I remember about him,” Mona said. “Not his music and not him — just how he treated Mom.”

     I told her that I liked a man who wasn’t perfect and she said, “Well, he was far from being perfect. He was a perfect fiddler, I think.”

     She looked at Lawrence and said, “He knows Mom and Pop was divorced, don’t he?”

     No, I said.

     “Well, they were,” she said. “What year was it, Lawrence? 1943 or ’44. We still lived on 17th Street.”

     Lawrence thought his parents had only separated but Mona was sure that Judge Imes actually granted a divorce. Afterwards, Ed went back to Logan County, West Virginia, where he played music and saved up a whole change-purse full of money. After Mona had convinced him to come home, he rattled his change-purse to Ella and said, “I’ve got this plumb full of fifty-cent pieces and I’ll give them all to you if you’ll just let me sit by your fire this winter.”

     “It was just pitiful,” Mona said. “I’m glad I took him home.”

     I asked if Ed and Ella ever remarried and Lawrence said no, that there was a “bed and board” arrangement where Ed only slept and ate in the home. Mona felt her parents got along better after their divorce, implying some sort of reconciliation, while Lawrence remembered Ed giving young women small bottles of “Radio Girl” perfume he bought at a five and dime store.

     Not long after Ed’s return to Ashland, he made the home recordings.

     “Ralph made all those original records, you know,” Mona said. “I can see that now. He was cutting them and his wife Margaret was taking a brush and brushing that plastic off as that needle was cutting. He had to touch Pop on the shoulder when to start and when to quit.”

     “I guess you heard me in some of those records, didn’t you?” she asked me. “I was strumming a flat-back mandolin. Mom was playing on accordion, Ralph guitar, Pop the fiddle.”

     I asked Mona which tunes she liked the best from Ed’s repertoire.

     “I liked those fast ones that Pop and Ralph played, like ‘Down Yonder’ and ‘Dill Pickle Rag’,” she said. “And there’s a lot of them not on record that they sang, like ‘Little White-washed Chimney’. He played ‘Kentucky Waltz’ and ‘The Waltz You Saved For Me’ and ‘Beautiful Ohio’. He played a lot of Irish tunes — jigs. ‘Humphrey’s Jig’ was on that album wasn’t it? He played ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’. He played ‘Take Me Home Again Kathleen’ and sang it. And another one he played was ‘When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget Me’.”

     Just as I thought we were about to get into some heavy music dialogue, Mona said, “Oh, I didn’t tell you about that time we went up Durbin Creek in the flood. Jack was home on leave from the Navy and it flooded up 37th Street and we went up Durbin to Manuel Martin’s. That’s Nora Martin’s husband. Lived up there then. We had to walk up the Big Sandy Railroad then over a mountain. Pop had brought some eggs from the house in his pocket and he fell down and broke his eggs and he just set there and cried. He said, ‘Oh god.’ And Mom just trudged along like a trooper.”

     In Ed’s later years, he grew a beard and didn’t bath because “it was a waste of water.” He would seldom play the fiddle for Mona when she visited from South Point, Ohio. He was pretty bitter about music, especially what was broadcast over the radio in those days.

     “Did your daddy like Bill Monroe?” I asked.

     “I don’t think so,” she said.

     “He didn’t like too much bluegrass,” Lawrence said.

     “Did your Dad ever talk about or listen to anybody like Roy Acuff or did he ever listen to the Grand Ole Opry?” I asked.

     “I don’t think he’d have much to do with Roy Acuff,” Lawrence said.

     Mona said, “He listened to the Grand Ole Opry some and he said that if he’d been a showman like Natchee the Indian — playing under his leg and behind his back and all that — he could’ve made it.”

     “He didn’t much care for Natchee, did he?” I asked.

     “No, he didn’t like Natchee,” Mona said. “He didn’t like the show-offs. He was a straight fiddler. But a lot of people thought he was great. That Jesse Stuart wrote that poem about him. I guess he thought he was great, too.”

     Mona thought the last time Pop played was with Bill Bowler in Ironton, Ohio. He died not too long afterward at 2144 Greenup Avenue.

     “When he was in the funeral home, somebody took Mom up to say her last goodbye,” Mona said. “She put her hand on him and she said, ‘Well goodbye, Ed. I’ll see you sometime, somewhere.'”

     After Ed’s death, Ella gave their records, which had been wrapped and put in storage, to the children. Mona lost a few of hers when she sent them to Clyde, who was incarcerated at San Quentin in California (“he never brought them back with him”). Around 1956, she lost the rest after leaving them in a trunk at the home of a good friend Dorothy Bates in Ironton. She later came back to get the trunk but Dorothy had moved away.

     “I was young and full of, you know, whatever,” she said. “Going here and there. Traipsing around the country and leaving everything. I lost pictures and I lost those records and I lost a lot of stuff by just leaving it here and there. I would have never sold mine, or pawned them, or whatever. I treasured mine, but evidently not well enough.”

     I asked Mona if she thought Dorothy Bates had kept her things, and she said she doubted it because “she was flighty.”

In Search of Ed Haley 73

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Ed was good at predicting the future.

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

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

Of course, I did.

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

What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

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

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

 

My old gal got mad at me.

I never did her any harm.

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

Done got the ‘chines in my mind.

In Search of Ed Haley 72

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.”

Parkersburg Landing 70

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

     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 56

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

     Mona was about fourteen years old when Ed made the dining room recordings at 17th Street. I had some detailed questions for her, since — unlike Lawrence, who was away in the service — she had first-hand memories of the whole experience.

Mona: My brother played a guitar…

Me: And you played the mandolin on some of them?

Mona: I don’t remember which one. I don’t remember but you can hear it in the background.

Me: What kind of room were those records made in?

Mona: Dining room.

Me: How big a room was it?

Lawrence: Not very big. Twelve feet by twelve feet, I guess.

Me: You put the recorder on the table and he’d sit up next to the table and play?

Mona: Yeah, it was on the table. It was an old one where they had to brush the curls off the record. He wasn’t holding the fiddle over the table.

Me: What time of the day were they made in?

Mona: Different times. He didn’t make them all in one day.

Lawrence: It mostly depended on when Ralph had the time, I guess.

Mona: Yeah and — again — it depended on whether Pop felt like it.

Me: Was he drinking during any of those records?

Mona: No.

Me: Do you think those records were a pretty good representation of how he played or do you think he played a lot better than what’s on those records?

Mona: He played a lot better than what was on the records because some of them was a little too fast. You know, the speed on them. When he was in a good mood you could just hear the happiness in it.

Me: So a lot of that’s not on the records?

Mona: No, a lot of it’s lost forever.

     In the car on the way home, Lawrence told me more about why he thought Ed never recorded commercially. “He was a kind of a proud man. But I’m like Curly Wellman: if he’d been alive back when these people first started coming to me back thirty years ago he could’ve made a bundle of money if he’d a wanted to. If he hadn’t been afraid of being taken by recording companies and things.”

     As we made our way through town, Lawrence pointed out a spot on Greenup Avenue where Pop used to play: “Right here on this empty corner there used to be a two or three story building. It was a big restaurant called Russ’ place. Pop used to play on the sidewalk out here on his own when he felt like it, if the weather was good. He’d go in there and stay all day and play a while and drink a while and talk a while and go back and play a while.”

In Search of Ed Haley 55

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

     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

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

     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 28

13 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Roxie seemed very interested in Ed Haley’s kids, saying, “I know now they was Mona and Clyde and Ralph and Jack.”

Lawrence said he was the “baby boy” and Roxie realized for the first time that he was Ed’s son…not me. She got real tickled and said, “I believe you was about four or five years old when you was at my house.”

He told her, “May have been, ’cause I came up here until I was about nine years old. Just about every summer, it seemed like, we come up here.”

Roxie wanted to know about the others.

Lawrence said, “Clyde is still living. He lives in California. When he quit running the country, he settled down in California.”

As for the other boys: “Jack worked as a millwright at a steel mill in Cleveland.  Noah’s in Cleveland, too. They both went up there after they come out of the service. Had a depressed time just after the war. Jack worked for a while here but that little factory closed up so about a year and a half later he went to Cleveland and got on at a steel mill up there as an electrician and worked his way up as a millwright. They say he went into work that day and he punched his card, then he had to walk to his workplace — which was a pretty good ways away — and he hadn’t even got out of the time-clock building, and he just fell over dead. Massive coronary or something.”

Roxie thought Ralph had hung himself, but Lawrence said, “No, he was out picnicking and was kinda grandstanding. You know he could take a run-a-go and do a flip-flop and land on his feet — that kind of stuff. Well, somebody was gonna take a picture of him, and he got up on this tree limb and hooked his toes over it and he was hanging straight down from his toes and he was gonna let go and flip over and land on his feet before he hit the ground. But he didn’t make it: he hit the back of his head and broke his neck. He thought he was still a young man, you know.”

Roxie’s memories of Ed went pretty far back into his life — even before his marriage. She tried to describe him for me.

“He dressed nice. Man, Ed was as clean as a pin — wore nice, clean clothes. To be a blind man, he kept hisself just as clean as a pin. I never did see him dirty. Kept his hair combed pretty and neat. Ed’s eyes looked awful bad — he wore glasses over them. We never did talk much with him. He was kindly strange to us. You see, us girls was kindly shy. We weren’t used to him. He always had a big bunch of men around him. We just listened. He wasn’t no crazy fellow, I wanna tell you that. He was smart in the Bible. He told us all about the wars, Armageddon and stuff, and about these bombs.”

I asked Roxie if she remembered the first time she saw Haley play the fiddle. She said, “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was about eighteen years old when Ed and Uncle John played at our house. Then they left here and went off, you know, to stay awhile. They’d come back every now and then. Uncle John played a banjo and Ed played the fiddle. Boy, they could really play.”

I asked if Ed sang back then.

“Yeah, he sung,” she said. “Now, he asked Cecil… He said, ‘Cecil, I’d like to ask you something, but I don’t want you to get mad.’ He said, ‘I would like to know if you know the song about John Brumfield?’ And Cecil said, ‘Yes. I’d like to hear you.’ And Ed said, ‘All right.’ Ed played it for him. And Cecil’s daddy was the one they killed, but Cecil liked Ed. He knowed they’s just all drunk, you know, just like people now a getting dope and a killing each other.”

Roxie’s mind rolled back through the years, leaving Lawrence and I to just sit there listening to her stories. Each passing moment sent chills up the back of my neck. It was apparent that she’d known Ed very well.

“He stayed with us a whole lot, Ed did. Off and on, he stayed with Grandma and Uncle Peter and them. Grandma lived down there where Turley lives now. And they had a sheep in that field, you know? Ed kept going from Grandma’s house up to Uncle Peter’s and Aunt Liza’s house. They told him, they said, ‘Ed, that ram’s a going to kill you.’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of that ram.’ One day he started up through there and that ram went to bellering, you know, and run at him and butted him and he catched him by the head and slung him. He said, ‘If you don’t stay away from there, I’ll get my knife out and cut your head off.'”

Roxie laughed remembering the stories.

“Lord, he told all kinds of tales on hisself,” she said. “You woulda laughed till you woulda died if you’d heard him telling tales on hisself. He told about being at Uncle Peter’s and they was having a dance up at Jeff Baisden’s and he said he took a notion to go along in the night. He’d slept till about 9 or 10 o’clock in the night. Uncle Peter had a garden and a barn and had a lot of cattle laying out around that barn. And he went out there, he said, to that barn and aimed to climb up over a big high fence and jump out when he jumped out right astraddle of a steer. And said that thing jumped up and him on it backwards and took up that holler a flying, and said he hung right on to him till he got to the waterfall and said when he got to the waterfall, he fell off. Said he was drowning when he went on up there, and said they said, ‘Ed, what are you doing so wet?’ He said he said, ‘Well,’ said he’s riding and got in the water and couldn’t see it. He would’t tell them about the steer.”

Roxie implied that Ed took any mishaps or practical jokes in stride.

“Lord, he told all kind of tales on hisself, honey. They cut trees and put him in logs and would start him at the top of the hill and roll him into the bottom and bump to bump to bump to bump, you know, and man just skinned him all over. They played all kinds of tricks on him. Why, he’d just laughed till he died about it. He didn’t care.”

In Search of Ed Haley 17

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Later in the evening, Pat put me in touch with Lee “Trick” Gore, an Ashland preacher and musician who remembered Ed Haley from his childhood days on Harts Creek. We met Gore the following day at his home in what was my first meeting with someone from Ed’s birthplace. He was a polite man with a loud clear voice, somewhat thick in stature and decked out in a tie and button-up sweater.

“I understand what you’re trying to do,” Gore said right away.

It wasn’t long until he and Lawrence were in a deep discussion about the people and places in and around Harts.

“We used to spend a week or two with Aunt Liza or Uncle Peter,” Lawrence said, prompting Gore. “Most of the time we’d ride the train up there and get off at Harts. They run passenger trains up into coalfields then. We’d get off there at the mouth of Hart and walk up and it was nothing but creek. You’d ford that creek a dozen times trying to stay close to the road and the road was in the creek half the time. You had to wade the creek half the way up through there. It’d take us half the day it seemed like.”

Lawrence said his father spent some time in Chapmanville, a town upriver from Harts about nine miles.

“I remember staying in Chapmanville, too. There was a beer joint or something that Pop wanted to stop at. They was some guy in there got to down-mouthing Pop. Stoney Ferrell, that’s exactly who it was. This guy kept aggravating him and Pop just edged toward his voice, you know. Instead of carrying a blind man’s cane, Pop carried a big heavy cattle cane. He got pretty close to him and he reached out and grabbed him around the neck with that cane.”

Gore said Ed used to come see his uncle Charley Gore at Ferrellsburg, a settlement about two miles upriver from Harts.

“Uncle Charley was a fiddler,” he said. “Charley was the principal of the school and Ed stayed with him. Well, once a year he’d happen by. That was right on the heels of the Depression. I was twelve. I was just learning to play the guitar then.”

Gore looked at Lawrence and said, “Either you or Mona was leading him.”

I asked Gore what Ed looked like at that time and he said, “He just dressed ordinary. He never dressed up, but he wasn’t dirty looking or nothing like that — just old-fashioned.”

He stopped for a moment, lost in thought, then said, “He was just something else. He was far ahead of a lot of fiddlers, buddy. There wasn’t none of this grinding on that violin. When he played it, it was just as smooth in that bow hand. I know he played ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Fire on the Mountain’ and ‘The Wild Horse’. Uncle Charley played those tunes, too. I guess he learned them from Ed Haley.”

“I wish my daddy was alive,” Gore said. “Boy, he could tell you about Ed Haley because he loved him. Uncle Charley loved him dearly. And Ed knew that he was welcome at our house and that’s where he hung his hat buddy — where he was welcome. Do you know how I think of him? I think of him as kind of a mountain poet. He sung religious songs and them old mournful mountain tunes. It seems to me like he sung a song called ‘The Dying Californian’. I can’t remember the poetry to it, but it was a mile long.”

Ed sang while fiddling it.

Gore said Ed sometimes traveled with “Little Johnny” Hager, a banjo player who used to stay weeks at a time with his family when he was a boy. Lawrence Haley had shown me a picture earlier of Ed with Johnny Hager in Webster Springs in 1914.

I asked Gore if he knew that Ed could play the banjo and he said, “Seems like I heard him play it when him and Johnny was together. No doubt he could play it.”

Gore asked Lawrence if he remembered a man his father used to play with named Ode Curry (he didn’t), then said, “Ode Curry was just a fella that played the banjo and sang and he had a big nose, as well as I remember, and it’d vibrate when he’d sing because he sung through his nose. But let me tell you something: they would give him all he could drink to play and Ode knew some of the lonesomest, heart-breaking songs you ever listened to.”

Gore got his guitar and sang several songs for me, then whistled the melody for “East Tennessee Blues” and named it as one of Haley’s tunes. He said, “That’s funny how things come back to you when you sit down and get to talking about it, and reminiscing.”

I encouraged him to “play another tune and see what it stirs up,” so he strummed and whistled out a few more melodies.

At some point, Gore’s wife said she remembered seeing Haley play at Logan Court House and in a nearby coal town named Ethel.

Just before Lawrence and I left, Gore called his 85-year-old aunt, Mag Gore, about Haley. “Mag was a singer,” he said. “She married Ira Gore, her third cousin. She couldn’t get out of the Gore family.” He spoke with her briefly on the phone, then told us: “The only thing she remembers was that her husband Ira went to town one day and Ed Haley come home with him because Ira had a little bit of that good ol’ ‘moon’ they make over on the West Fork. They was a sipping that a little bit.”

West Fork, Gore said, was a tributary of Harts Creek with its headwaters in Logan County.

In Search of Ed Haley 15

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pat said, “My mother-in-law used to worry about Pop — whether Pop would go to heaven, because Pop would curse and I guess Pop was a rough man when he was growing up.” Lawrence added, “A drinker and a swarper, I guess.” Pat went on: “My father-in-law used to wear these big Yank work clothes — the dark green and navy blue, he liked those — and I would tell him, ‘Pop, time to change your clothes.’ Pop had been dead, I guess, about two years and one night I had a dream. And I saw my father-in-law on this cloud and he had an almost brand new set of big Yank work clothes on. He was chewing his tobacco and he had his pipe, and he said, ‘Patricia, I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I can chew my tobacco all I want and spit anywhere I want.’ I got up and my mother-in-law got up and I said, ‘Mom, you don’t have to worry about Pop anymore. I had a dream about him.'”

Hearing this caused me to think about how Jesse Stuart, the famous Kentucky writer, wrote about Haley — who he called “Blind Frailey” — playing in Heaven.

This is a fiddler when he gets to Heaven

As people say “Blind” Frailey’s sure to do —

He’d go up to the golden gates of Heaven,

“Blind” Frailey would, and fiddle his way right thru.

He’d fiddle all round God’s children with harps,

“Blind” Frailey doesn’t know the flats and sharps,

But all God’s children will throw down their harps

And listen to a blind man fiddling thru.

“Blind” Frailey will fiddle on the golden street

Till dancers will forget they are in Heaven,

And they’ll be swept away on dancing feet

And dance all over golden streets of Heaven.

“Blind” Frailey will fiddle for the dancers there

Up where the Lord sits in his golden chair,

He will sit down to jolly fiddling there.

 And if one Plum Grove man has gone to Heaven

And if he hears this fiddle by a chance,

He will call out the angels here in Heaven;

The sweet fair maids here all white-robed in Heaven,

And they’ll renew again the old square dance —

The old Kentucky mountain “Waltz the Hall” — 

The most Kentuckian of all dance calls —

The Lord will sit in his high golden chair

And watch “Blind” Frailey from Kentucky there,

The Lord will sit wistfully a-looking on

But the Lord will never say a word at all,

Not when he sees his angels “Waltz the Hall — “

And when he hears Frailey from Kentucky there

He will sit back and laugh from his golden chair.

And if “Blind” Frailey finds rest in Heaven

And if the Plum Grove folks knew it back here,

I’m sure these folks would try harder for Heaven

To follow the “Blind” Frailey fiddler there —

They love to dance to his magic fiddle —

They could dance all the night and all the day —

And if they would become light spirits in Heaven

And get all the thirst and hunger away

Their light spirits then could dance till Doomsday —

There’s danger that they would forget to pray —

But when “Blind” Frailey starts sawing his fiddle

Only he stops long enough to resin his bow —

When he does this, spry dancers will jig a little —

Jig on till Frailey says: “Boys, let ‘er go!”

I wondered if Ed was a religious man.

“A lot of preachers, he was with them like he was the record companies,” Lawrence said. “He took about half of what they said as truth. But he believed in a heaven and hell, I’m pretty sure, because his hell was if he had to play music with people like Bill Day or some other half-assed musician. And that would be his hell, and that’s the way he felt about it.”

Not long after Ed’s death, Ella divided their home recordings among the kids.  Lawrence showed me his share — some were aluminum-based, while others were paper-based. Most had been scratched. Others were warped or had the disc holes entirely off center. But in spite of their poor condition, I could tell that Lawrence had faithfully guarded them with a passion and a stubborn resolve that his dad’s music would survive. (Back in the fifties or sixties, he’d refused a $5,000 offer for them by a Gospel singer from Nashville.) His dedication seemed to stem from a deep love for Ed and Ella, as well as an unyielding pride in their music. When I told him that Ed was a musical genius, he wasn’t surprised or flattered — it was something he already knew. He took it all in stride. If I started bragging on Ed too much, he joked about how I never did see his “mean side.”

Lawrence didn’t know much about the circumstances surrounding Ed’s records, because they were made during his years in the Air Force.

“I was in the service, and they give me what they thought I’d like. They mighta duplicated some of the same records they gave me and gave them to some of the other children. Like ‘Old Sledge’, maybe one of my other brothers or somebody liked that piece of music, so they’d make one for me and one for them. Maybe a fifth of those were duplicated.”

Most of the records featured Ella on the accordion or singing.

“Mom would sing things like ‘Me and my wife and an old yellow dog, we crossed the creek on an old hollow log.’ She would come up with that mostly. Maybe one little thing like that through the whole tune.”

In addition to Haley’s home recordings, Lawrence showed me the four reel-to-reel tapes of his dad’s music, which the Library of Congress had made for him in the early 1970s.

I asked him about the other kids’ records and he said, for starters, his brother Clyde sold his to “a guy by the name of Brickey that run a store down on 12th Street and Winchester. Pop used to go around and play with Brickey — sit around the store with him and play music. I think this guy was from out in Carter County originally. But Clyde sold him all of his records, just for enough money for him to take off on one of his wild jaunts. He’d start out and take off and be gone two or three years at a time.”

Lawrence didn’t think any of the Brickeys were still around Ashland.

“I think this old gentleman died. I got some of the records back from him, but I know he didn’t turn loose of all of them.”

Lawrence’s sister Mona lost her records when she got behind on her rent.

“I know my sister, she lived over in Ironton, and she got in back on her rent some way and moved out. She took one of them ‘midnight flights’ you know, and didn’t take this trunk — she had a big trunk — and all those records was in that and where they went to from there nobody knows.” Pat said, “She never could get the trunk. The woman later told her that she discarded it. We also know for a fact that my sister-in-law trashed a bunch of the records because she was angry at her husband and threw them at him.”

Oh Lord.

Lawrence’s brother Jack apparently lost most of his records, too.

“Jack and his family, they probably just wore a lot of theirs out and discarded them,” Lawrence said. “They didn’t take care of them right. They just played them to death, I guess.” Pat agreed, “Jack said they didn’t take care of them. They let the kids play with them.”

Noah, Lawrence’s older brother, lost his records when his ex-wife threw them at him in various arguments.

Lawrence sorta dismissed their destruction.

“They went. We all had our share of them — just one of the gifts that Mom and Pop gave us.”

As our conversation turned away from Ed’s life and toward his music, Lawrence almost immediately mentioned his father’s version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat”.

“Well, they call the first part of it ‘Washington’s March’,” he said. “My dad would tune the low string way down and you could hear the real fast march, like the men marching at a pretty good pace, and all at once he’d lift that bow up and hit that low string and it’d sound like a cannon booming. And he’d go into this real fast finger-work that had to do with the troops moving out of Russia as fast as they could and then there’d be a small section that was slow, like it was a sad, sad situation for these French soldiers coming back out of Russia. You can picture it, I guess. A bunch of soldiers coming out with their shoulders stooped and rags around their feet and just barely able to move. Pop would play part of that real slow like a funeral dirge and then he’d go back to the fast march with the cannons booming.”