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In Search of Ed Haley 290

17 Thursday Apr 2014

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Curly suggested that we visit Wilson Reeves, a local record collector, for more information about Ed. Wilson was glad to talk to us. He remembered seeing Ed and his family play on the streets of Ashland during World War II.

“This was in the early forties,” Wilson said. “I came up here to take training at the old Ashland Vocational School. I lived on Carter about 17th. There was a house there where I had a room upstairs. And every evening I’d cross over from Carter over to Winchester, go down Winchester, and on down to a little restaurant — what they call a ‘hole in the wall.’ Greasy food, but it was cheap. And she [meaning Ella] would be sitting in a chair there by the Presbyterian Church close to 16th Street. Most of the time she’d be playing the mandolin. Sometimes, I’d see her with the accordion. The little girl would stand on her side — I believe the 16th Street side — and she’d be holding the tin cup. I didn’t notice whether people put money in it or not.”

Where was Ed?

“Well, I don’t remember too much about them,” Wilson said. “I was twenty years old and other things to think about and on my way. Mr. Haley, I don’t remember whether he was sitting down or what. I’ve seen him over at the old Alphon Theater. He would sit right there. Best as I remember about him, he was by hisself. And there was times — and this is very vague in my memory — that I saw them get off the bus. They’d drag a chair out with them. Just a straight-backed chair, I believe. After the war was over, I went back to Fleming County for a while. Sometime in 1947 I came back up here, but I don’t recall ever seeing them any more.”

Wilson said he was never really acquainted with Ed or his family and was never at his home.

“Course I was in the house,” Curly said. “Poorly furnished. The family was rich in being family but very poor as far as living conditions. You might say if it was possible at that time, they would have been on food stamps.”

Curly was speaking of Ed’s home at Ward Hollow. I asked Wilson for some paper so I could sketch it out based on Curly’s memories. We started out with the living room.

“Just a square room,” Curly said. “No rug. A pine floor and a fireplace and a mantle and a little side table and his rocking chair and an old cane-backed straight chair. There was another doorway here that went into the next bedroom back. It was just an open door really. It was a shotgun house. I was never in their kitchen. They had about four rooms. But this was in a big building that there was a lot of apartments in — several apartments in this building — and Ed and his family lived downstairs in the first apartment as you went up the hollow. Big old community house — all wood — weather-boarded house. In my time, it mighta been sixty, seventy years old. They had a name for that building but it won’t come to me.”

When I’d finished my sketch of Ed’s home at Ward Hollow, I said to Curly, “Now what about his home at Horse Branch?”

“It was about a four room house — and one floor — and set up about six foot off a the ground because the creek run down through there and if they hadn’t a built it up on these sticks that it set on they woulda got flooded out every time it rained,” he said. “And you had to go up a long pair of steps to get up on their porch. Handrails down each side of the steps. Porch all the way across the front. I’d say the porch was six feet deep. I was never inside. In fact, the front room is as far as I was in the other house.”

Curly said he used to play music with Ed on the porch. Ed always sat to the right of everyone, probably so he wouldn’t have to worry about pulling his bow into them.

Wilson said Ed played with David Miller, a blind musician sometimes called “The Blind Soldier.” Miller (1893-1959) was originally from Ohio but settled at 124 Guyan Street in Huntington just prior to the First World War. He played on WSAZ, a Huntington station, with The Guyandotte Mockingbirds in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He also made it as far up the Guyan Valley as Logan where he hosted at least one fiddling contest.

“Saturday night, September 17th at 8 p.m., sharp at the court house, Logan, W.Va., David Miller, an old time recording artist, will open a real old time Fiddlers Contest, awarding three big cash prizes to contestants and one prize to best old time flat-foot dancer,” according a September 1927 article in the Logan Banner. “It is expected that this will be the season’s big meeting of old timers and lovers of old time music. See Miller at Grimes’ Music Shop Saturday afternoon.”

According to one source, Miller lost his radio job around 1933 after threatening to throw his manager through a window. Wilson heard that Ed taught Miller the tune “Rose Connelly”, as well as Red Foley’s “Old Shep”.

Aside from the Blind Soldier, there were several other well-known musicians working in Huntington during the Depression. In the mid-thirties, Riley Puckett and Bert Layne (two of the famous Skillet Lickers) spent a few months there, while Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas (a friend to Natchee the Indian), and Arthur Smith were featured acts during the World War II era.

In Search of Ed Haley 285

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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About two weeks later, I called John Lozier, the harp player in South Portsmouth, Kentucky. I wanted to hear more about his memories of Ed in Portsmouth, Ohio.

“That there’s where I met Ed Haley at — sitting on Market Street back in about ’28 or ’29 playing for nickels and dimes,” he said. “And his wife had a banjo-uke of some kind. It was about an eight-stringed instrument, but it wasn’t a ukelele and it wasn’t a banjo. And she was blind. They raised five children.”

I had some very specific questions about Ed’s fiddling, which John answered in short measure. I wondered, for instance, if he was a loud or soft fiddler.

“When Ed played, he played so soft and so low that you had to listen,” he said. “It was just like pouring water through a funnel.”

Where did Ed Haley put the fiddle?

“He put it up under his chin.”

Did he play a long bow or a short bow?

“I think he used all of his bow. In other words, he didn’t waste any of it. He played an awful lot of hornpipes.”

I asked John about Asa Neal, the great Portsmouth fiddler whose skill was preserved only on a few cassette tapes floating amongst an “underground” network of old-time music enthusiasts.

“Asa Neal was a good fiddler and he copied after Clark Kessinger,” John said. “He lived over here in Portsmouth and worked on a section on the N&W. I don’t know how he played as well as he did — fingers clamped around them old pick handles all day long. He was kindly rough and a little loud, but he could play a lot of fiddle. Lord, I’ve eat at his house many a time.”

I asked John if Ed knew Asa Neal and he said yes, then added, “Ed Haley and them used to get in a contest when they used to have the West End Jubilee down on Market Street in Portsmouth and Clark Kessinger would come down. Someone asked Charlie Fry one time, said, ‘What are you gonna play?’ and he told him. He said, ‘Well, Clark Kessinger’s gonna do that.’ He said, ‘That’s all right — I’ll use that rolling bow on him.’ Charlie Fry, he had a boy that was a tenor banjo player and he was good. His name was Harry Frye.”

John seemed to regard the Keiblers — who were apparently his kinfolk — as the best among local fiddlers.

“I remember Uncle John Keibler,” he said. “Uncle John Keibler was the best fiddler they was in the country. He was another Ed Haley — he played all of his life. ‘Winding Down the Sheets’, now there’s an old Keibler tune. Did you know there’s one of the Keibler boys up here yet left that plays? Abe Keibler. Lives right above me about four mile in a housing project up here at South Shore. He’s got sugar awful bad, but he’s one of the younger ones of the old set. He’s one of the boys of the seven I told you about and they all played. Now one of them has got the old fiddle that Grandpa brought over here from Germany. Made in 1620 or 1720. A Stradivarius. Abe’s boy’s got it.”

I asked John if Ed knew the Keiblers and he said, “I don’t know whether he did or not. He knew the Mershon boys that lived over on Pond Creek and around over in there. They was a bunch of Mershon boys that played fiddle and banjo there. Some of them were pretty good and some was rough. They was good for a square dance, but they couldn’t play with Ed Haley.”

John was on a roll: “At one time, they was more good musicians around Portsmouth — during the Depression — and they wasn’t no work and they just sat around and played cards and drank a little moonshine and got good. None of them ever went anyplace. And they was just some great fiddlers. Sam Cox, he was a banjo player. You know Natchee the Indian? He lived down around Blue Creek somewhere in Adams County. He’d play the bow over the fiddle and under and upside down and lay down… But Ed Haley never did do that. Ed Haley would just sit and roll it out just as smooth — just spit it right out on the street for ya. Smoothest fiddler I ever heard.”

In Search of Ed Haley 128

13 Thursday Jun 2013

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Wilson said Ed hung out with his buddies for a month or so, then made plans to head back down to Ashland or to Logan County.

“About a week before he’d get ready to go to Logan, we’d say, ‘Now Ed, stay another week. They is some big farmers coming out of Roane County, and you can make a little money there’,” Wilson said. “And that Postalwait, a week or two before he knew about when Ed was gonna leave, he’d [give Ed] some homebrew — and ah God it’d knock your hat off. Bernard would say, ‘Now Ed, hang on a few days, now. We’ll help you get some more money.’ Aw, he’d cuss around, ‘Well, I’ll stay another week, and that’s it.’ When that homebrew’d work off, Postalwait would bring him just a little bit about noon that day before the session. By God, he’d just lick his lips, you know, and he’d say, ‘That’s fine,’ but he’d never let him get none before the session. Well he’d stay that week and we’d tell all the aristocrats that had money. Some of them old retired ladies, they liked to hear him and they would bring a little money.”

“Well, he’d leave over there maybe with sixty or seventy dollars,” Wilson said. “Then he’d head for Logan and the coalfields, and they would begin to make money, stay up there two or three weeks. Back to Ashland, and then in the fall, he’d come back to Calhoun County. Let everybody build up a little, you know? And if they was nobody down there to meet him, he’d catch that what we call the ‘mail hack’ — a man that carried the mail with a little buggy and a team of horses. Everybody hollered, ‘Well where’re you gonna be?’ ‘I’m over at Hicks’, boys!’ That danged house was full. The yard was full. Minnie Hicks’d have a big pot of beans and three gallon of coffee. And it was just about every night.”

Wilson had really specific memories of Ed playing at Laury Hicks’ house.

“He’d sit there in an old split-backed chair, by god, and never miss a note,” he said. “And his endurance never slowed up. He patted his feet a little bit, but not in excess. Any time Haley was just sitting around, his fingers constantly moved all the time just like he was playing the fiddle. And there was no fine tuners. The man didn’t have a chin rest — he didn’t have no use for a chin rest.”

What kind of strings did he use?

“John, in them days, there were no super sensitive strings,” Wilson said. “It was the old Bird, and the old Gibson, and them Black Diamonds. They cost twenty-five cents. And he played them strings and them white bone keys and that old fiddle. And I tried to remember what kind of fiddle he had but it didn’t matter much whether it was any good or not. He could make it play. Now John, another thing I want to mention to ya. Now, Ed Haley’s bridge was almost flat. He didn’t have much roll in his bridge.”

Wilson said Ed didn’t have a lot of rosin on his fiddle because he didn’t use much on his bow.

What was he like?

“You couldn’t punch the wrong button,” Wilson said. “He didn’t want you to ask him about any ‘Orange Blossom Special’ or ‘Boil the Cabbage Down’. You had to be real careful. We didn’t talk a lot, but he took a liking to me. I picked up enough nerve to ask him why he didn’t go onto WSM way back there in ’37 and ’38. ‘Well,’ he said,’‘I don’t like them people. I don’t trust them. And another thing, they’ve got no soul about their music.’ And if you mentioned Natchee the Indian, you punched the wrong button. Ah, there’s so much stuff about him — I don’t want to leave nothing out. I remember this one night in particular it was about 3:30 in the morning. Some lady come in there. She was about half-stooped on that homebrew. Said, ‘Ed, I wanna hear the ‘Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor’.” He said, ‘Damn the ‘Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor’. I’m tired. I’m quitting.’ That’s the way he was.”

In Search of Ed Haley 101

02 Thursday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 95

25 Thursday Apr 2013

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I called Clyde Haley to ask him about Patsy’s genealogical information. Trying to prompt his memory, I asked, “Your grandfather’s father was named Benjamin Haley and his wife’s name was Nellie Muncy.” He said, “Muncy? Well I knew some Muncys when I was back up there, you know. They were in West Virginia. Down around Huntington and down in that area. Luce Muncy had a store and filling station, and that’s the most I can remember about them. Lucian Muncy.”

Clyde went from sketchy memories of the Muncys to asking me, “Did you ever know a guy named Clark Kessinger? He was a fiddler, too, you know.” I asked Clyde if he thought Kessinger tried to play like his dad and he said, “I don’t think so. I just come up with that name from somewhere. You know my dad used to take me out on those contests when he’d go and I remember some of those people — like Natchee the Indian. Sam Vie, he was a blind fiddler. He could play a guitar pretty good, too.”

What about Asa Neal? “Asa Neal? I think I went with my dad when we saw him one or two times. I’ll tell you somebody else that was close to our family — those Judds. They lived on the hollow where I lived, called 37th Street in Ashland, Kentucky. We didn’t know them back in those days.”

Clyde seemed to really enjoy my calls. He asked, “When are you coming this a way?” — as if I were just down the road. I told him it would be in the spring and he said, “Well, why don’t you check on me here if you come this a way and we could get us a day off and go somewhere and sit down and just talk all day? I don’t know what you’re doing with this information but I’d like to hear you say it’s going in the news some way. Maybe write a book about his history. That would make me happy. At least he would be remembered.”

Clyde paused, then said, “I’ve been all over the country in different forms and manners and ways. I’ve been a roamer all of my life, but I’ve got this damned arthritis and it’s pretty well got me pinned down.”

In Search of Ed Haley 74

28 Thursday Feb 2013

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     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.”

Parkersburg Landing 36

22 Saturday Dec 2012

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     Ugee said Ed seldom had a fiddle case with him when he traveled into Calhoun County, West Virginia.

     “Most of the time Ed had his fiddle in a twenty-four pound flour poke,” she said. “Sometimes he’d put it under his coat and sometimes up under his arm — just whichever way he felt best about it. He was very careful with it under there. Dad told him one time, ‘Why don’t you get a case so you can carry that bow without tearing it up all the time?’ Ed said he didn’t want to bother with carrying that case in his hand. Some times he might take a notion to stop and play some music somewhere on the road.”

     At that instant, I had this image of Ed being so attached to his fiddle, with such an addiction, that the two were virtually inseparable. To not even want to put it away in a case made me think he always had it in his hands, feeling it, tinkering with it, trying new ways to make it work — all the time. You know, a person can get really attached to feeling an object — a ball or a pen — to where it doesn’t seem comfortable to not have it in hand. I imagine for a blind person this feeling is most intense. There’s a real comfort level to consider. This fiddle would’ve been his entire life — his passion, his breadbasket, his ticket to daily comforts and a better life in general. Then, I also pictured horrible images of him stumbling or even falling with it in his hands or tucked under his coat as he scooted along bumpy country roads.

     Ugee said Ed ordered his strings from “Sears & Roebuck and places like that. You could buy strings out in them country stores. Used to be you could buy them all in a drug store.”

     How did he get his bows haired?

     “Horse’s tail. Dad haired it for him.”

     Ugee said Ed and Laury played music at little towns called Rosedale, Grantsville and Webster Springs. I asked if Ed put a box or cup out to catch money and she said, “Oh, no. Maybe Dad would put a cigar box down. When Ed was some place and Dad was around, he’d just step up after they’d get to playing and Dad’d say, ‘If you fellers like that how about putting some money in this cigar box? This man’s got six kids. Don’t make him play for nothing’.”

     Ugee had faint memories of Ed fiddling in contests with her father. One time, she said, he lost a contest in Charleston to an Indian — no doubt Natchez the Indian, the famous show fiddler. “Ed got so mad at hisself,” Ugee said, “he just about blowed up over it because he knowed the feller couldn’t play but they give it to him. He was the world champion fiddler but he couldn’t play. Ed said, ‘It’s already cut and dried.’ Ed cut a shine and said that his music wasn’t worth a damn. You never heard such cussing.”

     The first time Ugee saw Ella, she was pregnant with Lawrence (circa 1927). At that time, Ella did not play the mandolin — an important thing to note considering how it was so prominently featured on the home recordings of the mid-40s.

     “Now Ella, when she first come in there, she played the accordion. Dad told Ed, he said, ‘I don’t like the accordion. It drowns out your music. I’d ruther hear the fiddle.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you teach her to play the guitar or the mandolin?’ Ed laughed. He said, ‘Hell, you can’t teach her nothing.’ Ella — I can see her shut her eyes yet — said, ‘Laury, don’t you like the accordion?’ He said, ‘Oh, I like it. Ella, you’re the best in the world, but I like string music.’ Next time she come back, she was playing mandolin. Ed learned her how to second and buddy she could keep time with it, too. Dad said, ‘I like that a whole lot better, just hearing that time.'”

     Ugee said, “Well, they had Lawrence and they named him after Dad. Then when they come back they had a little girl and they named her Monnie after my mother, Minnie. Ella wrote and told Mom, ‘Well, I had my baby and it’s a girl. Instead of calling her Minnie, I’m calling her Monnie, but it’s still your namesake.”

     I wondered if Ed and Ella played at courthouses in that part of West Virginia and Ugee said, “Yes, yes. They played at every courthouse there was in West Virginia down there: Grantsville, Clay County, Glenville and back through that way. Gassaway, West Virginia. Sutton, West Virginia. Just any place around — all the churches and all the schoolhouses. The old Roane County Courthouse in Spencer, it used to have great big shade trees. Then they had the stock market up on the Spencer Hill back towards Arnoldsburg and Ed and them’d go over there. And they had a boarding house just before you crossed the bridge — state hospital’s across over there — and then there’s the big Miller Hotel and everybody went in there to eat. And they’d be over there playing music and people would take Ed and Ella down there to eat.”

     Ugee said Ed and Ella were regulars at Arnoldsburg, a little town north of the Hicks home on Route 33 in Calhoun County. It was the first of many stories where she became the hero of her own narrative.

     “My brother, Harvey, he took me down to Arnoldsburg and Ed and Ella was playing music. They had a platform to dance on and Dad was down there. Harvey said, ‘Well, let’s sit back over here and listen to them a while.’ There was some girls trying to dance. They wasn’t keeping time. You could tell right then that Ed didn’t like the noise they were making. They was some way about twisting his shoulders that he didn’t like something that was going on. I looked at Harold and said, ‘He’s gonna quit playing in a little bit.’ Me and him sat over there in the car and was laughing about it. And Ed and them wasn’t making very much money there at the time.

     “So Dad happened to see us over there. He come over and said, ‘Won’t you go over and dance some?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go over and dance.’ He went back and he told Uncle Jerry — that was Aunt Susan’s man — he said, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll say something like, I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Jerry said, ‘You give me ten dollars and I’ll put it in the box.’ Uncle Jerry said, ‘I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Ed perked up like that — he’d give ten dollars too almost to hear me dance. And old Carey Smith, I never will forget it. Carey and old John both was there and they had money. ‘Well,’ Carey said, ‘I’d give a twenty-dollar bill to see Ugee Hicks come in there on that board and show them girls a few things.’ I just walked over to Uncle Jerry and I said, ‘Uncle Jerry, just put your ten where your mouth is.’ And I looked down at Carey Smith and I said, ‘Carey, you put your twenty where your mouth is. Throw it in that cigar box.’

     “Well, Ed went to playing ‘Carroll County Blues’. I had a pair of shoes on that had like a wooden heel on them. I hit that floor and I wanna tell you right now, you oughta heard Ed play. He just brightened up so. I don’t think I ever heard him play it better in my life. And Uncle Jerry turned around to old John, he said, ‘Well, you better put your twenty in here.’ Well, Ed made fifty dollars. Old Ed and Ella, you know they had a family. I was a pretty good dancer then. Them two girls quit. One girl stepped back and said, ‘Well, she can’t do the Charleston.'”

     Ugee told me more about the pact made between her father and Ed in the early thirties.

     “Now they made that pact a long time ago and they renewed it when Ed was back again. Dad told him he wanted him to play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’ and he said, ‘I don’t care what you play before, fiddling pieces or anything, but when you play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’, that’s when I’ll meet my Lord.’ And he said, ‘I’ll be a laying there in that grave until you sing that.'”

     Ed asked Laury to play “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” and a few fiddle tunes at his funeral.

     “I’ll lay there in that grave and won’t hear nothing,” Laury joked.

     Ed was “kindly acting a fool” about it too and told him to let Ugee sing since he was such a horrible singer.

     “Laury, we’re getting a little serious with this stuff,” Ed finally said. “I don’t know whether I can play anything or not.”

     “I know,” Laury said. “I don’t know whether I can sing over you, either.”

     Ugee said her father died of leukemia and stomach cancer in January of 1937 at the age of 56 years. About a month later, Ed made it to Calhoun County and played “When Our Lord Shall Come Again” at his grave. The famous Ohio River flood of ’37 delayed his trip. According to one publication, the flood crested in Ashland at 74.3 feet — nearly 20 feet above flood stage. It took one month and a half to play out, leaving residents with a large cleanup effort that lasted for six months.

     “Ed went up to the grave — it’s right up on the hill from the house — and he stayed and played music all day,” Ugee said. “He played fast fiddle tunes and he played slow ones and then he’d sing. That evening, back at the house, nobody said a thing. You coulda dropped a pin in our house. Ed just come down on the fiddle and went to playing that ‘Carroll County Blues’ and I just jumped up in the floor and went to dancing. I said, ‘Well, if my dad was a living, that’s what he’d wanted me to do because I can’t hold my feet.’ Ed told me the next day, ‘If you hadn’t done that I’d a choked to death right there.’ Ella said, ‘When you hit that floor I knowed you was gonna be all right.'”

In Search of Ed Haley 6

26 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Back in Nashville, I was knee-deep in Haley’s music, devoting more time to it than I care to admit. I talked so much about it that my friends began to tease me. Mark Howard, who was producing my albums at the time, joked that if Ed’s recordings were of better quality, I might not like them so much. As my obsession with Haley’s music grew, so did my interest in his life. For a long time, my only source was the liner notes for Parkersburg Landing, which I had almost committed to memory. Then came Frazier Moss, a fiddling buddy in town, who presented me with a cassette tape of Snake Chapman, an old-time fiddler from the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy in eastern Kentucky. On the tape, Snake said he’d heard Haley play the “old original” version of “Blackberry Blossom” after he “came in on the boats” at Williamson, West Virginia.

The boats?

This was making for a great story. I was already enthralled by Haley’s fiddling…but to think of him riding on “the boats.” It was the marriage of my two loves. I immediately immersed myself in books like Captain Fred Way’s Packet Directory 1848-1983: Passenger Steamboats of the Mississippi River System Since the Advent of Photography in Mid-Continent America (1983) to see which boats ran in the Big Sandy Valley during Haley’s lifetime. Most of the boats were wooden-hulled, lightweight batwings – much smaller than the ones that plied the Mississippi River in my St. Louis youth – but they were exciting fixtures in the Big Sandy Valley culture.

“I have seen these boats coming down the river like they were shot out of a cannon, turning these bends, missing great limbs hanging over the stream from huge trees, and finally shooting out of the Big Sandy into the Ohio so fast that often they would be nearly a mile below the wharf boat before they could be stopped,” Captain Robert Owens wrote in Captain Mace’s River Steamboats and Steamboat Men (1944). “They carried full capacity loads of sorghum, chickens and eggs. These days were times of great prosperity around the mouth of Sandy. Today, great cities have sprung up on the Tug and Levisa forks. The railroad runs on both sides, and the great activity that these old-time steamboats caused has all disappeared.”

During the next few weeks, I scoured through my steamboat photograph collection and assembled pictures of Big Sandy boats, drunk with images of Haley riding on any one of them, maybe stopping to play at Louisa, Paintsville, Prestonsburg and Pikeville, Kentucky on the Levisa Fork or on the Tug Fork at Ft. Gay, Kermit, Williamson, and Matewan, West Virginia.

Finally, I resolved to call Snake Chapman and ask him about his memories. It was a nervous moment – for the first time, I was contacting someone with personal memories of Ed Haley. Snake, I soon discovered, was a little confused about exactly who I was and why I was so interested in Haley’s life and then, just like that, he began to offer his memories of Ed Haley.

“Yeah, he’s one of the influences that started me a fiddling back years ago,” Snake said, his memories slowly trickling out. “I used to go over to Molly O’Day’s home – her name was Laverne Williamson – and me and her and her two brothers, Skeets and Duke, used to play for square dances when we first started playing the fiddle. And Uncle Ed, he’d come up there to old man Joe Williamson’s home – that’s Molly’s dad – and he just played a lot for us and then us boys would play for him, me and Cecil would, and he’d show us a lot of things with the bow.”

Molly O’Day, I knew, was regarded by many as the most famous female vocalist in country music in the 1940s; she had retired at a young age in order to dedicate her life to the church.

“And he’s the one that told me all he could about old-time fiddling,” Snake continued. “He said, ‘Son, you’re gonna make a good fiddler, but it takes about ten years to do it.'”

I told Snake about reading in the Parkersburg Landing liner notes how Haley reportedly wished that “someone might pattern after” him after his death and he totally disagreed. He said, “I could have copied Uncle Ed – his type of playing – but I didn’t want to do it because he told me not to. He told me not to ever copy after anyone. Said, ‘Just play what you feel and when you get good, you’re as good as anybody else.’ That was his advice.”

I didn’t really know what to make of that comment. I mean, was Haley serious? Was he speaking from personal experience or was it just something he told to a beginning fiddler for encouragement?

After that, my conversation with Snake consisted of me asking questions – everything from how much Haley weighed to all the intricate details of his fiddling. I wondered, for instance, if Ed held the bow at the end or toward the middle, if he played with the fiddle under his chin, and if he ever tried to play words in his tunes. I wanted to know all of these things so that I could just inhabit them, not realizing that later on what were perceived as trivial details would often become major items of interest.

Snake answered my questions precisely: he said Haley held the bow “up a little in the middle, not plumb on the end” and usually played with the fiddle at his chest – “just down ordinarily.” He also said Haley “single-noted” most of his bow strokes, played frequently in cross-key, hated vibrato and used a lot of “sliding notes.” He seldom got out of first position, only occasionally “going down and getting some notes” that he wanted to “bring in the tune” and he definitely tried to play words in his music.

“The old fiddlers through the mountains here – and I guess it’s that way everywhere – they tried to make the fiddle say the words of the old tunes,” Snake said.

“Uncle Ed, he was a kind of a fast fiddler,” he went on. “Most old-time fiddlers are slow fiddlers, but he played snappy fiddling, kindly like I do. Ah, he could do anything with a fiddle, Uncle Ed could. He could play a tune and he could throw everything in the world in it if he wanted to or he could just play it out straight as it should be. If you could just hear him in person because those tapes didn’t do him justice. None of them didn’t. To me, he was one of the greatest old-time fiddlers of all time. He was telling me, when I was young, he said, ‘Well, I could make a fiddle tune any time I want to,’ but he said he just knowed so many tunes he didn’t care about making any more. He played a variety of tunes that a lot of people didn’t play, and a lot of people couldn’t play. He knew so many tunes he wouldn’t play one tune too long.”

I asked Snake about Haley’s repertoire and he said, “He played an old tune called ‘Old Sledge’ and it was one of his good ones. He played tunes like ‘Trouble Among the Yearlings’, but when he was gonna play it he called it ‘Fox in the Mud’. He made that up himself. One of the favorite tunes of mine he played was the old-time way of playing ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and he played it in G-minor. Ed could really play it good. They was somebody else that made the tune. Uncle Ed told me who it was – Garfield. He said he was a standing fiddling near a big blackberry patch and it was in bloom at the mouth of the hollow one time and this fella Garfield played this tune and he asked this fella Garfield what the name of the tune was. He said, ‘Well, I ain’t named it, yet,’ and he turned around and spit in that blackberry patch with a big bunch of ambeer and said, ‘We’ll just call it ‘Blackberry Blossom’.”

Snake laughed.

“Yeah, Uncle Ed, he had tales behind every one of them like that, but that’s where he said he got the name of it. He said he named it there…spitting in the blackberry blossom.”

Snake only remembered Haley singing “Stacker Lee”, a tune I’d heard him fiddle and sing simultaneously on Parkersburg Landing:

Oh Stacker Lee went to town with a .44 in his hand.

He looked around for old Billy Lyons. Gonna kill him if he can.

All about his John B. Stetson hat.

Stacker Lee entered a bar room, called up a glass of beer.

He looked around for old Billy Lyons, said, “What’re you a doin’ here?

This is Stacker Lee. That bad man Stacker Lee.”

Old Billy Lyons said, “Stacker Lee, please don’t take my life.

Got a half a dozen children and one sweet loving wife

Looking for my honey on the next train.”

“Well God bless your children. I will take care of your wife.

You’ve stole my John B. Stetson hat, and I’m gonna take your life.”

All about that broad-rimmed Stetson hat.

Old Billy Lyons said, “Mother, great God don’t weep and cry.”

Oh Billy Lyons said, “Mother, I’m bound to die.”

All about that broad-rimmed Stetson hat.

Stacker Lee’s mother said, “Son, what have you done?”

“I’ve murdered a man in the first degree and Mother I’m bound to be hung.”

All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Oh Stacker Lee said, “Jailor, jailor, I can’t sleep.

Old Billy Lyons around my bedside does creep.”

All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Stacker Lee said, “Judge, have a little pity on me.

Got one gray-haired mother dear left to weep for me.”

All about that broad-rimmed Stetson hat.

That judge said, “Old Stacker Lee, gonna have a little pity on you.”

I’m gonna give you twenty-five years in the penitentiary.”

All about that John B. Stetson hat.

It was one awful cold and rainy day

When they laid old Billy Lyons away

In Tennessee.  In Tennessee.

Snake said Haley used to play on the streets of Williamson, West Virginia where he remembered him catching money in a tin cup. In earlier years, he supposedly played on the Ohio River and Big Sandy boats and probably participated in the old fiddlers’ contests, which Snake’s father said was held on boat landings. These impromptu contests were very informal and usually audience-judged, meaning whoever got the most applause was considered the winner. Sometimes, fiddlers would just play and whoever drew the biggest crowd was considered the winner.

I asked Snake if he ever heard Ed talk about Clark Kessinger and he said, “Skeets was telling me Ed didn’t like Clark at all. He said, ‘That damned old son-of-a-gun stands around and tries to pick up everything he can pick up from you.’ And he did. Clark tried to pick up everything from Uncle Ed. He was a good fiddler, too.”

Snake said Clayton McMichen (the famous Skillet Licker) was Haley’s favorite fiddler, although he said he knew just how to beat him. This made me think of the line from Parkersburg Landing, “In regard to his own fiddling, Haley was not particularly vain, although he was aware that he could put ‘slurs and insults’ into a tune in a manner that set him apart from all other fiddlers.” (I wasn’t exactly sure he meant by slurs and insults.)

Snake could tell that I was really into Haley.

“Try to come see me and we’ll make you as welcome as we possibly can,” he said. “I tell you, my wife is poorly sick, and I have a little trouble with my heart. I’m 71. Doctors don’t want me to play over two or three hours at a time, but I always like to meet other people and play with them. I wouldn’t have no way of putting you up, but you can come any time.”

Just before hanging up, I asked Snake if he had any Haley recordings. He said Skeets Williamson had given him some tapes a few years back and “was to bring more, but he died two years ago of cancer.” Haley had a son in Ashland, Kentucky, he said, who might have more recordings. “I don’t know whether he’s got any of Uncle Ed’s stuff or not. See, most of them old tapes they made, they made them on wire recordings, and I don’t know if he’s got any more of his stuff than what I’ve got or not.”

I told Snake I would drive up and see him in the spring but ended up calling him a week later to ask him if he knew any of Ed’s early influences. He said Ed never talked about those things. “No sir, he never did tell me. He never did say. Evidently, he learned from somebody, but I never did hear him say who he learned from.” I felt pretty sure that he picked up tunes from the radio. “Ed liked to listen to the radio, preferring soap operas and mystery chillers, but also in order to hear new fiddle tunes,” the Parkersburg Landing liner notes read. “A good piece would cause him to slap his leg with excitement.” I asked Snake if he remembered Haley ever listening to fiddlers on the radio and he said, “I don’t know. He must have from the way he talked, because he didn’t like Arthur Smith and he liked Clayton McMichen.”

What about pop tunes? Did he play any of those?

“He played ragtime pretty good in some tunes,” Snake said. “Really you can listen to him play and he slides a little bit of ragtime off in his old-time fiddling – and I never did hear him play a waltz in all the time I ever heard him play. He’d play slow songs that sound old lonesome sounds.”

Snake quickly got into specifics, mentioning how Haley only carried one fiddle around with him. He said, “He could tune right quick, you know. He didn’t have tuners.  He just had the keys.”

Did fiddlers tune low back in those days?

“I’d say they did. They didn’t have any such thing as a pitch-pipe, so they had to tune just to whatever they liked to play.”

Haley was the exception.

“Well, it seemed like to me he tuned in standard pitch, I’m not sure. But from hearing his fiddling – like we hear on those tapes we play now – I believe he musta had a pitch-pipe at that time.”

I wondered if Haley spent a lot of time messing around with his fiddle, like adjusting the sound post, and Snake said, “No, I never did see him do that. He might have did it at home but when he was out playing he already had it set up the way he wanted to play.”

Surprisingly, Snake didn’t recall Haley playing for dances. “I don’t think he did because I never did know of him playing for a dance. He was mostly just for somebody to listen to, and what he did mostly was to make money for a living playing on the street corner. I seen him at a fiddling contest or two – that was back before I learned to play the fiddle. That’s when I heard him play ‘Trouble Among the Yearlings’. He won the fiddling contest.”

What about playing with other fiddlers?

“Well, around in this area here he was so much better than all the other fiddle players, they all just laid their fiddles down and let him play. The old fiddlers through here, they wasn’t what I’d call too good fiddlers. We had one or two in the Pikeville area over through there that played a pretty good fiddle. Art Stamper’s dad, he was a good old-time fiddler, and so was Kenny Baker’s dad.”

After hanging up with Snake, I gave a lot of thought to Haley reportedly not liking Arthur Smith. His dislike for Smith was documented on Parkersburg Landing, which stated plainly: “Another fiddler he didn’t care for was Arthur Smith. An Arthur Smith record would send him into an outrage, probably because of Smith’s notoriously uncertain sense of pitch. Cecil Williamson remembers being severely lectured for attempting to play like ‘that fellow Smith.'”

Haley probably first heard Smith over the radio on the Grand Ole Opry, where he debuted in December of 1927. Almost right away, he became a radio star, putting fiddlers all over the country under his spell. His popularity continued to skyrocket throughout the 1930s, during his collaboration with Sam and Kirk McGee. In the late thirties, Haley had a perfect chance to meet Smith, who traveled through southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky with the Tennessee Valley Boys. While unlikely, Haley may have met him at fiddling contests during the Depression. “In the thirties, Haley occasionally went to fiddle contests to earn money,” according to Parkersburg Landing. At that same time, Smith was participating in well-publicized (usually staged) contests with Clark Kessinger, Clayton McMichen and Natchee the Indian. Haley, however, tended to avoid any contest featuring Natchee the Indian, who “dressed in buckskins and kept his hair very long” and was generally a “personification of modern tendencies toward show fiddling.”

In the early 1940s, Haley had a perfect opportunity to meet Smith, who appeared regularly on WSAZ’s “Tri-State Jamboree” in Huntington, West Virginia. Huntington is located several miles up the Ohio River from Ashland, Kentucky and is West Virginia’s second largest city.

In the end, Haley’s reported low opinion of Smith’s fiddling was interesting. Arthur Smith was one of the most influential fiddlers in American history. Roy Acuff regarded him as the “king of the fiddlers,” while Dr. Wolfe referred to him as the “one figure” who “looms like a giant over Southern fiddling.” Haley even had one of his tunes – “Red Apple Rag” – in his repertoire. Maybe he got a lot of requests for Smith tunes on the street and had to learn them. Who knows how many of his tunes Haley actually played, or if his motives for playing them were genuine?