Tag Archives: Noah Mullins

In Search of Ed Haley 222

11 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

When I pressed Joe for specific details about Ed’s technique he said, “He’d play up on the bow about four or five inches, but he played the full stroke with the bow all the time. He didn’t jiggle it.”

I asked if he always sat down when he played and Joe said, “I’ve seen him sitting down and standing up both. They said he danced, but I never did see him dance none. He pat his foot when he played. You’d never hardly know he was patting it. He just patted one foot. He had that chin rest…”

“So Ed put the fiddle up under his chin?” I interrupted.

“He put it up under his chin and played,” Joe confirmed. “Ed Belcher, he played with it under his chin, too. Now Robert Martin, sometimes he’d have it under his chin, sometimes he’d have it down here on his chest.”

Brandon asked if Ed packed his fiddle in a case and Joe said, “Yeah, he had a case. If it was raining or something, I’ve seen him with it under his coat. He had two or three bows. I’ve seen him take the bow loose… He took the end of it loose and put it under the string and played some kind of a tune. They was just one tune he played like that. I believe it was some kind of a religious song. I don’t know how he done it.”

I asked Joe if Ed sang any and he said, “I heard him sing a little bit one or two times on one or two tunes. He’d play a verse and then he’d sing a little bit but not much. Seems to me like that his wife sung a little bit with him on some of them but they didn’t do too much singing. He’d play a little bit, then sing a little bit. They was just a few tunes that he done like that. He didn’t play none of this modern music or nothing like that. He played old-time tunes, like ‘The Arkansas Traveler’. He’d play that and some of them boys’d be sitting off someplace and talking about the big rock in the field and all about the feller digging the taters out and that old sow rooting them out. Ed would play the music and they’d put that in. They’re all dead now, them boys that used to do that. Noah Mullins and my brother Howard and Burl Mullins and Cary and them.”

Joe’s memories seemed to stretch back fondly to that time.

“Yeah, it was all right,” he said. “Every time I played with him he played ‘Lady of the Lake’. Real old tunes.”

Joe said Ed played “Love Somebody”, “Birdie”, “Brownlow’s Dream”, “Hell Up Coal Hollow”, “Hell Among the Yearlings”, “Wild Hog in the Red Brush”, and “Jenny’s Creek”. He also played “Mockingbird” with “everything in it.”

“He’d make the bird holler and everything else,” Joe said.

I asked Joe if Ed played a tune for a long time and he said, “Well, some of his tunes he played a long time and some of them were just short and sweet. He put a lot extra in them sometimes. It went along with it but if you didn’t know him pretty well and watch what you was doing you’d get off. It just come natural for me to follow him because he played good time.”

In Search of Ed Haley 96

27 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 92

18 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Clyde said, “My brother Ralph, he was my dad’s favorite because Ralph was smarter than I was. He wouldn’t ever beat up on Ralph. Well, Ralph was bigger than he was. Did you ever know a guy from this part of the area named Frank Creech? Well, he was one of the bad boys around my area when I was growing up. And he come and borrowed Ralph’s guitar from my dad. Ralph had a great big Martin guitar. He’d bought it from one of those Ruffner boys, I think. He worked. But this guy Frank Creech borrowed Ralph’s guitar and took it somewhere and had a truck run over it — smashed it up. So Frank Creech come to the house and told my dad about it and my dad wasn’t saying a word about it. I was there in the house when this happened. And my mother didn’t like to hear anybody cuss. She was a Puritan about things like that. She didn’t allow any of that in her house.”

Clyde’s memories trailed off at that point, but I knew he was telling more about Ed’s attack on Frank Creech, an event which I’d first heard about while watching a Christmas video at Lawrence’s house.

Clyde said Ed and Ella argued sometimes about music.

“He’d want to play it one way and she’d want to play it the other,” he said. “But a mandolin and a fiddle are tuned up the same way — got the same pitch on the strings — but it’s a different kind of music.”

I asked him who usually won the arguments and he said, “Well she did because he’d give up on her.”

Clyde laughed, “He was mean. If he didn’t win with his talking, he’d do it with his fists to my mother.”

So Ed beat on his wife? I knew that was something Lawrence would have never told.

“He was a mean devil,” Clyde continued. “The worst I ever done him in my life, we was up on Harts Creek at Uncle Peter’s house. And he wanted to go somewhere and she didn’t want to go at that particular minute [and he started hitting her with his fists, so I got a hold of a plowpoint] and hit him in the head with it. Knocked a pretty good-sized hole in the head. Noah Mullins and the other Mullins boy Tennis chased me all over that mountain with a great big piece of a hoe-club. He never did catch me because I was pretty fast on my feet, too, running through those mountains and I could really get over the land. I was a boy then — a minor, you know — and they took us all down to Catlettsburg to the city jail and they threatened him with putting him in the penitentiary for beating on my mother that way and after that he never did beat her up too much.”

I asked Clyde if Ed did a lot of jail time and he said, “Just for minutes, like to hold him over for a few hours. Let him get sobered up a little bit. They weren’t mean to him, but they were mean to us boys, the police were. We deserved it.”

When I mentioned Ed’s oldest son, the boy who had died young, Clyde said, “He was born before I was. His name was Sherman Luther. Sherman was between me and Ralph.”

I said, “Now Ralph was your mother’s boy by somebody else.”

“Well, I didn’t know that,” Clyde said, kind of rattled. “See, you’re telling me things I don’t know and that kinda shakes me around a little bit and I don’t know what to say.”

I tried to smooth things up by saying, “Well I heard that but I wasn’t sure.”

Clyde said, “Well it seems to me like it could be, because my mother was a woman just like all the rest of the women. She had her good points about her. She was a Christian. I think that in my heart. But my dad wasn’t. He was just an ornery, old mean man. I hate to keep saying that about him because I… I hated him for a long time for the way he treated my mother and I finally got out of that hate and I got so I could talk about it to people who had business a knowing about it. I’m telling you things that I wouldn’t say to anybody else because I believe in you and I believe you’re being honest about what you’re doing. I wish it could be known widely about what he did for a living.”

Clyde promised if I’d come and see him, he’d tell me a lot more about Ed that he didn’t “dare mention over the telephone.” He said, “You know, I had a skull fracture here about a year ago and I can’t think real properly like I could if I set down. I’ve had my head broke, my brains knocked out a couple of times, and that affected me, too. If I saw you… Maybe if I could be prodded a little bit, I might could recall some things that might go good in a book.”

In the meantime, he said I should contact his sister-in-law, Patsy (Cox) Haley, who’d done some research on Ed’s family years ago.

“That was Jack’s wife,” Clyde said. “Her husband Jack, he blew up with a heart attack. You ought to get in touch with her. She can tell you more about that than any of us boys could ’cause she was a genealogist. She took that up as a hobby and she got into it and she couldn’t get out of it.”

Parkersburg Landing 41

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

     When I got back in Nashville, I ranted and raved over Haley’s fiddle before taking it downtown to John Hedgecoth, an instrument repairman. John and I went over its every detail. We fitted a bridge to it and put Black Diamond strings on it (the brand Haley supposedly used), then I brought it home and played on it for about two weeks. I focused on learning Ed’s version of a fabulous tune called “Half Past Four”.

     “It just sounds like a dream,” I said to Lawrence when I called him. “You play on it real light and it’s got that sound in it.”

     “Well, that’s great, John,” he said.

     “Now I had to put a chin rest on it and I am using a shoulder rest with it because that’s what I’m used to and I had to put tuners on it because I like to keep it in tune,” I said.

     “Okay. Well, that’s all right,” Lawrence laughed.

     I said, “I tell you what’s interesting about it. It looks like at one time the back had been taken off and re-glued.”

     Lawrence said, “Yeah, it got damp and the glue came loose on it and I guess that back warped or something. I don’t think it was completely off. Well, my son Steve had somebody down there in Nashville to repair it but that bridge — that thing looked real odd to me. I had an old bridge here. It’s in a drawer around here somewhere, I’d say, and I’ll look for it. I never really got it strung up since then. I just figured, well, there’s enough glue on that old fiddle that it ain’t gonna sound right anyway. If you use too much glue, you’re gonna lose a lot of the resonance in the wood.”

     I said, “Now, it also looks like at one time the neck was broken out of it and reglued.”

     Lawrence said, “Well now, it was not in the best of shape when Steve snuck it out of here. He took it out and had it repaired for me for a Christmas present. I just figured it’s gonna lay around here and just deteriorate again, maybe draw dampness some way or it’ll fall apart anyway. I just thought since you showed so much interest in it I’ll just let you have it.”

     I said, “Well, I sure appreciate that. One of the things… The fingerboard, when you look at it straight on, lays over to the right in a funny kind of an angle.”

     Lawrence said, “Yeah, that’s what I figured. I don’t remember it being like that. That fingerboard, it looked to me like it had some wear on it where my dad had fingered it so much. It looked like it had slight indentations from his fingers. I didn’t know whether it would fret right.”

     I said, “And also, the sound post is an inch back from where it ought to be.” I wasn’t sure if Ed had kept it there or not; I felt it likely that it had fallen over in the decades after his death and been misplaced by some half-wit repairman.

     I got Ed’s fiddle and played “Half Past Four” for Lawrence, who said, somewhat amused, “You’re trying to play one of his pieces. Sounds pretty good. Well, maybe some time down the line you’ll get that ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ down. It’s just working at it. And that fiddle does sound good from over the phone.”

     I said, “It’s got a little overtone in it that none of these other fiddles have and when I go back and listen to those tapes I hear that overtone in there.”

     Lawrence said, “Maybe you got a prize there. I don’t know. I think everybody agrees that you should have it. Steve seems to know more about you than what we do. I don’t know how he does but he’s a musician too, you know. He taught high school band for a while and he plays in a jazz band some. Plays the trumpet. His wife’s a musician. She’s a church organist — used to be. Two of the children… One of them’s in some kind of Nashville junior symphony. Plays the cello. The other plays the violin.”

     I told Lawrence I wanted to be sure and go back to Harts Creek in the fall and find out more about his dad’s early years there.

     “All right,” he said. “We’ll go back up there. I don’t think anybody up there, once they find out who you are will have any objections. One of my second cousins, Noah Mullins, he killed one of the revenuers that come up through there and that give Harts Creek a bad name, I guess. Those days are gone. I believe the second time up there everybody’d be glad to see you and talk to you like they were this last time. They won’t be any problem about that. People are a little suspicious if they don’t know who you are. But if they know you got a purpose and reason for being up there that isn’t detrimental to their causes they ain’t gonna jump you or anything or give you problems.”

In Search of Ed Haley 25

10 Monday Dec 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? Why would he have done such a thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked Enslow about Ed Haley’s music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow — so Ed told jokes?

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

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

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

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

What was his name?

“Jeff Baisden.”

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

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

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