Tag Archives: Rector Hicks

In Search of Ed Haley 343

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Calhoun County, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music

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Not long after visiting Ugee, I received some great information in the mail regarding Rector Hicks, a fiddler and nephew to Ed’s friend Laury Hicks. Rector grew up watching his uncle Laury play the fiddle.

“Rector was born out in the country around Chloe, Calhoun County, West Virginia, in 1914,” Joe LaRose wrote in Traditional Music and Dance in Northeast Ohio (March 1985). “His father was a good mouth harp player, but no one else in his family played music. Rector learned from fiddlers who lived in his area, beginning to play the instrument when he was around ten years old. Rector learned a lot from time spent with a distant cousin, Laury Hicks, a generation older than Rector and one of the foremost fiddlers in the area. ‘I don’t know of a fiddle player, really, that played like him. Ed Haley said Laury was the best fiddler he ever heard on the old time tunes, you know, and old fast ones. Hisself, he said that. And I always thought he was.'”

While at Laury’s, Rector Hicks also had the opportunity to see Ed.

“He was hard to figure out,” Rector told LaRose. “When I was around him most I didn’t know too much about fiddling, and a lot of that stuff I could pick up now if I was around him. How he got all that in there with his bow like he did you’d never believe it. He just set there this way (passes the length of the bow back and forth across the strings) but everything seemed like it just come in there. If you’d hear him play… Now that record, that’s not Ed Haley. That’s him, but that’s no good. You don’t get a lot of what he puts in. But he puts every note in that thing. His left hand, his fingers just flew. But his right hand… He just set there and his fiddle laid on his arm, set there and rocked. That’s the way he played. All them fastest tunes he played, didn’t seem like he put any of the bow in hardly. But it was all in there.”

Rector seemed to idolize Haley, at least according to Kerry Blech, a fiddling buff and friend of mine.

“Rector, when he was a teenager, had saved up some money and got him a pretty good fiddle and when Ed would come and stay at Laury’s house Rector would always come over,” Kerry wrote. “For a couple of years, Ed would tease him and say, ‘Well, I really like that fiddle you got, Rector. We should swap.’ And once he did and went off and played in some other town, then came back through about a week later and got his fiddle back. Rector said he was just really thrilled to’ve had Ed’s fiddle for even a week.”

As Rector got older and learned more about the fiddle, he really patterned after Haley’s style.

“Rector’s approach to playing has much in common with Haley’s,” LaRose wrote of Hicks. “Like Haley, Rector holds his fiddle against his upper arm and chest and supports it with his wrist (he does not rock the fiddle under the bow, though, like Haley did.) Rector uses a variety of bow strokes. Like Haley, he uses the length of the bow, sometimes playing a passage of several notes with one long stroke, deftly rocking the bow as he plays. He will accent the melody at chosen times with short, quick strokes. Rather than overlay the melody with a patterned or constant bow rhythm as some dance-oriented fiddlers do, Rector adapts his bowing to the melody of the particular tune he’s playing. Much of the lilt and movement of his tunes is built into the sequence of notes played with his left hand.”

Rector apparently kept in touch with Ed’s family, who he sometimes visited long after Haley’s death, and was very disappointed with the quality of fiddling on the Parkersburg Landing album.

“When I met Rector in the mid-70s, the Haley LP had just come out and Rector called me up to tell me it was awful,” Kerry wrote. “He said it was not representative of the man’s genius. He told me that he knew the man, and although many years had passed, the Haley genius was still in his mind’s eye. He also said that there were many other home recordings beyond what Gus Meade had copied. He said that Haley’s children had split up the recordings, that Lawrence had a number of them, and that a daughter, who lived in the Akron-Canton area, had over a hundred of them, and that Rector occasionally went over there and listened. He said that the family was irritated by how the Rounder record came to be and did not want to be involved with any of us city folk any more, afraid that someone would exploit their father’s music.”

At that time in his life, Rector mostly played Tommy Jarrell tunes but also several Ed Haley tunes, like “Birdie”, “Sugar in the Morning” (“Banjo Tramp”), “Ragpicker Bill”, “Black Sheep”, and “Staggerlee”.

Parkersburg Landing 34

20 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     By some accounts, Dr. Lawrence Hicks was Ed Haley’s best friend. Hicks was a well-known fiddler who practiced veterinary medicine in Calhoun County, West Virginia. Ed thought enough of Hicks to name his youngest son after him and, according to Parkersburg Landing, came to play the fiddle at his grave when he died in 1937. With Lawrence Haley’s encouragement, I telephoned Ugee Postalwait, a widow of advanced age and the only daughter of Dr. Hicks. Ugee (pronounced “you-gee”) was a resident of Akron, Ohio — one of those industrial towns flooded by job-seeking mountaineers some four decades ago.

     “I’m a friend of Lawrence Haley’s in Ashland and I’m very much interested in his father, Ed Haley,” I told her. “I was just visiting with Lawrence and he said you knew him real well. I was wondering if you would tell me about him.”

     “Well, I don’t know what you want me to tell you about,” Ugee said. “My dad and him was two of the finest fiddlers I ever heard. My dad’s name was Laury Hicks. Well, Lawrence was his name but they called him Laury. A lot of them called him Dr. L.A. He was a veterinarian, but he was a fine fiddler. Him and Ed were very close friends for years and years — ever since I was a little girl. They was both born in 1880. They loved each other. And Mom and Ella got along the same way. Mom was born in 1882. She lived to be a hundred years old. She played the organ. She was a good singer.”

     I said, “Now, there’s a story on that album where Ed went to this grave and played over it. Was that your dad?”

     “Yes,” she said. “They was talking one time, whichever one died first the other one was supposed to play the fiddle at their funeral. Dad requested that he play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’ and said that he wouldn’t meet his Lord in the air until Ed played. Dad died on the 18th day of January in ’37 but Kentucky and Ashland was under water. The water was up so high in ’37 that Ed and Ella couldn’t get there until after that and they played the song that dad requested.”

     I asked Ugee where all that went down and she said, “Dad’s buried up there at the home place on Route 16 in Calhoun County between Chloe and Stinson — as you come up from Arnoldsburg. Him and Mom and my brothers.”

     Calhoun County, I discovered, is a rural spot wedged in the backcountry between the Little Kanawha and Elk rivers northeast of Charleston, the state capitol. It is some 75 miles away from Haley’s birthplace on Harts Creek, at least as the crow flies. In Ed Haley’s time, it was a real hot bed of musicians.

     I wondered if Laury Hicks made any recordings. No, Ugee said, although his fiddle was still around. She gave it to Harold Postalwait, her son in Rogersville, Alabama.

     “He just had it refinished and everything,” she said.

     Ugee’s memories were warming up: “Ed and Ella and all the family used to come stay at our home — not for days — but for maybe months. We had some beautiful music there. I tell you, they ain’t nothing that I’ve ever heard on the TV or any place else to beat Ed Haley and my dad playing the fiddle. Ed Haley was one of the best I ever heard. Well, I thought my dad was too, but Ed was smoother. I’m always glad to talk about Ed Haley. He’s the only one that I ever heard where my dad would play and he’d second on the fiddle. Like, you’re singing a song and somebody singing alto behind it.”

     I told Ugee what Lawrence said about Ed being able to play the banjo and she agreed. “Ed could play a guitar like crazy, too. There’s where Ralph learned to play a guitar — Ed learned him. And Ed could play a mandolin, too. He could play any kind of music, anything that had a string. Now Dad could thump a banjo a little but he wasn’t what you’d call a banjo player.”

     Ugee said, “I wish you coulda been around through that country back when I was a girl a growing up so you coulda heard the music that was in that country. They really had good musicians. Rector Hicks, he was a cousin of mine, born and raised right across the hill. That was Clay Hicks’ boy. He used to come over and Dad would learn him to play. He lived across the hill on White Oak and there’s where Ed and Ella went all the time to visit.”

     I wondered if Rector was still around and she said no — that he had died a few years ago in 1989. She promised to talk with his widow in Akron, who supposedly had recordings of his music. Maybe such recordings would provide clues about Ed’s fiddling.

     I asked Ugee if she ever met John Hager, the banjo-player shown with Ed in the White Sulphur Springs photograph.

     “Oh, I sure did,” she said. “Played the banjo. They stayed at our house one whole winter, Ed and John, and then the next time that Ed come back he had a fella playing the guitar with him. I can’t think of his name but I can see his face. Ed was a tall slender fella then.”

     I invited Ugee to my upcoming show in Akron but all I could get out of her was, “I’m always glad to talk about Ed Haley. And Lawrence, you can’t meet a nicer person. He was named after my dad. And his wife is an awful nice person. I hope I can get down to see them this year. Nice talking to you because nobody loves to watch you any more than I do on TV.”