Tag Archives: South Shore

In Search of Ed Haley 306

16 Friday May 2014

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The next day, after a few hours of sleep at Wilson’s house, Brandon and I drove to see fiddler Slim Clere in South Charleston, West Virginia. Slim was born in Ashland around the time of the First World War and knew a lot about Ed. We were parked behind his two-story house and were unloading our “gear” when he appeared out of a back door and led us inside his house (past some type of home recording studio) and up a flight of stairs. We sat down in the living room where we met his wife, a vivacious middle-aged woman who fetched several scrapbooks at Slim’s request. We flipped through the pages while Slim told us about some of his early experiences.

“I knew Jesse Stuart in 1934,” he said. “He lived at South Shore, Kentucky, across the river from Portsmouth, Ohio. He went to Vanderbilt. I believe he did play football. He used to date Theron Hale’s daughter that used to be at WSM at the Grand Ole Opry. I thought maybe he might marry her but he didn’t. Well anyway, I went away. I left my home and went to Atlanta. Well I went to Gary, Indiana, and everywhere, and worked with Bert Layne and Riley Puckett and some of those old-timers. I knew old Fiddlin’ John Carson. I never did meet Lowe Stokes. He lost an arm in a hunting accident. At one time he was a better fiddle player than McMichen. But Mac come out of it. He really could play. I patterned a lot of my style after him.”

Slim pointed to a picture of himself in his youth and said, “That’s back when I had hair and teeth.”

I was anxious to talk about Ed, so I asked Slim if he could remember the first time he ever saw him.

“I grew up knowing him,” Slim said. “He used to come down to the Ashland Park there every Sunday and sit around and fiddle for nickels and dimes on a park bench and I’d sit on there and watch him play.”

Slim said Ed Haley, Ed Morrison, and Bill Day were his primary influences during his younger days in Ashland.

“He was hot stuff,” Slim said of Haley.

He described Ed as a “loner” but said his wife was always with him.

“The old lady chorded a taterbug mandolin,” he said.

Ed played on a little yellow fiddle, which he wouldn’t let anyone “get a hold of,” and kept a cup between his legs for money. Down at his feet on the ground was his old wooden case, “made like a coffin.”

How much would you have to put in the cup to get him to play a tune?

“Didn’t matter,” Slim said.

Could he tell how much you dropped into the cup?

“He’d know just to the tee what it was,” he said. “He could tell the difference between a penny and a dime.”

Would the length of how long he played the tune depend on how much you dropped in the cup?

“No, he liked to play.”

Slim and I got our fiddles out and played a lot of tunes — or parts of tunes — back and forth for about a half an hour. I wanted to know all about Ed’s technique and repertoire. Slim said he “cradled” his fiddle against his chest (“all the old-timers used to do that”) and held the bow way out on the end with his “thumb on the underneath part of the frog.” He moved very little when playing.

“The only action he had was in that arm…and it was smooth as a top,” Slim said. “He fingered his stuff out. He didn’t bow them out. He played slow and beautiful and got the melody out of it. Now, he could play stuff like ‘Dill Pickle Rag’ where you had to cross them strings and that ‘Blackberry Blossom’ was one of his favorites. He played ‘Goodnight Waltz’, ‘Wednesday Night Waltz’. I don’t think ‘The Waltz You Saved For Me’ had been invented yet. He played ‘Over the Waves’ and ‘Sweet Bunch of Daisies’. He didn’t double-stop it, though.”

In Search of Ed Haley 297

27 Sunday Apr 2014

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Later that day, I went to see 88-year-old Abe Keibler in nearby South Shore, Kentucky. Abe was the last surviving member of the old fiddling Keiblers and a first cousin to fiddler Morris Allen, one of the sources for Parkersburg Landing.

“My grandfather, he was sixteen years old when he landed in here from Germany and he got a job out here at an old furnace,” Abe said. “He couldn’t even speak the language when he first come here, they said, and he didn’t play nothing.”

“Wow,” I said, “So fiddling started with your dad and uncles?”

“My uncles and dad, yeah,” Abe confirmed. “Jim was my dad’s name. He played a banjo — the old claw-hammer style.

Abe was raised up in a family of fiddlers, but he originally played the guitar. He began to play the fiddle at the age of 55. He wasted little time in showing me the old family fiddle, which he inherited from his uncle John Keibler. It was a good-looking instrument with a good tone, although the bridge was ready to collapse.

“Way back before I was born some fella came into Portsmouth when they had the old saloons in and he had this old fiddle and couldn’t play it,” Abe explained. “My uncle John, he seen that it was a good fiddle and he wanted to buy it and this guy wouldn’t talk about selling it. My uncle Charley, he was a left-handed fiddler. He said, ‘Now John, if you want that fiddle, I can buy it for ten dollars.’ So he bought it. It’s been in our family around ninety years or maybe close to a hundred.”

Abe said the old fiddle was hard to tune — it had seen some rough times.

“My uncle fell and busted the top all to pieces. I had a fella that made fiddles put that top off of another old fiddle on it. My uncle had patent keys put on it and I had them took out and wood keys put in it.”

I tuned the Keibler fiddle as best as I could, then reached it back with a request for a tune I’d heard Abe mention called “We’ll All Go to Heaven When the Devil Goes Blind”. He couldn’t remember it but said it was the same thing as “Stumptail Dolly”. He scratched out a melody in the key of G, then said, “Some of them called that the ‘Girl With the Blue Dress On’. ‘Old Coon Dog’ is all I ever heard it called.”

He also played “Boatin’ Up Sandy”, “Sally Goodin” (in G), “Rye Whiskey” (which he called “Cold Frosty Morning”), “Sally Got Drunk on Irish Potatoes”, “Cotton-Eyed Joe”, and “Susan’s Gone to the Ball With Her Old Shoes On” (key of G).

Every now and then, I joined in with my fiddle.

“I’m gonna learn you how to play a fiddle yet,” Abe said.

In Search of Ed Haley 59

28 Monday Jan 2013

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A few days later, I called Roger Cooper, a fiddler in Lewis County, Kentucky. Roger was a protégé of Buddy Thomas, the eastern Kentucky fiddler who captured the interest and won the hearts of folklorists in the 1970s. Roger was more than happy to talk with me but said, “Really, I don’t know very much about Ed Haley. Course, I’m just like 43 years old myself so I never did see him or nothing, but a lot of guys around here knew him and would see him and stuff. I’ve heard quite a bit of talk about him. He’d come down to the Portsmouth area and play sometimes. And the Portsmouth area had lots of fiddlers around during the 20s and 30s and on up into about the 50s before they started dying off. There was stories going around about how he played.”

I asked Roger if he knew anything about Asa Neal, the famous Portsmouth fiddler.

“Asa Neal, from what they say about him, he was from down here in this county starting out and lived on a shanty boat and I guess he went on up towards Portsmouth,” Roger said. “He even made some records, I think.”

I told Roger that I figured Asa and Clark Kessinger were Ed’s two chief competitors and he said, “Well, Clark Kessinger, he gave Ed Haley a lot of credit as to learning some stuff from him himself.”

Roger felt there were a lot of other good fiddlers in the area aside from Asa Neal and Clark Kessinger.

“There was six fiddlers in South Shore — that’s just across the river from Portsmouth — all brothers — Keiblers — and there was six of them played the fiddle and they was supposed to been the best around here,” Roger said. “They was a German people. Uncle John Keibler was supposed to have been the best. The old guys around here, they say they learned from the Glenn Brothers out of West Virginia. Their names were Bob and Abe Glenn. Those Glenns would come down through here and sometimes they’d stay maybe a year with those Keiblers and they learned a lot of tunes off them Glenns. They all say that Bob Glenn was a great fiddler. I’ll tell you a little story. John Keibler was over there and Ed Haley was playing in Portsmouth, you know, like for nickels and dimes, so he went over to see him and asked Ed if he could play him a tune. And Ed let him have the fiddle and after he played the tune he thought he was Glenn playing. He went over and started feeling of him. He said, ‘Are you Glenn? You sound just like him.’ That’s what Morris Allen told me. He was a nephew to the Keiblers.”

“I wish I could tell you more about Ed Haley myself,” Roger said. “An old man and some boys named Mershon, they was awful good fiddlers. The old man Mershon, he musta been something great. One of his boys came home and said, ‘Dad, I found a fiddle player that can beat you.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll just have to go hear him.’ He said, ‘Well, come tomorrow and go with me and you can hear him.’ He took him into Portsmouth and there was Ed Haley playing for nickels and dimes and that old man watched him play for a while and said, ‘Boy, he is a great fiddler but he don’t play like I do.’ That’s all he had to say about it. Evidently, Ed really showed him some stuff. All I can hear from any of these guys around here, they just talk like there was hardly any way of describing how Ed Haley could play. They all just seem to think he was the greatest that ever was. And them old German fiddlers, it’d take something to win them over.”

Roger recommended that I contact Abraham Keibler — a nephew to “those good fiddlers” — who took up the fiddle himself when he was around 50 years old. He also suggested John Lozier, an 82-year-old harmonica player who used to watch Ed play in Portsmouth.

“He said Ed Haley was the smoothest fiddler he’d heard in his life,” Roger said of Lozier.

We talked a lot about the old tunes played in eastern Kentucky.

“A lot of those kinds of tunes I just didn’t get to get on tape or nothing and I wasn’t far enough along and my memory’s not that good, but I can tell you somebody that you really should talk to is John Harrod down there. John Harrod, he plays an awful lot of tunes and he’s researched them for years. He don’t try to be no star fiddler or nothing but he’s got a real good bow lick. He’s got bow licks down like a lot of the fiddlers in this area — the old ones. And he’s a real fine fella along with it. He researched all the old fiddlers, him and Gus Meade. I think he’s some kind of a schoolteacher. Also, he has a lot to do with Berea College.”

Roger gave me John’s telephone number just before we hung up. I put it away for later reference, trying to keep my focus on Ed Haley and not getting lost researching the fiddle music of eastern Kentucky in general.