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In Search of Ed Haley 112

18 Saturday May 2013

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A few days later, I called John Lozier, a harpist in South Portsmouth, Kentucky. I could tell right away that he was feisty. When I mentioned Ed’s name, he said, “Ed Haley played so soft and so smooth you had to listen when he played. Well, that’s about all I can tell you ol’ buddy.”

Of course, I wanted more.

I pressed John by asking where he first saw Haley.

“Sitting on Market Street over here in Portsmouth, Ohio, playing for nickels and dimes back in the twenties or early thirties,” he said. “That’s the way he made a living. Raised five children. Then after that him and his wife separated. Now, can you imagine that?”

John seemed so sure of his memories that I asked him about Ed’s repertoire.

“John Harrod always had me to play one tune — nobody else played it,” he said. “My grandfather knew it, called ‘Portsmouth Airs’. I play all the fiddle tunes on a harp. My grandfather made fiddles and played fiddles but he never would allow me to pick it up. He’s afraid I’d drop and break the neck out of it. So when I was three years old I started playing fiddle tunes — so they tell me. I’m 85…or will be.”

I wondered what the secret was to getting that old and being as healthy as he sounded to be and he said, “Ah, boy. I work every day at something. I got a garden here. I’ve got out a hundred pounds of taters and I planted some beans and my cabbage is out and I move around a little bit every day.”

I had more questions.

Did Ed play a lot of waltzes?

“He could play anything,” John answered immediately.

Did you ever hear him sing?

“If he ever sung a song, I never knew it.”

How did he hold his fiddle?

“Very loosely,” John said, confirming Mona’s memory.

John asked me if I ever got up to his part of the country, then said, “Well, old buddy, I’m fixing to go to church and it’s good talking to ya. I live at South Portsmouth. If you’re ever up in here come around and let’s take a look at one another.”

In Search of Ed Haley 105

08 Wednesday May 2013

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Taking Bobby Taylor’s advice, I decided to call Wilson Douglas and ask him more about Ed Haley.

“You know, he’d come to Calhoun County, West Virginia, which borders Clay County,” Wilson said. “And there was an old gentleman over there by the name of Laury Hicks. He played the banjo for him a lot and also the fiddle. Now, he was a hell of a fiddler. Ed said the first time he went over there, Hicks was setting on the porch playing the ‘Arkansas Traveler’ — him and Cheneth on the banjo. And he said, ‘Wilson, I thought I was up against it right there. That old Hicks was a powerful hoedown fiddler.’ I knew it when I was a boy.”

I asked Wilson how Ed looked back in those early days, hoping to glean more personal and less-musical memories this time around.

“He would weigh about 185 pounds and he had a large-like stomach on him and he had little tiny feet,” he said. “When he went to a strange place, he would have me to lead him one time to the kitchen, one time to the living room, one time to the outhouse and that was all after that. He didn’t ask you to go no place with him and he walked like a cat, you know — very quick, very active man. He moved like a mountain lion. I’d say, ‘Now slow down a little bit Ed, and I’ll let you get the feel.’ But he picked his feet up fast, you know what I mean? And he could tell if you was a tidy housekeeper or a messy housekeeper. When he wasn’t playing the fiddle, he was continually moving his fingers — just like he did it so much that he did it unconsciously. He was an oddball. He didn’t fool with very many people — very withdrawn. Now when he got with a gang of mountain people playing music, he was very talkative then.”

Wilson said, “I was sixteen or seventeen years old and he saw I was interested in the fiddle and he sorta took a liking to me and he talked to me quite a bit. He treated me nice but he was a very obnoxious, sarcastic man if he didn’t like you. If he liked you, fine, and if he didn’t, he’d do his thing and that was it. And I’m gonna tell you something about Ed Haley. In as much as he was blind, especially if he’d had a drink or two, he was a dangerous man. He was a mean man. But he had an awful sense of feel. He had this sense of knowing when anything was close. He knew when he wasn’t in danger. He said, ‘Wilson, I went to a place one time,’ and he said, ‘it was rough, the people was rough.’ And said, ‘This man took me to the outhouse. I come back and I thought I could go myself.’ And said, ‘I must’ve got a little bit out of the path. I was fixing to make a step and something told me not to do it and I pulled back.’ And said, ‘I turned around and went back,’ and said, ‘I just liked one step of falling in that big, dug well.’ Now, that was the kind of good sense of feeling he had, you see?”

 

In Search of Ed Haley 99

29 Monday Apr 2013

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     I played a little for Wilson over the telephone to see what he thought of my bow stroke and he said, “You’ve got a lot of nice bow technique there. Now, that’s very close to Haley. Now, he plays a longer bow, but now you’re right on it as well as I remember. That’s the first time I’ve been reminded of him since ’55. You know, he died in ’55.” Hearing that made me feel good about my Scotch snap theory regarding Ed’s bowing, which I had been wearing out at home, although I noted that Wilson was off four years on Ed’s death date.

     Wilson said Ed played for dances all over Calhoun County.

     “Now when he got in a square dance where they was wound up, he played ‘Pigeon on the Gate’. That was a odd fiddle tune. He said it came out of Missouri somewhere. He’d play all night, you know. I believe he had more endurance at a dance than I used to have when I was younger. I’ve been around him when he would play for hours and never play the same tune twice, unless it was requested by somebody. But now what amazed me, he would play all night and maybe not play the same tune twice. And he told me, he said, ‘I know over a thousand fiddle tunes’.”

     I wondered if Ed drank at those dances, as Mona had said he was wont to do.

     “Now, if anybody had any alcoholic beverages around them places, they always kept that hid until after the fiddling session was over,” Wilson said. “If Haley took one drink of liquor, he could not play a bit. He would sort of get a chip on his shoulder and then he’d become violent, too. However, I could understand that. The man was blind and maybe he would go through a depressing stage.”

     Ed was deeply depressed during World War II, Wilson said, because his sons were away in the fighting.

     “We would go over to this place to hear him fiddle and he would not play one bit till I informed him what all Hitler was a doing, what the U.S. was doing, where all they were invading.”

     Wilson’s memories of Ed’s family were limited.

     “I saw one of his boys one time and I didn’t talk to him too much. He didn’t seem interested in music.”

     I asked Wilson if Ed ever told any stories and he said, “Na, he wouldn’t tell you nothing or he wouldn’t show ya nothing. He was real touchy, you know. You had to be careful not to punch the wrong buttons. He did not have the patience to show you anything on the violin. He wouldn’t show you where to slow up and show you no notes. He just wanted you to listen and think about it. He said a man ought to comprehend a tune and if he heard it a few times he ought to start at the outer edge of it and then finally it will dawn on you what to do. He said, ‘If you’re determined enough, you’ll finally get it.’ And in them days, you know, there was no tape recorders, so you just had to hear it over and over and do the best you could. I kind of believe his theory: I think fiddle playing is a gift and if you ain’t got a little of the gift, I don’t think you’ll get it.”