Curly Wellman had also recommended that I talk with Slim Clere, an Ashland-born fiddler whose telephone number I secured from a friend, Curly Fox. As I told him about my interest in Ed Haley, he was very rigid and formal; he kept referring to me as “sir.” Things loosened up once I mentioned the name Curly Wellman and asked if he had learned anything from watching Ed play.

     “Well, I would say yes that I did,” he said. “He had a style of his own. Now I picked up my backward bowing from him. What he would do, he noted out a lot of stuff. Like he was playing ‘Devil’s Dream’, he bowed it out with a straight slur all the way down. And you didn’t hear him return his bow from one end to the other. Ed was the smoothest violin player. Mostly always long bow, but you never would know it. He never made a bobble and he wasn’t a double-noter. Now, he was not a waltz man. He could play a waltz, though.”

     Slim said Ed had a unique bow hold.

     “What he did when he bowed his violin… You know when you put your finger under the frog on the stick? He gripped the whole thing with his thumb under the whole frog, like you’d do a butcher knife.” As for Ed’s fiddle placement: “He played it right on top of his collar bone there. He let it sit on his wrist.”

     “He was hot stuff,” Slim said. “He didn’t know what a different position was — he just reached up and got it — but he knew where it was. His favorite tune was ‘Blackberry Blossom’ and ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. And there was nobody in the world that could beat him playing ‘Dill Pickle Rag’.”

     Slim remembered playing against Ed in a contest one time at the Paramount Theatre in Ashland during the Depression.

     “Every contest Ed ever got into, he won. They had a contest down there at the Paramount Theatre at Ashland one time — that’s our home. He and I was both born in the same place. There was four or five fiddle players in the contest and they drew numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… They didn’t allow anybody else to play the same tune the guy played before and his heart was set on playing ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. A guy got up and he said, ‘I’m gonna play ‘Cacklin’ Hen’.’ Ed smiled. I told the guy that was playing with me, I said, ‘He’s got a trick up his sleeve.’ He said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘This guy played his tune. When he looks like that, you know that he’s thinking and he’s gonna win.’ And they came around to Ed and said, ‘What’re you gonna play Mr. Haley?’ and he said, ‘I’m gonna play ‘The Speckled Pullet’ and she cackles, too.’ And he played ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ and cackled himself into first place. I thought that was the cutest thing I ever heard in my life.”

     Slim’s memories of Ed were broken up with stories about his own musical career. We knew a lot of the same people. I asked him again about Ed playing in contests — something no one seemed to remember in great detail.

     “Oh yea, he played in contests all the time,” Slim said. “He liked the money. They had them a bunch of theatres in Ashland. They had the Paramount and the Grand and the Capital and they would have contests in county fairs. Then he used to do a lot of barnstorming on courthouse steps. See, by being blind he didn’t have to get permits or anything like that.”

     Slim said he bumped into Ed all over West Virginia.

     “I’ve seen him in Logan, I’ve seen him in Williamson, in Grantsville, seen him in Spencer, in Charleston, Huntington. And he could always smell me when I was around him. He’d say, ‘I smell Slim Clere.’ Everybody had a smell to him and all you had to do was say, ‘How’re you doing, Ed?’ and he knew you by name just right now, see. He was an old trooper. He knew what it was all about. He wasn’t a dummy. He used to come down there to Central Park and I’d go down there and sometimes I’d play his fiddle. He liked to hear other people play because he got his ideas that way.”

     Slim said he wanted to play me some music by Ernie Hodges, an old fiddling teacher who he felt was as good as Ed. I could hear him over the telephone trying to get a tape working in the cassette player — buttons popping, an occasional “dad-burn-it,” etc. As he struggled with the tape, he talked more about some of the people he’d worked with back in his radio days. “Curly Fox, he was with the old school that I was with. McMichen and John Carson and Gid Tanner — all of them. I worked with them down in Georgia. I worked with Bert Layne and Riley Puckett in Gary, Indiana, till they sent for me to come to Atlanta. Ed reminded me so much of Riley.”