28 Friday Mar 2014
Tags
Appalachia, banjo, Calhoun County, culture, Douglas, fiddler, history, John Hicks, Laury Hicks, life, Minnie Hicks, music, photos, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, Willie Smith
John Hicks Home, Douglas, Calhoun County, West Virginia, c.1908
28 Friday Mar 2014
Tags
Alabama, Arthur Smith, Calhoun County, Clayton McMichen, Douglas, Ed Haley, fiddlers, fiddling, Harold Postalwait, history, Ivydale, John Hartford, John Hicks, Johnny Hager, Josh Joplin, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Minnie Hicks, music, Rogersville, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
Early one fall morning, I loaded up the Cadillac and drove south to the home of Harold Postalwait in Rogersville, Alabama. Harold, I knew, had a very special visitor — his mother, 88-year-old Ugee Postalwait of Akron, Ohio. Ugee remembered Ed Haley as far back as the Bull Moose era when he used to visit her father in Calhoun County, West Virginia. I hadn’t seen her since a visit to her home four years earlier and was anxious to pick her brain for new stories or tunes and show her what I had learned about Ed’s fiddling. Not long after my arrival, after we’d all said our “hellos,” Harold pulled out the picture of Laury Hicks and his family at John Hicks’ in Douglas, West Virginia.
“That’s my dad,” Ugee said, pointing to her father’s image. “I can remember when he wore the mustache.”
I wondered if the picture was taken before Ed was acquainted with Laury.
“Dad met Ed before I can remember,” Ugee said. “I don’t know whether that was before Mom and him was married. It was after Grandpap died, they said. Dad musta been about eighteen or something like that. Josh Joplin brought Ed into that country and told him they was a boy down there he wanted him to hear play the fiddle. Said, ‘He thinks he can play but he can’t play,’ and went in and had Dad to tune up his fiddle and played them two pieces. He played ‘Sally Goodin’ and I think it was the ‘Cacklin’ Hen’. Ed said, ‘Boy he’s showin’ me off.’ That was all they was to it. And that old man you know had told him a lie.”
I asked Ugee, “So Ed was coming to Ivydale before you were born?” and she said, “I have an idea he was because I wasn’t quite old enough to go to school when I first remember him. The first time I ever remember seeing him was when him and John Hager was there. I bet he wasn’t over 27 years old, when I think about it. I would say that was — I was born in 1907 — that was about 1913 or something like that. He was tall, slender. I can remember back when I was four years old real good and I remember him just as plain as if it was yesterday. We had a dirt road to the house and when he went to leave in the spring — they stayed all winter — he was walking behind John Hager and me and my brother Harvey run right to the bank and waved by at him. We’d been crying after him. I can see him walking along… But he carried that there fiddle in a flour bag. I never seen Ed with a fiddle in a case till after him and Ella was married. He always carried it in a flour poke.”
I told Ugee that I had worked a lot with Lawrence Haley in his last days trying to find out about Ed’s technique. Before I could show her what I had come up with, she started telling me what she remembered along those lines. She said Ed played with the fiddle under his chin — he hated when musicians “put the fiddle down low” — and turned it occasionally. He held the bow way out on its end, she said, and played a lot smoother than her father, a tremendous concession for a daughter to make. I asked if Ed played smoothly when she first saw him.
“Oh naturally he got better as years went by, but he was good then,” she said.
She gave me the impression that Ed’s fiddling had a lot of Irish-style “ornaments” in his early days (in the older, more European tradition), which gradually disappeared over the years — probably due to artistic peer pressure from radio fiddlers like Arthur Smith and Clayton McMichen. Smith and McMichen were extremely popular during the last few decades of Haley’s life.
12 Wednesday Feb 2014
Tags
Cincinnati, Doc White, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Harts Creek, history, Jeff Duty, Laury Hicks, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
A few days later, I called Ugee Postalwait with a whole bunch of questions, mostly related to my recent trip to Harts. I asked her if Laury Hicks ever went to Harts Creek with Ed.
“Oh, yeah,” she said immediately. “All through them places. Dad had a car and he had a driver, and they’d go a lot of places. Anybody was willing to take Dad any place.”
“Did Doc White ever take them anywhere?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Ugee said. “They’ve all run around together. He was a photographer, he could make teeth, he was a doctor, he was everything — and he learned it all in the penitentiary. He was a mid-wife. He could do anything. Played the fiddle. He was crazy about the railroad. He had a railroad steam engine and all that stuff back of his house. He was a smart man. Even my dad doctored with him.”
Ugee remembered Ed playing a tune called “Getting off the Raft” and figured her father also played it.
“I don’t remember Dad ever playing it but if Ed played it he played it, too,” she said. “Whatever one played, the other’n played. They was just that close together, John. They was just that way.”
I asked if Laury ever talked about a fiddler named Jeff Duty and she said, “Yeah, he talked about a fiddler by that name.”
What about Cain Adkins?
“Adkins. That sounds right.”
“Ought to be some people in Cincinnati to know Ed Haley real well,” Ugee said, kind of changing the direction of our conversation. “Him and Ella went down there and played music a lot. They made some money there. Whenever they’d get close and need some money they would go to Cincinnati and stay maybe for three or four days.”
14 Saturday Dec 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ed Haley, fiddle, fiddling, history, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
After pouring over all of this new information, I called Ugee Postalwait and asked if she could sing me any more of Ed’s songs. I hadn’t been thinking much about Laury Hicks lately and it seemed like a good time to just “check in” on that facet of Ed’s story. It wasn’t long until she was spinning this story that gave me insight into Ed’s ability to take a little melody and make it into a tune.
“One time when I was a little girl, somebody went up or down the road at night a singing, ‘Blue-eyed rabbit went away, the blue-eyed rabbit went to stay. Doodledy-do, doodledy do, doodledy do do doodledy do’,” Ugee said. “So I got up and that’s all I was singing all day long. Ed said, ‘What are you trying to sing?’ I said, ‘I’m a singing ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Dad and him said, ‘Well it’s got a name. What is it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Said, ‘Where’d you hear it?’ I said, ‘I heard it in the night.’ Said, ‘Did you dream it?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t dream it.’ They fooled around with that piece there for weeks trying to play it. When Ed Haley and Dad got done playing that, they had all kinds of runs in that there piece. One’d be a playing it and then the other’n, then they’d bring the different runs in on that song. Someone liked it real well when Ed was a playing it and wanted to know what the name of it was. He said, ‘Well, the one that give me the name of it said it was ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Ed just laughed and would tell Aunt Rosie about him a playing that piece.”
This story was very interesting since I was starting to formulate this improvable theory that Ed first learned to play fiddle tunes by listening to his mother whistle or hum them. As a young widow who had lost her husband in tragic circumstances, she may well have been determined to pass along some of her beloved’s music to little Ed as best as she could. Of course, he may well have begun playing before Milt’s death, even “sneaking” and playing on his fiddle when his father was out working timber. (I’d had a similar experience with an old fiddle in my grandfather’s closet as a boy.)
I asked Ugee if Ed ever talked about where he learned to play and she said, “He told me about somebody leaving an old fiddle laying around when he was a boy. I don’t remember who the man was.” I told her his father had been a fiddler and asked if maybe he’d meant “my old man left an old fiddle laying around” and she said, “Some old man left an old fiddle laying around and I just wonder if it was his dad. And he picked that up and went to see-sawing on it and he said he found out he could play the fiddle. He said that was all he was good for: to play the fiddle. That’s all he studied. I asked him if he went to school to learn to play the fiddle. He said no.”
I just couldn’t shake the image of Ed playing on Milt’s fiddle. If he hadn’t fooled with it before Milt’s death, maybe he picked it up afterwards (“it was just laying around”) and learned to play with his mother’s help. I had these images of Emma whistling or singing Milt’s tunes to him and saying, “Yeah, do that.” “Don’t do that.” I got chills thinking about the way Ed may have began learning tunes and the way I used to ask Lawrence, “Did he do this?” “Did he play this?” Or the way he would say to me, “Pop didn’t do it like that.”
19 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in Ed Haley, Music, Women's History
Tags
Appalachia, Clay County, culture, genealogy, guitar, history, life, Logan County, Nora Martin, photos, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia
Nora (Douglas) Martin, daughter of Rosie Hicks Day, Clay County, WV, 1913-1925
30 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Bob Hutchison, Braxton County, Ed Haley, fiddler, Harold Postalwait, history, Ohio, Ray Alden, Ron Chacey, Ugee Postalwait, Ward Jarvis, West Virginia, writing
By the mid-1990s, after several years of research, word had begun to leak out about my interest in Ed Haley. Around the first of 1995, Bluegrass Unlimited ran a story that prompted Bob Hutchison, a musician from Alledonia, Ohio, to write me.
“I played with an old fella down in Athens county (Ward Jarvis) who had played a lot and learned a lot from Ed Haley,” he wrote. “He played banjo with Ed and learned a lot of his tunes when he was a young man. He said Ed was the best he’d ever seen. Ward was in his 70’s when I got to know him and he was no slouch himself on the fiddle. He said Ed was big on different tunings on the fiddle. I learned the Icy Mountain tune from Ward that he had learned from Ed. Other tunes I remember him crediting Ed with were Camp Chase, Jimmy Johnson, Three forks of Reedy. Banjo Tramp was another of Ed’s. Ward has been dead for several years… Ward was originally from Braxton Co. W.Va.”
Ray Alden offered more information about Jarvis.
“In 1972 I went to Amesville, Ohio to visit instrument craftsman Ron Chacey,” he wrote. “Ron, on a very foggy night, brought me through some hilly back roads up to see Ward Jarvis, who had moved to the area in 1943 from Braxton County, West Virginia. Ward was 78 years old. I remember that special evening in which Ward played many unusual tunes, such as ‘Icy mountain,’ as well as a Kenny Baker Tune he had just learned from a record. It was lucky, since I didn’t have a tape recorder that evening, that Richard Carlin later went to tape Ward Jarvis [in 1976]. Old time musicians Dana Loomis and Grey Larson joined Richard and accompanied Ward at that session. Ward’s source for ‘Banjo Tramp’ was Ed Haley, who had a substantial influence over the Ohio River Valley Musicians in Ward’s younger days.”
Ray Alden’s statement about how Ed influenced a number of “Ohio River Valley Musicians” made me realize that thinking of him as a “Kentucky fiddler” or even a “West Virginia fiddler” was inaccurate. Early on, I’d dismissed the “Kentucky” label used on the Parkersburg Landing album, since he was born and raised in Logan County, West Virginia, and spent a great deal of time in central West Virginia, a hub for great musicians. Also, Lawrence Haley once said that he preferred to think of his father as a West Virginia fiddler because of how he was treated in Ashland. But I had to think, especially after reading Ray Alden’s statement, that it would be best to refer to Haley (in geographical terms) as a middle Ohio River Valley fiddler (or maybe even a Guyandotte-Big Sandy Valley musician) since his sphere of influence wasn’t limited to a single state.
Sometime in the middle of January 1995, I met Ugee Postalwait’s son at one of my shows in Birmingham, Alabama. It was my first encounter with Harold Postalwait, a rather robust man — clean-shaven with a beer gut and decked out in a snap-up shirt, cowboy hat and boots shined to perfection. He showed me Laury Hicks’ fiddle and some old family photographs.
28 Wednesday Aug 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Ashland, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Laury Hicks, Manuel Martin, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
After hanging up with Pat, I called Ugee Postalwait — Laury Hicks’ daughter in Akron, Ohio — to tell her about getting the picture of Ed from Maxine McClain. Ugee was full of energy. Her memory was obviously working in overdrive.
“I used to know all of them,” she said of the old musicians in her part of the country. “They was all to our house. They’d come from miles around to hear Dad play, especially when Ed was in the country. Maybe they’d stay two or three days at our house. I’d get up of a morning to look see who was in the house asleep and who all I was gonna have to cook breakfast for, when I was a girl growing up. The young men would sleep in the boys’ room and they’d sleep in the floor. Then they’d sleep four crossways in the bed, too. As I get old, I get to thinking about all of them and wonder how in the world my dad ever fed them all. I been a cooking ever since I was nine years old for workhands and people like that. One morning — I never will forget I wasn’t very old, then — got up and got breakfast. We’d had cabbage the day before for supper. A big pot of cabbage. And Ed and Ella was there. I never put cabbage on the table for breakfast. Ed looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, what did you do with that cabbage last night?’ I said, ‘It’s in there.’ ‘Well why didn’t you put it on the table for breakfast?’ I said, ‘Well who eats cabbage for breakfast?’ He said, ‘I do.’ Now I never seen anyone eat such a mess of cabbage for breakfast. Him and Ella did. Ella said, ‘Oh, we always eat the same thing we had for supper.’ I never will forget that. From that time on, whatever was left over from supper, I’d warm it up, you know, and fix it for their breakfast ’cause they would eat it. They liked cabbage or kraut.”
Ugee really laughed telling about that, then started in with another tale.
“One time they was some Baileys there and I believe they was some of them McClain boys, and I was peeling tomatoes for supper — you know, slicing them and putting them on the plate — and I had a plate on one end [of the table] and one on the other end. And Manuel Martin was there too, and Commodore Cole. And I looked in both places and them tomatoes was gone. ‘What in the world? Some of them’s come in and hid my tomatoes.’ I looked out and Ed was standing there sitting on the walk — I never will forget — a laughing, and he said, ‘Wait till she finds out.’ I said, ‘Ed did you get them tomatoes in there?’ He said, ‘We ate every one of them.’ I said, ‘If I could find the plate, I’d break it over your head.’ That Commodore Cole, he said, ‘You wouldn’t dare do that.’ Ed said, ‘Don’t dare her too much, Commodore. I know her.’ And they was a eating them tomatoes as fast as I was a peeling them. Them ornery birds, I never will forget that.”
“The last time I ever seen Ed was at his house,” Ugee said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Ugee, can you still make a rhubarb pie?’ I said, ‘Why lord yes, I reckon I can. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, I want a rhubarb pie.’ And I made four and I never seen no such eating as he done that evening, him and Ella, on them rhubarb pies while they was hot — with milk cream over them. I can see them yet. I went down to Ashland, Kentucky. They lived on 45th Street.”
09 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, Frank Santy, French Carpenter, Jenes Cottrell, Laury Hicks, Senate Cottrell, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, Will Jarvis, writing
For the rest of the summer, I was busy on the telephone with Ugee Postalwait, Wilson Douglas and of course Lawrence Haley. I first called Ugee to tell her about peering up at the old Hicks homeplace in Calhoun County with Wilson Douglas. I also wanted to cross-check a lot of what Wilson had told me about Haley’s time in that part of the country with Ugee, who was about 20 years his senior. Together, they represented most of my research on Ed’s life in northcentral West Virginia.
“Well, it was beautiful when I was a growing up,” she said. “All them hills was clean then, but the brush has grown down to the road now. I got to go down last September and visit around. Went up on Coal River and up through there. Places I hadn’t been for 20-some years. My dad’s old home burned down in 1966 or ’67. I owned the place when it was burnt down. Then they came back about a year after that and burnt my garage down at the road. They was a burning houses down there like crazy till I got the law in on them. They even burnt barns with horses in them.”
I’d been re-reading the story in Parkersburg Landing where Haley played at Laury’s grave in 1937 (and had heard Wilson’s version), so I asked Ugee if she remembered who came there with him.
“Ed and Ella and the kids,” she said, contradicting what Wilson Douglas had said about Bernard Postalwait being there. “Well, let’s see, now. Ralph wasn’t with them. Noah and Clyde and Lawrence and the girl and I believe Jackie might’ve come with him, too.”
And what happened at the grave?
“Oh, he didn’t stay out there very long,” she said. “He played some fiddling tunes and he played some songs that he wanted. ‘Sally Goodin’ and things — old songs they liked. You know, fiddling pieces. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, and something like that. He didn’t play very many up there. He was tore up pretty bad over that, he really was. Him and Ella both. They thought an awful lot of my dad, and Mom and Dad thought an awful lot of them, too. It was a very sad occasion when they got there that evening, I can tell you that, for all of us.”
After Laury’s death, Ed and Ella made other trips to Calhoun County.
“They was back the next summer,” Ugee said. “I lived up at what they call Stinson up above there. I’d moved over there. They played music on the hill where I held a Sunday school. A Hardshell Baptist Church. I was the first one ever had Sunday School there and it was called the Metheny Church. The first year that I had Sunday School, they wasn’t there — they went somewhere else, I think, playing music — but he come to that Sunday School for my Children’s Day, him and Ella. You oughta seen that hill when they found out Ed and Ella was a gonna be there. They come from the head of Walker and every place around.”
I told Ugee what Wilson Douglas had said about Ed always requesting a certain banjo-picker at Laury’s named Chennison.
“Cottrells,” she said immediately. “Jenes Cottrell, the younger one, he was from over around Rosedale and he was a good banjo-picker. He made his banjos out of drums. Old Senator Cottrell, I knowed him, too. They was all good musicians. Will Jarvis, he had a thumb off at the first joint and he was a good banjo-picker, too.”
What about French Carpenter?
“Yeah, I knowed about French Carpenter. He lived over towards — oh, I expect about fifteen miles. Maybe more than that. And there was another one too named Frank Santy. They both played the fiddle. Frank was a left-handed fiddle player. I used to know about every thing that went in that country — them old people playing music — ’cause they always come to Dad’s and sit on that porch and played music. And if Ed was in the country they’d just come from miles around to hear Dad and him play. I hate to say this, but Nashville down there ought to have some of the players that’s been in that country.”
I told Ugee a little bit about learning that Ed may have had a sister and brother named Josie Cline and Mont Spaulding in the Tug Valley.
“I don’t know of Ed a having any brother,” she said, “but it’s just like a dream that I heard him say something about having a sister. I believe he did say he had a sister.”
Ugee could tell I had been fishing for new details in Ed’s background.
“Ed wasn’t blind when he was born,” she said. “Neither was Ella. She got sore eyes, Ella did, when she was a baby. And the old people washed their eyes with blue vitteral and that ate her eyeballs out. Ed, he had the measles that put him blind when he was a baby.”
Just before we hung up, I mentioned that Ed supposedly learned some of French Carpenter’s tunes.
“Well, I don’t think he got that many tunes from him,” Ugee said. “I have an idea he got more tunes from Ed than Ed ever got from him, if you want to know the truth about it. But you know, when Ed went back through the country — the only way they got out of that country was going to Ivydale and catch a train and they’d walk and go and maybe they’d stay a night or two a going, so they might’ve stayed over at French Carpenter’s and might’ve got some music.”
I guess French’s house was on the way to the station.
09 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Arthur Smith, Clark Kessinger, Ed Haley, fiddler, French Carpenter, history, John Hartford, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, Wilson Douglas, writing
Wilson well remembered Ed “rocking” the fiddle as he played.
“His violin rocked continuously on his chest,” he said. “I mean it rocked like a rocking chair. That’s the only fiddler I ever seen do that. He told me one time, he said, ‘Wilson, I don’t play the ‘Mockingbird’. It’s a hard matter to play the ‘Mockingbird’ unless the violin is placed under your chin.’ He really commended Arthur Smith on the ‘Mockingbird’ and Clark Kessinger, but he didn’t play the ‘Mockingbird’ at all. I’m sure he could’ve. He could play anything. I’ll put it this way, sir. I know a lot of great fiddle players. Well, I’ve seen French Carpenter — he was good — and Clark Kessinger was good but I think Haley was one of the greatest as far as I’m concerned. He was a legend in this country and in any country that knew about him.”
I asked Wilson about Ed’s fingers, like whether they came up off the fingerboard very high when he was fiddling.
“John, I’m gonna tell you like it is,” he said. “You could hardly tell the man was changing notes. His fingers practically stayed on the fingerboard and they moved like worms. Now that’s it in a nutshell. And his fingers was about as big around as a writing pencil. He had fingers more like some lady typist, you know what I mean. But I could understand: he never did any work to build his hands up other than play that fiddle. And he told me once — somebody had made the remark about not being able to note with your little finger, you know — Ed said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you gotta do to play the fiddle. You got to use all four of them and use your thumb, too, if you can.’ He had a sense of humor in a way, you know. And he said, ‘Son, get some soul out of your fiddle. Don’t play it to just hear the wind blow.'”
I asked Wilson if he remembered the names of Ed’s tunes.
“He played a tune he called ‘Harry in the Wildwood’,” he said. “Carpenter played it and I used to play it, but danged if I ain’t forgot it. It was a good tune. And then he played a tune he called the ‘Silver Lake’. It was on the bass. It was a four-string tune. God, he pulled a note on that bass that was out of this world. The more bass, the better he liked it.”
Wilson didn’t remember Ed singing much.
The only song he sung was “Frankie and Johnny”, which I had heard from Ugee Postalwait some time earlier. “Oh yeah,” Wilson added. “He called it ‘Old Billy Lyons’.” Unlike Ugee, who stressed Ed’s singing, Wilson emphasized Ed’s fiddling. “He had a beautiful voice,” Wilson said, “but he liked to concentrate on them hoedowns. He and Clark Kessinger would play that ‘Dunbar’ and he said, ‘Now, I’ll tell you Wilson. Clark plays that well, but they’s a little bit of bow work in there that he never did get, but I never would mention it to him.’ But he commended Clark constantly. I heard him say several times, ‘They’s very few men, maybe three out of a hundred, can play that fast and get clear notes.’ He liked Clark. He also liked Arthur Smith — some of Arthur’s tunes.”
I told Wilson that Haley supposedly hated Arthur Smith and he said, “Well, he said he didn’t know all that many tunes, but what he knew he was real unique at it, you know.”
I tried to jar more of Wilson’s memories of Ed’s repertoire by naming off some of the titles from Haley’s home recordings. He had some great comments.
“Oh God, that ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’, he was good on that. But now that ‘Three Forks of Sandy’, they’s another tune related to that. I used to play it a little bit. He called it the ‘Three Forks of Reedy’. That’s a creek over here in Calhoun County. It empties into the Little Kanawha River. That tune is as old as the hills.”
When I mentioned “Hell Among the Yearlings”, Wilson said, “Oh God, he had the world beat on that.”
As for “Blackberry Blossom”:
“Well, he was awful good on the ‘Blackberry’. Well, to tell you the truth, they wasn’t nothing he was bad on. That’s the whole bottom line. Everything he played was good.”
I asked Wilson if he remembered what key Ed played a lot of his tunes in and he said, “Well, he played a lot of tunes in the key of C, like ‘West Virginia Birdie’ and the ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and ‘Callahan’. And he didn’t play much in the key of E. Very little in the key of E. Ed’s main key was G, C and D and A. However he could play in E-minor or he could play in A-sharp, or any of the sharps that he wanted to, but he stuck pretty close to the regular standard mountain music key.”
How about B-flat?
“Oh god, yeah. Like ‘Hey Old Man’ and the ‘Lost Indian’. Stuff like that. Oh yeah, he played a tune in B-flat, he called it ‘Boot Hill’. And he said the tune came from out West back in the old days. Somewhere back in the 18 and 80s.”
Wilson said he couldn’t play those tunes anymore.
“It’s been so long. I can remember a few tunes, but yet I can’t get them together anymore. I quit for about seventeen years.”
04 Saturday May 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Clay County, Georgia Slim Rutland, Gilmer County, history, James Shaver, Lawrence Haley, music, Parkersburg, Russell Shaver, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
That evening, I called Lawrence to tell him about speaking with the Holbrooks. When I mentioned them having one of Ed’s records, he reminded me about Ugee Postalwait’s half-brother Russell Shaver, who supposedly had others. Russell died several years ago, but his only grandson James Shaver lived in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
I got his number from directory assistance, then dialed him up. As soon as I mentioned Ed’s name and the records, James said, “He played the violin, right? Well, I remember hearing the record when I was a kid. I’m 41 and I was just a young kid — my grandfather raised me — and I remember listening to the record of Ed Haley playing the violin. I don’t know if it’s still around or not. I’d have to search the house and find out. Ed Haley, he was blind. I remember my grandfather talking about him. He used to come over to their house. I’m trying to think where my grandfather lived in the thirties. They lived up in Gilmer County or Clay County, the central part of West Virginia.”
James promised to try and locate the record.
The next day, I called Georgia Slim Rutland’s widow in Valdosta, Georgia to see if she knew anything about Slim staying with Ed in Ashland around 1938. Mrs. Rutland very emphatically said, “No, huh-uh, no. That’s not true, ’cause Slim was just in Ashland about a week. That’s all. He was there performing for about a week and that was it. He didn’t live there.” I told Mrs. Rutland that several people had told me he was enamored of Ed’s playing, as was Clark Kessinger, and she said, “Now, I’ve heard him speak of Clark Kessinger, yes. Lots of times. But now, I’ve never heard him mention a blind fiddle player. I’m sorry.”
04 Monday Mar 2013
Tags
Appalachia, banjo, Big Rock Candy Mountain, bowing, Calhoun County Blues, Carroll County Blues, Ed Haley, fiddler, fiddling, Ghost Riders in the Sky, Hell Among the Yearlings, history, John Hartford, Mona Haley, music, Pretty Polly, Soutwood Mountain, Sweet Betsy from Pike, Ugee Postalwait
Talking about Ed’s records caused me to ask Mona about his technique and tunes. She said her father was a long bower – that he used “one end of the bow to the other,” except on songs requiring short, quick strokes. Interestingly, she had no recollection of him ever “rocking” the fiddle while playing (as is so fondly remembered by some eyewitnesses) and said he patted his foot softly in half-time (never picking up his whole foot and stomping). He didn’t keep a chin rest on his fiddle because “it got in his way.”
Mona said Ed knew “millions” of pieces, including “Hell Among the Yearlings” (her favorite), “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Sourwood Mountain”. She recognized “Carroll County Blues” (what Ugee Postalwait called “Calhoun County Blues”) as a Haley tune when I played it for her. She said Ed played “Pretty Polly” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike” drop-thumb style on the banjo (no fingerpicks). He loved “Ghost Riders in the Sky” — which he never could learn — and would say of the tune, “Lord god almighty, would you listen to that?” When Ed thought about or heard a tune he liked, Mona said he would pat his hands together.
30 Wednesday Jan 2013
Posted in Big Sandy Valley, Ed Haley, Huntington, Music, Pikeville, Williamson
Tags
Appalachia, Beaver Creek, Big Sandy River, Bill Necessary, Carter Caves State Park, Curly Wellman, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddler, fiddling, Floyd County, Fraley Family Festival, Grayson, history, Huntington, J P Fraley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Levisa Fork, Lynn Davis, Mingo County, Molly O Day, Molly O'Day, Mona Hager, music, Nashville, Paintsville, Prestonsburg, Snake Chapman, Tug Fork, U.S. South, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, Williamson, writers, writing
A few months later, I met Lawrence Haley at the Fraley Family Festival at Carter Caves State Park near Grayson, Kentucky. Lawrence and I spoke with Bill Necessary, a musician who saw Ed and Ella all over the Big Sandy Valley when he was about twenty years old. He said they rode a train up Levisa Fork to Paintsville, the seat of government for Johnson County, where they spent the day playing music at the courthouse. From there, they continued by train to Prestonsburg, county seat of Floyd County. At times, they went into the nearby coal camps of Beaver Creek and played at theatres. From Prestonsburg, they took the train to Pikeville, the county seat of Pike County, and then continued over to the Tug River around Williamson, county seat of Mingo County, West Virginia.
“Aw, they took in the whole dern country up through there,” Bill said. “By the time they made that circuit, why it’d be time for them to come again. I guess they’d tour a couple of weeks. By God, I just followed them around, son.”
Lawrence didn’t remember going to all of those places with Ed but did remember staying with Molly O’Day’s family around Williamson. Bill said Molly’s widow Lynn Davis was still living around Huntington, West Virginia.
Bill said Ed always wore a long overcoat — “rain or shine” — and even played in it. He never sang or entered contests.
“He was pretty up to date on music at that time,” Bill said. “His notes were real clear, boy.”
Back in Nashville, I worked really hard trying to figure out Ed’s bowing. There was a lot of contradictory information to consider. Snake Chapman said he bowed short strokes, indicating a lot of sawstrokes and pronounced note separation. J.P. Fraley, Slim Clere, Lawrence and Mona said that he favored the long bow approach and only used short strokes when necessary, like for hoedowns. Preacher Gore, Ugee Postalwait and Curly Wellman spoke about how smooth his fiddling was, which kind of hinted at him being a long bow fiddler. All were probably accurate in some respect. It seemed plain to me that one reason why there were so many contrasting and sometimes completely opposite accounts of how or even what Ed played was that everyone I’d talked to witnessed him playing at different times and places during his musical evolution. All along the way, he was experimenting, looking for that “right combination” or playing the style needed to create the sounds popular in a certain area. Even what I could actually hear on his home recordings was really just a glimpse into the world of his fiddling as it existed at that moment toward the end of his lifetime.
13 Sunday Jan 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, banjo, Billy in the Lowground, Blackberry Blossom, blind, Cacklin Hen, Catlettsburg, Clark Kessinger, Clayton McMichen, culture, Curly Wellman, Curt Polton, Ed Haley, Elvis Presley, fiddler, Floyd Collins, Forked Deer, Grand Ole Opry, guitar, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, history, Horse Branch, Huntington, Ivan Tribe, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Logan County, Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, Morehead, Mountain Melody Boys, Mountaineer Jamboree, music, National Fiddling Association, Old Sledge, Poplar Bluff, Rowan County Crew, Ugee Postalwait, Ward Hollow, WCHS, WCMT, Westphalia Waltz, writing, WSAZ
I asked Curly if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “Ah, I remember ‘Forked Deer’ and I remember ‘Billy in the Lowground’ and I remember the ‘Old Sledge’ and I remember ‘Poplar Bluff.’ ‘Blackberry Blossom.’ The longer he played a tune, the meaner he got on it. If he got the feel, it hit him. And the more he played the better he got and the more tunes come to him. He played one waltz — ‘Westphalia Waltz’ — and that’s really the only waltz that I can recall that he played. And it was all double stop fiddle.”
Curly never heard Ed sing a note — a very surprising recollection considering the way that Ugee Postalwait had hyped Haley’s singing abilities.
“I got a copy of a song from him,” Curly said. “He had somebody to write it down. Because at this time, out at Morehead, Kentucky, they had a feud out there. And they had a shoot-out there on the steps and then somebody wrote this song called ‘Rowan County Crew.’ And Ed, they tell me, would sing that at different places throughout Kentucky. At that time, it was like Floyd Collins that was in the cave and like the Hatfields and the McCoys — only this was called the ‘Rowan County Crew.’ Well, at that time it was hot as a pistol through the state. Now evidently he sang that song, but he never sang it for me.”
Curly said, “Ed could have been as great as the Blue Yodeler or any of those people. He could have been right on those records with them but under no reason did he want to record commercially. Had he been living today and with the equipment they’ve got today, he would’ve been in more demand than Elvis Presley ever was. Nobody played ‘Cacklin’ Hen’ like him. And a very humble man. I never heard Ed down anybody else, I never heard him put anybody below him and I never had him to tell me how good he was. In fact, I wonder sometimes if he knew how good he was. But I knew it. He was a brilliant man. He’d just about keep a check up on everything during his lifetime. He knew the news, he knew the political field, he knew what was going on in the state.”
I asked Curly about the first time he ever saw Haley play.
“I played with Ed when I was a kid — twelve, thirteen years old — and we lived at a place called Horse Branch. That’s as you enter Catlettsburg, Kentucky. And I was a kid carrying an old flat-top guitar — no case — trying to learn how to play. In the evening, he’d come out on the front porch after dinner and Ralph would get the guitar and the mother would get the mandolin and the neighborhood would gather because at that time radio was just coming into being. And I’d go down there and sit and bang while they were playing. And that’s where I first heard Ed Haley.”
Curly lost track of Ed when he started playing music out on his own at the age of fifteen. Throughout the mid-thirties, he played over the radio on Huntington’s WSAZ and Ashland’s WCMT with the “Mountain Melody Boys,” then made several appearances on the Grand Ole Opry and Knoxville’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round with Curt Polton’s band. It was during that time, he said, around 1936, that Ed got into a contest with Clark Kessinger and Clayton McMichen at the WCHS radio station in Charleston. Clayton was the National Fiddling Champion, while Clark was the National Fiddling Association’s champion of the East. The whole thing was “built up for months — it was a showdown.” In the contest, each fiddler got to play two tunes and someone named Banjo Murphy seconded every one using a three-finger picking style on a four-string banjo. First prize was a “live baby” (a little pig) and the winner was determined by a clapping meter. Curly wasn’t sure what tunes Ed played (probably “Cacklin’ Hen,” his contest specialty) but remembered the results clearly.
“Ed Haley beat the two men on stage,” he said. “McMichen was out of it in a little bit but it took several rounds to eliminate Clark Kessinger.”
Curly returned to Ashland in the early forties and found Ed living in the bottom of a weather-boarded, two-story apartment building on 37th Street (Ward Hollow). He started visiting Haley again, usually on cold days when he knew that he’d be close to home. He’d put his D-18 flat-top Martin guitar in the trunk of his car and “go pick up a pint or a half a pint of moonshine,” then head on over to Ed’s house.
I’d go in. I wouldn’t take the guitar in at all. I’d just knock on the door and go in and I’d say, “Hi, Uncle Ed.” “Hi, Curly.” He knew me by my voice. And I’d go in and sit down, you know, and say, “How’s the weather?” and “How’s things?” and “How’s the family?” and so forth and so on. We’d sit around there and talk a little bit. I’d say, “Ed, been playing any lately?” “No, I haven’t felt like it. I just haven’t felt like it.” I’d say, “Well, how about a little nip? You think that would help?” “Well now you know you might have something there.” So I’d go on to the car and I’d get the bottle and come in and we’d sit back down and I’d pass it to him. He’d hit it. He’d sit right there a little bit you know and I’d say, “Take another little nip, Ed.” “Well, I believe I will,” he’d say. “It’s too wet to plow.” And he’d sit there and he’d rock a little bit in that chair and… Being blind, he talked a little loud. “Hey, did I ever play that ‘Old Sledge’ for you?” I’d say, “Well, I can’t remember Ed. Just can’t remember.” Well, he’d get up and he’d go over and he’d lay his hand right on that fiddle laying on the mantle of the fireplace. By that time I’d be out the door and getting the Martin. I’d come back in and he’d tune ‘er up there and feel her across you know and touch her a little bit here and there. He’d take off on it.
Curly and I got our instruments out and played a few of Haley’s tunes. He showed me the type of runs he used to play behind Ed and gave me a few more tips about his fiddling. He said Ed was “all fingers…so smooth” and could play all over the fingerboard — even in second and third positions. He “put a lot of his upper body into the fiddling” and patted one foot to keep time. If he fiddled for a long time, he put a handkerchief under his chin for comfort (never a chinrest) and dropped the fiddle down to his arm and played with a collapsed wrist.
Just before Lawrence and I left, Curly said, “I’ll tell you somebody that’s still living in Charleston and he’s a hell of a fiddle player — or was. They called him Slim Clere. He’s about 82. He knew Ed. In fact, he was the man that Clere looked up to as he was learning. And he could probably give you more information than I could because he’s followed the fiddle all of his life.”
Curly also recommended Mountaineer Jamboree (1984), a book written by Ivan Tribe that attemped to detail West Virginia’s contributions to country music. It briefly mentioned Ed: “Blind Ed Haley (1883-1954), a legendary Logan County fiddler who eventually settled in Ashland, Kentucky, repeatedly refused to record, but did belatedly cut some home discs for his children in 1946.”
29 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Doc Holbrook, Ed Haley, fiddle, history, J P Fraley, John Hartford, Kentucky, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, Maysville, music, Sherman Luther Haley, Ugee Postalwait, Wilson Douglas, writing
I met Lawrence a few weeks later at the Fraley Family Festival near Grayson, Kentucky. He gave me Ed’s newly located bridge and I showed him Ed’s fiddle — pointing out all of the things I had discovered about it. I specifically pointed out a “V-shape” pattern worn into the varnish on its back toward its bottom. At its top were what appeared to be “sweat marks” where Ed rotated the fiddle and slid his fingers up to get notes in second and third position (which contradicted what Snake Chapman had said about him rarely getting out of first position except when, every once in a while a finger would sneak and grab a note or two from the upper positions). As we talked about such things, J.P. Fraley showed up along with Nancy McClellan, a local folklorist.
After some small talk, I played “Half Past Four” for Lawrence on his dad’s fiddle.
“Where he got a name like that, I don’t know,” he said. “I think, though, it was possibly when my oldest brother Sherman Luther Haley was born. My mother went into labor about 4:30 in the morning. He was named after one of Mom’s brothers. It was the one that died.”
I said, “Now, I’m not totally used to these Black Diamond strings and I’m not playing it note for note the way Ed did. I’m just scratching the surface.”
Lawrence said, “I know. Them old records are hard to hear.”
“There is so much on them records you wouldn’t believe what’s in there,” I said. “Just all kinds of little things. Like his notes, he gets certain long notes and they’re like words. Some of them are moans. And he uses certain little tones.”
Lawrence said, “I notice a lot of you guys, it looks like it’s really hard work for you to do this. Pop never had a bit of trouble playing a fiddle. It wasn’t work to him. If he enjoyed the group he was with, you could absolutely hear it in his music. If he had good accompaniment, he’d stay all day.”
“I’m also curious about that bridge because I think he might have played with a little bit lower action than what I’ve got here,” I said.
Lawrence said, “Yeah, a little bit lower. You could look at that bridge I brought you.”
I said, “Yeah, I’ve already had it on and looked at it. The thing that’s interesting about that is if you look at that bridge, that bridge has been handled a lot because he would feel of it and that’s why all that finger grease is on it. I can just see him. What I may do, I may try that on but what I might do is carve a duplicate of that because sometimes when they get old, they’ll crack.”
Nancy McClellan asked Lawrence, “Were there other fiddlers in the family?” and he said, “No, I couldn’t play. I was left-handed and when I was a little tiny fella I nicked the whole end of this finger off and I didn’t have any meat on the end of it and that hindered me from picking a violin, see. I couldn’t work up a callus on it. Bone’s right underneath it.”
You know, I’d never really thought much about that — the fact none of the Haley children played the fiddle. Ralph, of course, was a guitar player — but he wasn’t actually Ed’s son. It was only natural that the kids — no matter how intense their exposure or no matter their possible distaste — would at some point pick up a fiddle and at least try it. This had been Lawrence’s confession — and his reason for not carrying it any further.
J.P. played a little on Ed’s fiddle and commented on the Black Diamond strings. “Have these strings been on there all that time?”
“No,” I said.
“Where’d you find them?”
I said, “I’ve got a friend that used to carry them and he had a couple of sets and he gave them to me.”
J.P. said, “I can remember when they was a quarter. Wonder what those fiddlers would have done if they’d had access to the strings and stuff that we can get now?”
There was a little pause then J.P. said, “Remember I was telling you about a tune called ‘Maysville’? It had to do with Maysville, Kentucky. I don’t know where the people in Elliott County learned it. They was a tobacco house down there and those people had to wagon tobacco from back in Elliott County plumb to Maysville to sell it.”
Lawrence said, “Pop played a lot of pieces named after…”
J.P. interrupted, “Now he played ‘Maysville’.”
Lawrence continued, “He played a piece of music that I really liked that he called ‘Catlettsburg’.”
Lawrence said to J.P., who still held Ed’s fiddle, “That isn’t as fine a fiddle as you played that used to belong to my dad that the Holbrooks got.”
J.P. said, “Paul’s got it. Well, what he done… That’s a good fiddle, too. He let me have it. I told him if he ever wanted it back… It was in the awfulest shape that ever was. But I had it fixed up. Not embellished now. Just restored. And suddenly Dr. Holbrook’s daughter was gonna take violin lessons. They took it. There’s something else he told me. See, I didn’t know the old Dr. Holbrook…”
Lawrence said, “He’s the one delivered me.”
J.P. said, “His son Paul — our doctor — told me that old man Holbrook went to fiddling, too. Well, Paul said that he supposedly took Ed and Ella to Columbus to do a record.”
Lawrence said, “That was that ‘Over the Waves’, I think. Big aluminum record.”
J.P. said, “It was the closest thing to a commercial record that Ed ever made.”
Lawrence spoke some about his father’s travels.
“Pop didn’t get all the way down into Old Virginia, I don’t think. He made it to Beckley and Bluefield and places like that. I can remember walking from Morehead to Farmers right down the railroad track. They went down there to somebody’s house to play — I was just a kid then — and seemed to me like they played all night.”
Nancy McClellan said, “Well, that’s what Wilson Douglas said happened up there in Calhoun County, West Virginia. He said a fiddler named Laury Hicks would ask for ‘The Black-Eyed Susan’ and said Laury Hicks would sit there and cry while Ed Haley played.”
I told about my recent visit with Laury’s daughter Ugee Postalwait and Lawrence said, “When Pop come around and they was playing, she’d get fiddle sticks and she’d just clog around Pop’s fiddle and every time he’d note it she beat the sticks on that. Dance right around him.”
26 Wednesday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, blind, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, music, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
The next thing I knew, Ugee was up at the stove cooking a big meal and singing “Maggie and Albert” — Haley’s version of “Frankie and Johnny”. When she was finished, she said, “Now that’s some old songs. Ed played them and when he played them, you’d be glad to sit and listen to them, too. And he patted his foot.”
During dinner, Ugee told me about her own musical experience.
“I started off on the five-string banjo then graduated myself to the guitar,” she said. “The first guitar that I ever seen, Howard Alexander brought it in the country. He’d been over to his mother-in-law’s around Rosedale and when he come back he brought a guitar. Howard didn’t play the guitar or banjo either. He come down and said, ‘Ugee, I brought you something. A guitar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I never tuned one of them things.’ I suppose I’d been playing the banjo about three or four years. Dad said, ‘Well, you tune the banjo. Go ahead and tune it up there.’ Howard said, ‘Aw, just keep it as long as you want to. I’m in no hurry fer it.’ He’d traded something for it. I forget what it was. I went to fooling with that guitar, you know, picking around with it, this that and another, running a knife down it. Well, I tuned it up like a banjo. First thing you know I found me a chord, and then Dad come in with a mandolin.”
“We went to play music around at the schoolhouse and places like that for pie suppers and cake walks,” Ugee said of herself and her father. “My dad thought there wasn’t nobody in the world like me. Nobody could do like I could. We went to a place and played for a schoolhouse and the teacher down there… He was a Glenville graduate — you know, went to college and everything — thought he knew it all. He said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. So Dad played it for him. Just as soon as he got done playing it, he said, ‘Mr. Hicks, play ‘Soldiers Joy’. Dad played it for him again. I think he played it about five times. By that time, Dad was getting tired of it. And he come there and said, ‘Mr. Hicks would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’? Dad said, ‘Hell, I’ve played it for you five times and you didn’t know it when you heard it.’ Made Dad mad. Every once in a while, me and Dad’d be a sitting playing, practicing, you know, and I’d look over, I’d say, ‘Dad, would you please play ‘Soldiers Joy’?’ He said, ‘I’ll mash you in the mouth.'”
Ugee said, “One time, a teacher taught at our school and he made me mad the way he treated me in school. He was having a doing going on at his school and Dad said, ‘I’m supposed to play at the White Oak School.’ And I went to the White Oak School. Well, me and Dad went over and I decided I wasn’t gonna play any music. When I sat down, the teacher said, ‘Oh, I’m so proud you come to play, Ugee,’ and just going on. I just reached down with my finger on that guitar and I broke that string. Dad reached down in his pocket and pulled out another one and said, ‘Now put that on and don’t you do that again, either.’ I never will forget it as long as I live. Jasper McCune was playing the five-string banjo. He was Dad’s first cousin. He said, ‘Why don’t you do that again, Ugee? Laury’ll slap your ears, too.'”
After supper, I asked Ugee what she knew about Ed’s blindness.
“They said Ed went blind when he was three or four years old. He had the measles. Well, he was sick and had a high fever. I don’t know whether you ever knowed it or not but the gypsies used to come around in the country and he had a high fever and they told his dad and them to take him down to the creek and throw him in the cold water and that would break the fever on him and he’d never have a fever again. And that’s what he done and it put him blind. But you know measles will put you blind because I almost went blind too when I had the measles. I was about twelve years old. And that’s what Ed said that put him blind. I asked him, I said, ‘Was you born blind?’ He wasn’t.”
Ugee said Ed occasionally talked about his father — a growing source of interest for me — although she didn’t remember much about it.
“I think his dad was a pretty mean man, the way he talked. And the way I understood him to say his mother got killed by some of them Hatfields and McCoys or some of them when that feud was going on. But I believe he said his dad was a pretty mean man. I don’t know what he meant by that. I never did hear what happened to his dad. I never heard him say about that. I believe he said he was raised by a aunt.”
I told Ugee about Lawrence and I going to Harts Creek and she said, “Lawrence, he was little all the way around. He thought an awful lot of his dad and mother. Larry’s the only one that turned out real good. Noah, he gambles and I don’t know what all. And Clyde, he’s been in a little bit of everything. Mona’s been the same way. Poor old Larry, he’s looked after all of them. He don’t care whether he hears from them or not because every time he hears from them it’s money or have to help them out or get them out of something. Jack died. Jack was a nice looking man, too. He was taller than Lawrence. He was a nice boy like Larry.”
I asked Ugee if she thought maybe some of Ed’s kids took after his father Milt, who she called “a pretty bad feller.” She said, “I have an idea they did. And I heard Ed say one time that Ella had some awful mean people on her side. He said Noah was turned just exactly like his mother’s people. They was a lot of mean people down there in Kentucky. Lot of murdering and lot of killing.”
25 Tuesday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Black Sheep, Blackberry Blossom, Buttermilk Mountain, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddling, Fire on the Mountain, Florene, Harvey Hicks, history, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, McKinley, music, Old Zed Tanner, Parkersburg Landing, Pat Malone, Stacker Lee, Sweet Florena, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
I reached Ugee my Parkersburg Landing album, hoping it might rekindle the names of more Haley tunes.
“Ed had a habit of changing the name if he was in a different town,” she said. “Now just like this ‘Parkersburg Landing’, that’s another song that he always played.”
Ugee remembered Haley’s singing ability more than his fiddling.
“He had a beautiful voice,” she said. “It’d bring tears to anybody’s eyes. He could sing low, he could sing high. He sang ‘Stacker Lee’ and he didn’t lay his fiddle down when he sung. He played his own music and sang at the same time. I never heard nothing like him and I’ve heard a lot of them, Mr. Hartford, because they used to come to my dad’s house. Anybody come in anyplace close, they’d come to our place. They didn’t stay all night — they stayed a week or month. Banjos, guitars, whoever played music come to my dad’s. They wasn’t nobody in the world loved it any better than he did.”
Ugee went through some other tunes — like “McKinley” and “Old Zed Tanner” — but only remembered pieces of them. There was also “Fire on the Mountain” and “Buttermilk Mountain”.
Going on Buttermilk Mountain to see my old girlfriend again.
When I come out, there’ll be no Buttermilk girlfriend to meet me again.
When I come back, I’ll bring my girl from old Buttermilk Mountain.
I’m a goin’ away, I’m a goin’ to stay, I’m a goin’ to Buttermilk Mountain.
“Ella didn’t like that song,” Ugee said. “She’d say, ‘I hate that song. I don’t want to hear that old thing.’ She thought it was some girl Ed used to go with that he was talking about. Harvey my brother would get around and have Ed to sing it.”
Ugee said Harvey would come around with whisky and get Ed to play what he wanted, usually songs that made Ella jealous, like “Florene”.
I’m leavin’ you sweet Florena.
I’m leavin’ you sweet Florene.
I’m goin’ away, I’m goin’ to stay.
I’m a leavin’ you sweet Florene.
Oncest I bought your clothes sweet Florena.
Oncest I bought your clothes sweet Florene.
Oncest I bought your clothes
But now I ain’t got no dough
Now I have to travel on, sweet Florene.
Down in the pen sweet Florena.
I’m down in the pen sweet Florene.
I’m down in the pen, but for you I’d go again
I’m a leavin’ you sweet Florene.
“Harvey was a good man but he’d slip Ed a little shot of whiskey,” Ugee said. “He’d say, ‘Ed, it’s about time for you to have a little drink of water, ain’t it?’ Oh, it wouldn’t be but about a few minutes till old Ed was playing like crazy. You give him a shot and boy you oughta heard him. Then he’d say, ‘Ed, I’d like to hear that old Florene song.’ Ella would shake her head — ‘I don’t like that song. That’s about some of his old women that he used to run around with probably.’ And that’s all she’d say about it, but she’d shut her eyes tight and shake her head.”
She remembered Ed playing ‘Blackberry Blossom’ but couldn’t quite remember the story behind it.
“And then there was a song called ‘Pat Malone’,” she said. “Did you ever hear that song?”
Before I could answer, she started singing:
Times are hard in an Irish town. Everything was a going down
And Pat Malone was short for any cash.
He for life insurance spent all his money to a cent
And the most of his affairs had gone to smash.
Pat’s wife spoke up and said, “Oh dear Pat, if you were dead
There’s twenty thousand dollars we could get.”
So old Pat laid down and tried to make out that he had died
Until he smelt the whiskey at the wake.
Then Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.
Oh, he raised right up and shouted from his bed.
“If the wake goes on a minute, the corpse’ll sure be in it.
You gotta get me drunk to keep me dead.”
So they gave the corpse a sup.
After they had filled him up
And they laid him back upon his bunk again.
Then before the break of day everybody felt so gay
That they all forgot that he was dead.
So they took him from his bunk, still alive but he’s awful drunk.
And they laid him in his coffin with a prayer.
Then the driver swore by dad that he’d never start ahead
Until he seen that someone paid the fare.
And Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.
He raised right up in the coffin and he said,
“If you dare to doubt my credit, you’ll be sorry that you said it.
Drive on or this corpse will smash your head.”
So the driver started out on the cemetery route
And the people tried that widow to console.
Then near the churchyard lot, Pat Malone’s last resting spot,
They begin to lower the dummy in the hole.
When the clods begin to drop, Pat burst off the coffin top
And quickly to the earth he did ascend.
Then Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.
He quickly from that cemetery fled.
Pat come near a goin’ under, what a lucky thing by thunder,
Old Pat Malone forgot that he was dead.
I was blown away. I said to Ugee, “That’s great! Where in the world did that come from?”
“Oh,” she said, “that was from back in the hills there. That’s an old song. Just like that ‘Black Sheep’ song. You ought to have heard Ed play that.”
In a quiet country town not so very far away
Lived a rich and aging man whose hair was silvery gray.
He had three sons, his only ones, Jack and Tom were sly.
Ted was as honest as he could be and he would not tell a lie.
They both began to ruin him within the old man’s eyes.
Then the poison began its work and Ted was most despised.
One day the father said to him, “Be gone ye to the poor,”
And these words the Black Sheep said while standing in the door:
“Don’t be angry with me Dad. Don’t turn me from your door.
I know that I’ve been a worry, but I’ll worry you no more.”
Give to me one other chance and put to me the test
And you’ll find the Black Sheep loves you Dad far better than the rest.”
Year by year passed by and the father he grew old.
He called in both Jack and Tom and he gave to them his gold.
“All I want is a little room, just a place by your fireside.”
Jack returning home one night and he brought with him a bride.
The bride begin to hate the father more and more each day
Until one night she declared, “That old fool is in our way.”
They decided to send him to the poor house which was near.
And like a flash that Black Sheep’s words went ringing in his ear:
“Don’t be angry with me Dad. Don’t turn me from your door.
You know that I’ve been a worry worry, but I’ll worry you no more.
Give to me one other chance and put to me the test
And you’ll find the Black Sheep loves you Dad far better than the rest.”
Well a wagon drove up to the door, it was the poor house van.
The boys laughed and pointed to their dad and they says, “There is your man.”
Just then a rich and a manly form came pressing through the crowd.
“Stop you brutes,” the stranger said, “This will not be allowed.
You’ve taken the old man’s property and all that he could save.
You’ve even sold that little lot containing his wife’s grave.
I am his son but I’m not your kin from now till Judgement Day.”
The old man clasped the Black Sheep’s hand and the crowd all heard him say:
“Don’t be angry with me lad. Don’t turn me from your door.
I know that I was foolish, but I’ve repented o’er and o’er.
I should have gave to you my gold ’cause you have stood the test.
Now I find the Black Sheep far better than all the rest.”
Ugee apologized for her voice, saying, “Now, that’s not sung right. You oughta heard Ed Haley sing that to you. The first time I ever sung that, I sung a little bit of it to Ed, and when he come back again he was playing and singing that. It’d raise the hair on your head.”
I wondered if Laury was a singer and she said, “My dad couldn’t carry a tune but he could play that fiddle. My dad could whistle.”
24 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Akron, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, music, Ohio, Ralph Haley, Spencer, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
A little later, Ugee saw Ed and Ella at Spencer, the county seat of Roane County.
“I lived three miles below Spencer one year and come up to town to get some groceries or something and Ed and Ella was there at the courthouse playing music. Well I went over to talk to Ed and Ella. Nothing else would do but for us to go down to eat at the hotel. Well, there was just a whole bunch of big shots over for that stock sale and Roane County was a Republican county. And they put us up to eat. That’s when they had that WPA and were giving out rations, like meat. My son Harold was up at the end of the table and they said, ‘Well, what do you want?’ He said, ‘I think I’ll have some of that Roosevelt dog meat.’ Aw, you ought to heard them good ole Republicans get up and just clap their hands. ‘Oh, that’s the smartest little boy I ever seen,’ he said and throwed him a dollar. Ed just throwed back his head. I can see him now – ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! That wasn’t a Republican said that, though.’ Me and Ella laughed about that.”
In later years, Ugee’s brother Harvey took Ed and Ella to Akron, Ohio where he worked at the B.F. Goodrich factory. Ugee said, “Ed drawed such a big crowd at the B.F. Goodrich they passed a law that people had to keep moving on the streets. Harvey got so mad. At Goodyear, it was the same way. People couldn’t get by. Traffic was that bad.”
I tried to explain to Ugee what I had learned about Haley’s fiddling and she said, “He was one of the smoothest fiddlers I ever heard. He’d put his fiddle right along here — he didn’t put it under his chin — and if somebody’d make him mad when they’d ask him to play something he’d almost make that fiddle insult that person. I don’t know how he’d do it, but I’ll tell you what: he could almost insult you with it. He’d make it squawl at them and squeal at them. Just like that ‘Wild Hogs in the Red Brush’ — the way he’d hit that fiddle somehow or other it’d sound just like hogs squealing.”
I played some of Ed’s recordings for Ugee, who quickly pointed out that they didn’t compare to hearing him in person.
“I’d give anything in the world if they could get some of Ed’s music out,” she said. “Now I had a nephew that went down to Kentucky after World War II and got two or three records of Ed’s. He give them five dollars. I tried to buy one off of him and he said, ‘I wouldn’t take a million dollars for them.’ That’s just how much we thought of Ed and Ella and them.”
More Ed Haley records?
“My nephew’s dead but his son is living in Parkersburg and I don’t know whether he’s throwed them away or what he’s done with them,” Ugee said. “They shouldn’t be scratched up. They took care of them.”
Ugee said her nephew was James Russell Shaver, who lived just off of 7th Avenue.
Turning my thoughts to music, I got my fiddle out to probe Ugee’s mind about Ed’s technique. She said, “Him and Dad both — that wrist done the work for them.”
Did he always sit down when he played?
“Most of the time. He could stand up and play but he didn’t like to.”
Did he pat his foot pretty hard when he played?
“Patted this one,” Ugee said. “The other one came down like you’re dancing. Whenever he began to pat that foot you could say he was bringing out some good music somewhere.”
I asked if fiddlers ever questioned Ed about how to play and she said, “Well he wouldn’t a showed one how to play. He learned it like I did — the hard way — just fooling with the fiddle.”
I told Ugee, “Now Lawrence said Ed played the banjo,” and she said, “Ed could play a guitar like crazy, too. He could play any kind of string music. Now Dad could thump a banjo a little but he wasn’t what you call a banjo player. Ed could play a mandolin, too. He could play a guitar, too. There’s where Ralph learned to play a guitar — Ed learned him.”
I told her about working on Ed’s music with Lawrence and about my theory regarding genetic memory and she said, “I don’t think I ever seen Lawrence even pick up a music box and try to play anything,” kind of dismissing the entire notion. She didn’t know much about Ralph’s musical ability. “I never was around him too much — just there at home,” she said. “He played with his pick or fingers either one.”
She was aware that Ella had Ralph before she married Ed.
“I forget how old he was when Ed and Ella got married but he’s just a half-brother to them.”
I asked Ugee if Ella ever talked about her first husband and she said, “No. They always made out like Ralph was Ed’s boy. Ed just called him his boy.”
I was very curious to see what Haley tunes Ugee might remember.
“I can remember a lot of his tunes,” she said, “but I can’t sing them any more: ‘Sourwood Mountain’, ‘Cripple Creek’ and ‘Wild Hogs in the Red Brush’. He played one — ‘The blue-eyed rabbit’s gone away. The blue-eyed rabbit’s gone to stay.’ Probably old fiddle tunes, all of them. You couldn’t mention one of them he couldn’t play. ‘Marching Through Georgia’, ‘Red Wing’. ‘Old Jimmy Johnson’ — you’ve heard that. ‘Old Jimmy Johnson, bring your jug around the hill. If you don’t have a jug, bring a ten dollar bill.'”
I asked if her father and Ed played most of the same tunes and she said, “Oh, yeah. Dad knowed some that Ed didn’t but Ed would learn them when he’d get in there, and if Ed knowed some, why Dad’d learn them, too.”
22 Saturday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Arnoldsburg, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Harvey Hicks, history, John Hartford, Laury Hicks, music, Natchee the Indian, Spencer, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
Ugee said Ed seldom had a fiddle case with him when he traveled into Calhoun County, West Virginia.
“Most of the time Ed had his fiddle in a twenty-four pound flour poke,” she said. “Sometimes he’d put it under his coat and sometimes up under his arm — just whichever way he felt best about it. He was very careful with it under there. Dad told him one time, ‘Why don’t you get a case so you can carry that bow without tearing it up all the time?’ Ed said he didn’t want to bother with carrying that case in his hand. Some times he might take a notion to stop and play some music somewhere on the road.”
At that instant, I had this image of Ed being so attached to his fiddle, with such an addiction, that the two were virtually inseparable. To not even want to put it away in a case made me think he always had it in his hands, feeling it, tinkering with it, trying new ways to make it work — all the time. You know, a person can get really attached to feeling an object — a ball or a pen — to where it doesn’t seem comfortable to not have it in hand. I imagine for a blind person this feeling is most intense. There’s a real comfort level to consider. This fiddle would’ve been his entire life — his passion, his breadbasket, his ticket to daily comforts and a better life in general. Then, I also pictured horrible images of him stumbling or even falling with it in his hands or tucked under his coat as he scooted along bumpy country roads.
Ugee said Ed ordered his strings from “Sears & Roebuck and places like that. You could buy strings out in them country stores. Used to be you could buy them all in a drug store.”
How did he get his bows haired?
“Horse’s tail. Dad haired it for him.”
Ugee said Ed and Laury played music at little towns called Rosedale, Grantsville and Webster Springs. I asked if Ed put a box or cup out to catch money and she said, “Oh, no. Maybe Dad would put a cigar box down. When Ed was some place and Dad was around, he’d just step up after they’d get to playing and Dad’d say, ‘If you fellers like that how about putting some money in this cigar box? This man’s got six kids. Don’t make him play for nothing’.”
Ugee had faint memories of Ed fiddling in contests with her father. One time, she said, he lost a contest in Charleston to an Indian — no doubt Natchez the Indian, the famous show fiddler. “Ed got so mad at hisself,” Ugee said, “he just about blowed up over it because he knowed the feller couldn’t play but they give it to him. He was the world champion fiddler but he couldn’t play. Ed said, ‘It’s already cut and dried.’ Ed cut a shine and said that his music wasn’t worth a damn. You never heard such cussing.”
The first time Ugee saw Ella, she was pregnant with Lawrence (circa 1927). At that time, Ella did not play the mandolin — an important thing to note considering how it was so prominently featured on the home recordings of the mid-40s.
“Now Ella, when she first come in there, she played the accordion. Dad told Ed, he said, ‘I don’t like the accordion. It drowns out your music. I’d ruther hear the fiddle.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you teach her to play the guitar or the mandolin?’ Ed laughed. He said, ‘Hell, you can’t teach her nothing.’ Ella — I can see her shut her eyes yet — said, ‘Laury, don’t you like the accordion?’ He said, ‘Oh, I like it. Ella, you’re the best in the world, but I like string music.’ Next time she come back, she was playing mandolin. Ed learned her how to second and buddy she could keep time with it, too. Dad said, ‘I like that a whole lot better, just hearing that time.'”
Ugee said, “Well, they had Lawrence and they named him after Dad. Then when they come back they had a little girl and they named her Monnie after my mother, Minnie. Ella wrote and told Mom, ‘Well, I had my baby and it’s a girl. Instead of calling her Minnie, I’m calling her Monnie, but it’s still your namesake.”
I wondered if Ed and Ella played at courthouses in that part of West Virginia and Ugee said, “Yes, yes. They played at every courthouse there was in West Virginia down there: Grantsville, Clay County, Glenville and back through that way. Gassaway, West Virginia. Sutton, West Virginia. Just any place around — all the churches and all the schoolhouses. The old Roane County Courthouse in Spencer, it used to have great big shade trees. Then they had the stock market up on the Spencer Hill back towards Arnoldsburg and Ed and them’d go over there. And they had a boarding house just before you crossed the bridge — state hospital’s across over there — and then there’s the big Miller Hotel and everybody went in there to eat. And they’d be over there playing music and people would take Ed and Ella down there to eat.”
Ugee said Ed and Ella were regulars at Arnoldsburg, a little town north of the Hicks home on Route 33 in Calhoun County. It was the first of many stories where she became the hero of her own narrative.
“My brother, Harvey, he took me down to Arnoldsburg and Ed and Ella was playing music. They had a platform to dance on and Dad was down there. Harvey said, ‘Well, let’s sit back over here and listen to them a while.’ There was some girls trying to dance. They wasn’t keeping time. You could tell right then that Ed didn’t like the noise they were making. They was some way about twisting his shoulders that he didn’t like something that was going on. I looked at Harold and said, ‘He’s gonna quit playing in a little bit.’ Me and him sat over there in the car and was laughing about it. And Ed and them wasn’t making very much money there at the time.
“So Dad happened to see us over there. He come over and said, ‘Won’t you go over and dance some?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go over and dance.’ He went back and he told Uncle Jerry — that was Aunt Susan’s man — he said, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll say something like, I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Jerry said, ‘You give me ten dollars and I’ll put it in the box.’ Uncle Jerry said, ‘I’ll give ten dollars to see Ugee Hicks dance.’ Ed perked up like that — he’d give ten dollars too almost to hear me dance. And old Carey Smith, I never will forget it. Carey and old John both was there and they had money. ‘Well,’ Carey said, ‘I’d give a twenty-dollar bill to see Ugee Hicks come in there on that board and show them girls a few things.’ I just walked over to Uncle Jerry and I said, ‘Uncle Jerry, just put your ten where your mouth is.’ And I looked down at Carey Smith and I said, ‘Carey, you put your twenty where your mouth is. Throw it in that cigar box.’
“Well, Ed went to playing ‘Carroll County Blues’. I had a pair of shoes on that had like a wooden heel on them. I hit that floor and I wanna tell you right now, you oughta heard Ed play. He just brightened up so. I don’t think I ever heard him play it better in my life. And Uncle Jerry turned around to old John, he said, ‘Well, you better put your twenty in here.’ Well, Ed made fifty dollars. Old Ed and Ella, you know they had a family. I was a pretty good dancer then. Them two girls quit. One girl stepped back and said, ‘Well, she can’t do the Charleston.'”
Ugee told me more about the pact made between her father and Ed in the early thirties.
“Now they made that pact a long time ago and they renewed it when Ed was back again. Dad told him he wanted him to play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’ and he said, ‘I don’t care what you play before, fiddling pieces or anything, but when you play ‘When Our Lord Shall Come Again’, that’s when I’ll meet my Lord.’ And he said, ‘I’ll be a laying there in that grave until you sing that.'”
Ed asked Laury to play “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” and a few fiddle tunes at his funeral.
“I’ll lay there in that grave and won’t hear nothing,” Laury joked.
Ed was “kindly acting a fool” about it too and told him to let Ugee sing since he was such a horrible singer.
“Laury, we’re getting a little serious with this stuff,” Ed finally said. “I don’t know whether I can play anything or not.”
“I know,” Laury said. “I don’t know whether I can sing over you, either.”
Ugee said her father died of leukemia and stomach cancer in January of 1937 at the age of 56 years. About a month later, Ed made it to Calhoun County and played “When Our Lord Shall Come Again” at his grave. The famous Ohio River flood of ’37 delayed his trip. According to one publication, the flood crested in Ashland at 74.3 feet — nearly 20 feet above flood stage. It took one month and a half to play out, leaving residents with a large cleanup effort that lasted for six months.
“Ed went up to the grave — it’s right up on the hill from the house — and he stayed and played music all day,” Ugee said. “He played fast fiddle tunes and he played slow ones and then he’d sing. That evening, back at the house, nobody said a thing. You coulda dropped a pin in our house. Ed just come down on the fiddle and went to playing that ‘Carroll County Blues’ and I just jumped up in the floor and went to dancing. I said, ‘Well, if my dad was a living, that’s what he’d wanted me to do because I can’t hold my feet.’ Ed told me the next day, ‘If you hadn’t done that I’d a choked to death right there.’ Ella said, ‘When you hit that floor I knowed you was gonna be all right.'”
21 Friday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, fiddler, history, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, Laury Hicks, Logan County, music, U.S. South, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
A few weeks later, I met Ugee Postalwait at her home in Akron, Ohio. An energetic, feisty woman with a band-aid on her nose, she didn’t look nearly as old as she said she was (eighty-something). She was very anxious to talk about Ed Haley and her memories seemed sharper than when I’d first called her. She bragged about him right away.
“He had the brain of music,” she said. “He’s one of the best I ever heard. You could name a tune and if he didn’t know it and you sang it to him one time he knowed it then, and when you heard it the next time he’d blow your stack.”
“Now they is some people’ll tell you my dad was better — Laury Hicks,” she continued, wasting no time in bragging on her father. “He and Ed was about the same age. Both born in about 1880.”
I asked Ugee to recall her childhood, when she first saw Ed Haley.
“The first time I ever seen Ed Haley, I was about five years old,” she said. “Dick Joblin told him that he wanted him to hear a boy that he knowed played music and he brought him there to Dad. Ed was about — oh, he must’ve been around twenty maybe, something like that. He was a young man. Dick had my dad to play the fiddle and he played three pieces: ‘Arkansas Traveler’ and another’n I can’t remember right now and ‘Sally Goodin’. Ed said, ‘If that next’n had come up as strong as the first few I heard, I’d never pulled my bow across that fiddle as long as I lived.’ And Dad at the time had his first fiddle. My dad made his first fiddle out of a cigar box and that’s what he learned on and he had that up till I was about ten or twelve years old.”
Ugee said, “Then the next time I seen Ed, he come there with John Hager.”
I asked her how Ed looked and she said he had on a suit and plug hat and had his fiddle in a flour sack.
“They stayed all winter, and they left on the first day of spring,” she said. “I’ll never forget that. There was a little narrow country road and as long as I live I’ll always see Ed, and Johnny leading him around a mud hole. We went out on the bank and watched them as they left and I stood there and cried after him and just cut a shine. Well, Ed then sent back a card — I think I still got it. ‘I love your wife, but oh your kids’ — from White Sulphur Springs.”
I asked Ugee if she had seen the picture of Ed and Johnny at White Sulphur Springs.
“Oh, yeah, I got that someplace in a box with a bunch of my pictures,” she said, before correcting herself. “Well, I think I give Larry all the pictures I had of Ed and Ella.”
When I pulled out the one of Ed and Johnny, she said, “Yeah, that’s John Hager. He was a little fella. That banjo had the longest neck I ever seen.”
She then pointed to Ed and said, “That looks just exactly like him. He wore dark glasses then. After he got married he stopped wearing dark glasses. Ed was six foot or something like that. Well Dad was a real little skinny guy like Ed Haley when he was young. He weighed about 144 pounds and then he had pneumonia fever and come near to dying. When he got over that, he gained weight. Went up to 175 pounds. But he weighed about 200 pounds. Dad was tall.”
Ugee said Ed stopped wearing his derby and gained a little weight after marrying Ella. I was surprised to hear her describe him as a “little skinny guy” but she insisted, “Yeah, looked like you put a pair of britches up on a fence rail. Ed said to me one day, ‘Ugee, can you make a shirt?’ I said, ‘Well sure I can make a shirt.’ Well, he come back from the store with material and I made him three shirts. He laughed about it. He said, ‘I want long tails. They won’t slip out of my pants.'”
Ugee said, “Yeah, I’ve seen these pictures.”
“This one,” she said, pointing to the picture of Ed used on the cover of Parkersburg Landing, “I don’t remember ever seeing that one of Ed. He looks to me like he’s been on a drunk.”
Ugee tried to describe the way things were when she was a girl in Calhoun County.
“When I was growing up and in the cornfield hoeing corn, you could hear singing on the mountains,” she said. “There was music in that country and very few people didn’t play some kind of music. My brother Russell played the banjo. My brother Shirley played the guitar and would’ve made a good fiddle player if he’d went ahead at it. I used to pick up the fiddle and see-saw a little bit. I can’t any more. We had a string band at our house, you might say. Mom played the organ and I went to playing the guitar. Anyway, they was nobody that come in that country that played the fiddle within thirty, forty or fifty miles away that wouldn’t come to our place and play music.”
The Hicks home took on a party atmosphere when Haley arrived.
“When Ed Haley was in the country, they come from miles around to our house,” Ugee said. “Dad would get out and tell everybody that Ed was there or Ed was gonna be there a certain day. They’d come through the day. Everybody did. Dad and them would play music all day — half a night.”
Ugee said she used to get up around two o’clock in the morning to see who’d be eating breakfast in a few hours.
Some of her happiest memories were of Haley’s visits to her father’s home.
“Dad’d go out there on the porch and if Ed was a playing music and if I was in the kitchen a cooking he’d go out and tell Ed to play ‘Carroll County Blues’,” she said. “Oh, I’d come out of that kitchen just a hitting that floor and a dancing all the way out there on the porch. I’d say, ‘Ed, don’t do that. You’ll not get no dinner ’cause I can’t hold my feet when you play that.’ Every time he played that, I’d dance. And Dad, when he played ‘Sally Goodin’, that’s when I’d dance for him. Mom didn’t want me to dance. She tried to keep me from it but I’d go out under them old oak trees out there on them old flat rocks and just dance, you know.”
I asked how far the Hicks home was from Harts Creek and Ugee said, “I would say that’s pretty close to a hundred mile. I never was in around Logan. I always wanted to go because Nora and Aunt Rosie lived up there. Dad and the boys, they used to go see them.” Aunt Rosie, she said, was Bill Day’s wife, while Nora was her daughter. I never knew the Days lived around Logan, West Virginia.
20 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Akron, Calhoun County, Ed Haley, history, John Hartford, Johnny Hager, Laury Hicks, Lawrence Haley, music, Ohio, Rector Hicks, Ugee Postalwait, West Virginia, writing
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.”
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Genealogy and History in North Carolina and Beyond
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Brandon Ray Kirk 