Later during the winter months of 1996, I called Wilson Douglas in Clendenin, West Virginia. I wanted to know more about Ed’s trips to Laury Hicks’ house.

“Now what we done, John,” Wilson said, “he’d come to Calhoun County, West Virginia, about twice a year. And it depended on the money: sometimes he’d stay three weeks, sometimes he’d stay a month and a half. Well now, we all had to work like dogs to keep from starving to death. We’d send him word by that mail carrier that they was a gang of us a coming. We’d load up in that old ’29 Model-A Ford truck — a whole truck load of us — cab full, the bed full — and all of us together mighta had four dollars. Well, by the time we’d get there — especially in the fall of the year — it’d be maybe 4:30, 5:00, 6:00, and he’d say, ‘Well, we’ll move inside. It’s getting damp out here.’ And I’d pull my chair right up in front of him and I’d sit right there till he quit at three or four o’clock in the morning — and I’d give him all the change I had. Well, I’d sit there by God till I just got paralyzed on them old hard-bottom chairs.”

I asked Wilson, “Well now, would people suggest the names of tunes to Ed and he’d play them, or would he sit there and if nobody said something he’d say, ‘Well now, here’s an old tune,’ and play something?”

“Aw, he wouldn’t say stuff like that,” Wilson said. “They was always somebody had three or four in line requested ahead. Now my dad mentioned one tune to him, he said, ‘No, I don’t know it.’ Said, ‘Arthur Smith plays it.’ And that was ‘Sugar Tree Stomp’, you know. And that’s the only tune that ever I heard the man say that he didn’t know. People didn’t know about hornpipes then. They didn’t ask him to play no hornpipes. I’m sure he could have, you know.”

I asked Wilson about Ed playing “Getting Off the Raft” and he said, “Seems like he played that up around Parkersburg.”

I wanted to know about Laury Hicks, like whether or not he played with Ed, and Wilson said, “He’d sit there and never open his mouth. Sometimes Ed would talk him into playing two or three tunes, but he was as far behind Ed Haley as I was. Laury Hicks didn’t turn them on.” I told Wilson what Ugee said about Ed and her father playing tunes together and he said, “Haley couldn’t touch him on the ‘Blackberry Blossom’ – the old one. Haley’d get him to play that. He said, ‘Now, nobody can beat Laury Hicks on that, or nobody can beat him on the ‘Arkansas Traveler’. But he was rough. I can remember him well. He played a good rough fiddle, but he didn’t put any skill in it.”

Wow — that was something I just couldn’t picture based on Ugee’s memories.

I asked Wilson if Ed ever heard him play and he said, “Well, I’d saw around with it. Now Haley was a funny man. It didn’t matter how good you played or how bad you played, he’d sit and listen and work his fingers and not say a word. I heard him commend two men: Clark Kessinger and French Mitchell. French played a lot of fast fiddle tunes and he handled a waltz pretty good and Haley liked his waltzes. And he liked Arthur Smith, but he said Arthur Smith didn’t know over thirty tunes. But he said he was hell on them Blues.”

I asked Wilson if any of these old fiddlers ever competed in contests and he said, “Now in the old days when I was young, Carpenter and all them there fiddlers over in Calhoun County, now they’d call it a convention. They wouldn’t play against each other and they’d laugh and it was jolly. They’d say, ‘Now I believe they’s a note in there that you’re not a gettin’.’ It didn’t offend them. It was just a big get-together. One a seeing how lonesome he could play against the other. No, they wouldn’t contest against each other.”