Tag Archives: Wilson Douglas

In Search of Ed Haley 124

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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I told Wilson about working on Ed’s long bow and the Scotch snap — about the little stops between notes — and he said, “Right, right. That’s hesitation in the notes. That is correct. He talked about ‘chopped notes.’ That’s a quick note. But you know, what I liked about Haley, whenever he would settle down and fiddle… I like to hear a fiddle drive a straight, hard, flat note. A clear note. This skipping over the notes, I don’t go for that. And Haley didn’t do that. Every note he got was clear, or he would make a ‘chopped note,’ he called it, and the hesitation was with the — well the hand was quicker’n the eye. He could make a quick hesitation with the bow.”

I was very impressed with Wilson’s memory of such details, which improved with each passing minute. Apparently, Bobby Taylor was right: after he thought about something for a while his memories became sharp as a knife.

Wilson said, “But now I didn’t tell you about the kind of strings he played, did I? He played the old Blue Bird. They quit making them back in ’42 or ’43. They was a steel string, something like a Black Diamond. I believe they’s a little better toned. They wasn’t so sharp. And they cost one quarter in them days, for I bought one as a kid. Now that was the string that Ed Haley played. He liked these solid bone keys in his fiddle, white bone keys. And I always thought about where he got that dang fiddle bow, but it must’ve been four-and-a-half foot long. I never will forget it: that’s the longest fiddle bow I ever saw. I’ve thought about that many a times. It looked to me like it was six inches longer than any other kind of bow, and he played it from one end to the other.”

I said, “You don’t reckon it was just the way he was pulling it that made it look long, do you?”

“No, it was long,” Wilson answered. “You know, a boy sixteen years old don’t miss nothing for he’s eager to learn, you see? I know a fiddler over here in Webster County, and he’s good, too. He’s a top fiddler. And me and him talked about that, and he said, ‘Ed Haley pulled the longest fiddle bow I ever saw.’ And he said his notes was plain. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Now the frog on that bow was some kind of a bone, if that means anything. White bone.”

Wilson really bragged on Ed’s repertoire.

“Now the man, John, what amazed me, he would play all night and maybe not play the same tune twice,” he said. “And he told me, said, ‘I know over a thousand fiddle tunes.’ Old Ed played ‘Callahan’ out of this world. I can’t remember the key. I wasn’t far enough along. But now, Ed sometimes would put that B-flat in the ‘Forked Deer’ and sometimes he wouldn’t. He would run that B-flat in there if he was showing off, you know. He played the ‘Paddy on the Pike’ in standard tuning. ‘Paddy on the Handcar’, Ed played that cross-key. Two different tunes. And he played ‘Poplar Bluff’ and the ‘Hole in the Poplar’ and all that kind of stuff.”

In Search of of Ed Haley 123

03 Monday Jun 2013

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     I spent the spring of 1994 triangulating the many different versions I had heard of Ed Haley’s life and trying to make some sense of the direction of my research. There were so many avenues to explore: Ed’s background and the story of his father’s death on Harts Creek; Ed’s family and professional life in Ashland; Ed’s experience in places like Portsmouth or Calhoun County… Really, I seemed to only be scraping the tip of the iceberg — and it appeared to be a large one at that. It was amazing to consider how much I might learn about someone who I had first read about as being “a misty legend.” Almost daily, some little scrap of information came in.

     I called Wilson Douglas several times with very specific questions in mind. I asked him if Ed played a lot in the second and third position and he said, “Oh, yeah, he did a lot of that. Well, you know it’s like this, John. When he wanted to show off he would play in the standard position then he would let loose and get down the violin neck — way down — and play down there a while. He’d do a lot of that where he had competition, you know, and more or less to show off. That is, if somebody provoked him that’s the way he would do. I don’t know how he did it, but you wouldn’t detect any change, any hesitation, any loss of time, or nothing like that. But the man was a genius, they’s no question about it. He played the fiddle so many different ways, you had to listen close to tell what he was a doing.”

     I asked Wilson if he knew anything about Ed’s personal history.

     “No, not too much,” he said. “You know, he had the measles when he was two or three years old and that put him blind. He told me, ‘Wilson, where I was born and raised there on Harts Creek in Logan County, we almost starved to death.’ Said, ‘All we had was greens and green onions to eat of a summer and practically nothing of a winter.’ He said, ‘Now you know what the Depression is.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well that was a picnic to what I was raised on .'”

     I said to Wilson, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about Ed’s background and see if that rings any bells. His daddy was lynched.”

     “Right,” he interrupted. “They was mean people. They were mean, violent people.”

     I asked if Ed ever talked about his father.

     “Not too much,” he said. “He didn’t want you to ask him too many questions about a thing like that, you know? He did mention one thing to me one time — said something about his dad, but he didn’t comment much, you know. Not enough to make any sense of it. Ed Haley wouldn’t tell you too much. You had to be in his confidence strongly before he’d tell you much of anything.”

     When I mentioned my theory about Josie Cline being Ed’s half-sister, Wilson said, “Well, I heard him telling Laury Hicks that he had a sister, but he didn’t say his ‘half.’ He said his sister.”

In Search of Ed Haley 106

09 Thursday May 2013

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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.”

In Search of Ed Haley 105

08 Wednesday May 2013

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

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

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

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

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

 

In Search of Ed Haley 104

07 Tuesday May 2013

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After talking with Mrs. Rutland, I called Bobby Taylor, a fiddling acquaintance and all-around nice guy in Dunbar, West Virginia. Bobby was a protégé of Clark Kessinger, the famous Charleston fiddler who regarded Haley as the best fiddler he ever heard. I told him about spending months trying to unlock the secrets behind Ed’s bowing before concluding that he played a long bow using the Scotch snap to get smoothness and note separation. Bobby agreed, telling how Clark Kessinger did the same kind of thing in “Sweet Sixteen” — “real fast and almost no bow. He would shuffle with his fingers.”

Bobby didn’t think that Ed used that one bow style for every tune, though.

“From what I could hear of Ed Haley’s fiddling, he done almost any type of style with the bow,” he said. “And I could hear his styles changing from one tune to the next and the way he would phrase. Like when I fiddle, it just depends on what mood I’m in and what style I want to play in. But Haley had to be what Kessinger would call a ‘down-bower,’ because Kessinger hated a ‘bow pusher.’ In other words, the accent’s on the up-bow. What little bit I can hear through all the scratches and everything, I hear Haley being a little more smoother, a little more fluid than Kessinger, but I still see the same bow. But Kessinger’s fast as greased lightning.”

I told Bobby how I’d really gotten into writing out Haley’s tunes note for note lately — every little slide — because I wanted to see what was going on.

“Of course, the deeper I get into it, the less I realize I know about it,” I said.

Bobby wasn’t surprised.

“Kessinger and Haley were both very complicated fiddlers, as any fiddler is,” he said. “But Kessinger was a master with the bow. I kid you not. I mean, that man could bow. Kessinger, if you listen at him fiddle, listen especially at his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’. Man, could he fiddle that. Very few people realize how well he could fiddle it until you start really listening to what he’s doing with that bow and note correlation. It’s a masterpiece, his ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’ is. Just as Ed Haley, when I heard Ed Haley play it, I could hear where Kessinger got his idea. I could hear it all coming together. Now my style, when you get a real good guitar player that I like playing with, I have a tendency to throw Mike Humphreys into my mesh — a little bit of Kessinger — and I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I sound a great deal like Ed Haley when I do that because I play a little bigger note in a way — not quite as fast as Kessinger — and try to smooth it up a bit.”

“Lawrence has told me repeatedly about how his dad held the fiddle,” I said to Bobby, “that he didn’t stick it up under his chin but he sat it kinda there at his shoulder.”

Bobby chuckled and said, “That’s the way I hold it when I’m jamming.”

I asked Bobby if he rotated the fiddle slightly with it at that position and he said, “I don’t, but my father does. My father, I don’t think, ever met Ed Haley, but is certainly old enough to have known him. My father’s 82. But he’d always heard of him. His favorite fiddler was Sam Jarvis. He was a very prominent person — well educated. He sold insurance. He was my dad’s schoolteacher way out in a little one-room school. My father just says one word for Sam Jarvis, and he says he was ‘perfect.’ I remember when I was a small kid, my father pointed him out and talked to him for a little while and he introduced me. I’ll remember it as long as I live, he said, ‘Here is the greatest fiddler that ever lived, and someday you will learn to appreciate what I have said now.’ And to this day, if you ask me who the smoothest fiddler was I ever heard, it’s Sam Jarvis. Jarvis’ note was not of this world. He was the same age as Clark. He died in 1967.”

That was the first time I’d heard of Sam Jarvis, so — figuring that Ed likely knew him — I pressed Bobby for more information.

“Oh man, he could fiddle. Very little did he play professionally. He would just show up and terrorize the contest world occasionally. I never have heard about Sam Jarvis playing against Ed Haley, but Sam Jarvis only lost one contest in his life — and he was disqualified. You won’t catch anybody in the Charleston area that knew both the fiddlers — Kessinger and Jarvis — that will tell you Kessinger was better. The two greatest fiddlers, when you hear people talk, one’ll say Sam Jarvis and the other will say Ed Haley and most people say they wouldn’t turn their hand over for the difference.”

I asked Bobby who he thought Ed and Jarvis patterned their fiddling after and he said, “That is what is very interesting. They learned from old Edison records, somewhat. I know Jarvis did. They said that his dad wouldn’t hardly let him have a hold of the fiddle, he was so little. And he said that his feet wouldn’t even hit the floor, and he wrapped his toes around the rungs of the chair, and put the record on, and his dad said, ‘You can play the fiddle today if you’re careful with it.’ And he sat down with that record, and they said when they come home that evening, not only had he mastered the record — he had snowed the guy on the record. And he was not even six years old. So he was just automatic.”

Bobby said Wilson Douglas had been talking a lot about Ed Haley lately. Apparently, my telephone call to him had stirred some of memories.

“You will find that if you ask him off the top of his head something, he’ll say, ‘I don’t know,’ but you ask him two or three days later and he has the Brittanica version,” Bobby said.

In Search of Ed Haley 100

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

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     Wilson tried to give me an idea of what kind of tunes Ed played — or rather didn’t play.

     “He wasn’t a hornpipe fiddler,” he said. “He might’ve been, but if he was he never did play them around me. And if you mentioned tunes like ‘Orange Blossom Special’ and the ‘Fire on the Mountain’ and ‘Boil the Cabbage Down’, why he just might give you a cussing. No, he didn’t like a tune like the ‘Fire on the Mountain’. I think he hated it because Natchee the Indian played it all the time. And if you asked him to play the ‘Sourwood Mountain’ or something like that, you got in trouble. He would smart you off. And if you asked him to play some of what he called ‘two string tunes’ if he wasn’t a feeling good why he’d just cuss you out. But if he felt good, he’d just laugh and say, ‘Well, I’ll play the damn thing. There’s not much to it, but I’ll do it.’ But, however, if somebody throwed a quarter in the cup, you know, by god he’d play that tune. You could figure on him playing it a good seven minutes anyway.”

     Wilson said Ed seldom re-tuned his fiddle for cross-key tunes.

     “In a tune in cross-key, all he did was change his notes,” he said. “He used to tell me, he said, ‘Wilson, I change my fingers instead of my notes.’ Now, I do a little bit of that, but I think them cross-key tunes — really I wouldn’t have never told him that — but I don’t think they sound right unless they’re tuned in the proper tuning. But he would get French Carpenter to play the cross-key tunes for him. I can remember that, you know. And Carpenter would say, ‘Well now Ed, you play them.’ Well Ed would say, ‘I can’t. I just don’t have the bow to play a lot of them cross-key tunes.’ So he’d set and listen to French Carpenter. However, French wasn’t in no class with him, but what French did, he was good, you know.”

     I said, “So, he learned a lot of tunes from French Carpenter?” and Wilson said, “Oh, yeah. Well, I was with French Carpenter for a long time.”

     I asked Wilson if he remembered any other people around Calhoun County who played with Ed.

     “Most of the time, it was just him and his wife,” he said. “She was a mandolin player. But then he had a fella over here in Calhoun County, a fellow by the name of Bernard Postalwait. He was one of the best guitar players, I guess, that ever was, but he was very withdrawn. He was really a ‘second Riley Puckett,’ and Ed wouldn’t have anybody else. Ed’d get him to follow his hoedowns you know, and then occasionally they would both find too much to drink somewhere and they’d wind up someplace else.”

     How about banjo players?

     “Oh yeah. An old guy by the name of Osner Cheneson, he’d play a lot with Ed. He was a claw-hammer banjo player from Calhoun County.”

     Wilson knew about other old fiddlers from other parts of West Virginia. When I mentioned the name Jack McElwain, he said, “Oh god, yeah. Now, he was right up there next to Ed Haley. Some of them Hammonses in Pocahontas County, now they knew of Ed and they liked Ed’s fiddling. Old Edden Hammons, he was a top fiddler in Pocahontas County. It was older stuff, but now the man could fiddle.”

     How about Senate Cottrell?

     “Yeah, well, he wasn’t that good, I never thought. But now there was another fiddler over there in Roane County, Ward Jarvis. He was good, too. Ed Haley liked his fiddling. He wasn’t as good as Ed, but he played a good fiddle.”

In Search of Ed Haley 99

29 Monday Apr 2013

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

     Wilson said Ed played for dances all over Calhoun County.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of Ed Haley 98

28 Sunday Apr 2013

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After some thought, I called Wilson Douglas, whose voice sounded “robotic,” like someone singing through an electric shaver. He said he had to talk through one of those little buzz boxes because he had lost his vocal chords to throat cancer several years ago. I asked him what he remembered about Ed coming to Laury Hicks’ house and he repeated a lot of what I had already read.

“Well now that’s a pretty long story,” Wilson began. “I knew him way back in ’38, ’39. As you know, he was a resident of Ashland, Kentucky, and he was born in Logan County, West Virginia. Well, he would come up to Ivydale, West Virginia, by train and then he would ride over on up into Calhoun County with the mail carrier. And he would get a ride with somebody over to Laury Hicks’, like with an old gentleman who used to be a country doctor, Dr. White. And while he was up in Calhoun County and Clay County, we’d go ever night — if we could get there anyway — and he’d play that fiddle about four or five hours at a time. Well, he’d go back to Ashland and stay a couple of months. I guess he was playing somewhere around in Kentucky. And then along in the fall he’d come back and maybe stay a month and then he’d catch the train to Logan County.”

I asked Wilson if he played a lot with Ed and he said, “Oh, well. No, I didn’t play a lot with him. I was just beginning to fiddle, you know, and he was my idol of a fiddler player. He mostly inspired me to fiddle, him and David French Carpenter of Clay County, West Virginia. I’m going to tell you, that there album [Parkersburg Landing] don’t give him credit.”

I asked Wilson if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “Oh god, he played all the old tunes. Well, as you know, they all played the ‘Billy in the Lowground’, the ‘Tennessee Wagner’. I play one of Haley’s tunes: he called it the ‘Morning Flower’. Played in the key of A. I’ll have to think. Well, as you know, he called the ‘Stony Point’, the ‘Gilroy’. I learned that off of him. You know, all these tunes has got four or five different titles. And I played a little bit of his ‘Devil’s Dream’. He would play that to get warmed up.”

Did you ever hear him play “Blackberry Blossom”? I asked.

“Oh, by god yeah,” he said. “I remember him playing that. You know, Ed Haley told me he could hear a tune twice and play it, and I believe it.”

I said to Wilson, “Now, Ed Haley improvised a lot, didn’t he? Like take a tune and play it different kinda ways.”

“Well, he could play it about any way,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. He’d do a lot of that to show his skill, I think, but when you settled him down he didn’t vary the bow from one time to another. Now where they’s a gang of fiddlers around, you know, a little distant to him, trading tunes and messing around, he would show them up. I don’t think he did it just to be smart: he did it to show them that he could do it, you know. And what I liked about him: if he heard somebody play a tune, they’d say, ‘Well now Ed, am I getting it?’ And he’d say, ‘No, you’re not getting it.’ And if you were to get it, he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough. Drop it. Don’t try to do it no better than that.’ I liked that. He went straight to the point, and he told it like it was. If a fiddler got to fiddling too fast, he’d say, ‘Well, you’re losing the soul.’ Oh, he’d just cuss. Only tune to my knowledge that he really played fast was ‘Forked Deer’.”

I asked Wilson what he remembered about Ed’s bowing and he said, “Now, he played a long straight bow, but he put in the bow whatever the tune required. Every tune requires a different bow technique, as you know. Oh God, he played a long shuffle bow. I always thought he had the longest fiddle bow I’d ever seen. You know, he could tell if a fiddler was playing the short bow. He’d say, ‘Well son, don’t hold your bow up in the middle. Catch back on the frog of the bow. By god, you need to have bow if you’re gonna play that kind of music.'”

I asked Wilson if he thought Vassar Clements’ bowing was anything like Ed’s and he said, “No, no. By god, no. No, not in my book. Now, you know everybody’s entitled to his own opinion.”

Did Ed play with a tight or loose bow?

“He played a half-tight bow. He didn’t want any bouncing or want any wobbling.”

In Search of Ed Haley 97

27 Saturday Apr 2013

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     Around that time, I read up on Wilson Douglas, an old-time fiddler who remembered Ed Haley visiting Laury Hicks during the Depression. I had first heard of him several months earlier from J.P. Fraley’s circle of friends. Wilson came from a family of musicians in the Elk River Valley north of Charleston, West Virginia.

     “I was born October 22, 1922 in Clay County,” Wilson said in one published interview. “My grandfather, Martin Stephenson Van Buren Douglas was one of the greatest ballad singers of all times. My dad was Shirley Andrew Douglas and he was a beautiful banjoist! And my Grandmother Morris was an old-time square dance fiddler and all her brothers were top fiddlers on my mother’s side, the Morris side.”

     Wilson started playing music at a young age, first the guitar, then the fiddle.

     “I started on the guitar when I was nine years old and I played the guitar Carter-fashion,” he said. “And 1935-36 was a severe cold winter. I was 13 years old. I had played the guitar up until that time for various fiddlers. During that winter I lived about a mile from my grandmother’s. At that time she had the only old fiddle in the country to my knowledge. The old instrument was patched with solder, carpet tacks, and various other things. Every night I would take my guitar over there and play. She would play hoedown fiddle tunes half the night. She played mostly dance tunes on two or three strings. She seldom played the bass. The following winter her health failed and she began to lose interest in the violin. However, that fiddle began to sound good to me. Then I suddenly decided that I would quit playing the guitar and try to make some kind of fiddler out of myself. So I started saving my money to buy me a fiddle.”

     In a short time, Wilson found himself visiting at the home of Laury Hicks, where he first saw Haley.

     “There was an old gentleman that lived in Calhoun County joining Clay County by the name of Laury Hicks,” Wilson said. “He was a good old-time rough fiddler. I would ride a bicycle over to his home to hear him play the fiddle. Then somehow Laury Hicks contacted Ed Haley in Ashland, Kentucky. In about a month Haley came to Calhoun County. So the news got around through the country that Ed Haley was at Laury Hicks’. Everybody around went to hear him play. It was 12 miles from where I was raised over to Laury Hicks’ where Ed Haley’d come to. And if a gang didn’t gather up to go in an old ’29 Model-A Ford truck, we’d start walking. Maybe somebody’d come along in an old car and pick us up. And it was just like a dang carnival, you know. We just sat and never opened our mouth and he’d scare them fellers. Them fellers never tried to play. I was just dazed with that fiddle. He’d play until about 12 o’clock at night, and when he got tired, he’d quit. I was really not conscious of coming back home.””

     According to Wilson, the locals tried to keep Haley in that part of the country as long as possible.

     “Well, when he’d take a notion to go back to Kentucky, we’d all beg him to stay another week,” he said. “Doc White would say, ‘Ed, now listen. They’s a gang of people coming from Roane County, you can make some money. Now, you stay another week.’ Ed was bad to swear. Well, they’d talk him into it. Maybe some of these old farmers would come along. They’d had a tune and maybe their father played or some of their ancestors and they’d heard it. They’d say, ‘Well, Ed, play me this tune,’ and they’d hand him a dollar. Well, he’d play it for 15 minutes! They’d sit there with big tears. Well, he’d play till the money ran out and he’d quit!”

     Wilson told about the last time he saw Haley play at the Hicks home.

     “The last night, the last time I seen him, I was a big boy and I’d got over there,” he said. “I was sitting in this old split-bottom chair. Sleepy, you know. But every time he’d play a tune, I’d survive. And he said, ‘Son, what’s your name?’ I didn’t know that he knew that I’d been sitting in front of him. I told him. He said, ‘You’ve been over here every night, haven’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Mr. Haley, you’ve played tunes for everybody and I don’t have no money. I’m saving up to buy me a fiddle.’ He laughed! I said, ‘How about you playing me a tune?’ ‘All right. What is it?’ I said, ‘Play the ‘Black-Eyed Susie’.’ ‘Well, that’s really no tune. It’s just a little old thing.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Damn it, I’ll play it. I don’t like to play it. Them’s single-line tunes, but I’ll play it for you.’ And he did, because I was interested, you see?”

Parkersburg Landing 42

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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     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.”