Pine Barrens Volume One: Why?

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

Our new album “Pine Barrens Volume One”. is officially out everyhere online. It is our first record that doesn’t have any of my original songs on it, and our first in a series of folk EPs highlighting the Folk music hailing from where we grew up.

We’ve been releasing music and driving around America playing a combination of original songs and American Folk songs for the last ten years, and very often we’d hear: “New Jersey? Folk music? What does New Jersey folk music even sound like?” And we’d usually say, “Like this”, and continue playing. But that was only half true. Sure what we were doing was contemporary folk music from New Jersey, but admittedly we weren’t playing any songs from where we grew up, let alone know examples.

But we had played at Albert Music Hall starting in 2011. Down in Waretown, where there have been weekly folk, country, and bluegrass acts playing since the 1970s, a lot of the South Jersey music and style has been revived and kept alive. We knew it existed and was played by folks such as George and Joe Albert, The Pineconers, and a band called The Pine Hawkers, whose photos line the walls of the hall.

A year or so ago, our friend Alan Smith, a DJ at WFMU in Jersey City emailed me a link to a long forgotten ReverbNation page containing about 25 songs recorded for a Rutgers professor  in the 80’s by one of the founders of Albert Music Hall, none other than Merce Ridgway Jr. and The Pinehawkers.

Suddenly, there it was, a bonafide archive with examples of centuries old Pine Barrens folk songs, as well as those written by him in the 70’s and his father in the 40’s.

This sent us down a musical rabbit hole, searching for and researching the origin of the folk songs and tracking down the stories behind the ones written by Merce Sr. and Merce Jr. Since 2021 we’ve been working these songs into our live sets and I’m sure if you’ve seen us live you’ve heard one if not three or four of the songs we’ve chosen for this first installment in the series. There’s even one contemporary Ocean County fiddle tune (from the 2010s) some of you who have followed us for years may recognize.

We chose Mt. Holly Jail as the first single because, firstly, Prison Songs are just damn cool, and secondly, it was the oldest lyric originating in NJ on the album. The first time it was written down was by a student named Herbert Halpert in 1936, who heard Oliver Minney, a half black and half Lenape man, sing it in Cookstown not far from Jackson. That is what NJ folk music sounded like.

Halpert’s teacher told him regional folk song was a bad topic to study, and he never worked on it again. Luckily his one paper exists and contains over a dozen examples of NJ folk songs. Now my book collection on the subject is getting as tall as me, and I have a few records of original songs to record soon too, but first it’s time to set the record straight.

Why are we doing this? Releasing ten year old, one hundred year old, and four hundred year old songs at a time when people are interested in what’s next?

Because this is what some folk music really sounds like where we grew up, where the Pines grow near the bay.

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A short essay about FAILURE for Soleil Magazine’s 3rd issue, 2018. When I was asked to write about anything I wanted, I wracked my brain for a while. After a few false starts and puny attempts at a two-page autobiography, I instead settled on my perception of success vs. failure as an independent artist. - Joe