Jackson Pines | Jackson

JACKSON PINES | JACKSON

ALICE: Songs on Site is recorded on location and features each site’s unique soundscape as an audio backdrop. This episode includes birds, a friendly dog named Charlie, a crackling fire, ATVs, and a distant firing range in the distance. We recommend listening to Songs on Site with headphones for an immersive audio experience.

MUSIC: SONGS ON SITE THEME PLAYS UNDER.
SEAGULLS FLY OVERHEAD. A TRAIN PASSES BY.

MICHAEL: From Cocotazo Media and You Don’t Know Jersey—

A BUS PASSES BY.

MICHAEL: —this is Songs on Site—

BIRDS TAKE FLIGHT. A CAR BEEPS. A HORSE (OR THE JERSEY DEVIL) RUNS BY.

MICHAEL: —where we explore the music and environmental soundscapes of the Garden State.

CONDUCTOR: Stand clear of the door.

MICHAEL: I’m your host, Michael Aquino.

COFFEE POURS INTO A MUG. SILVERWARE CLINKS AGAINST DISHWARE. KIDS ON A PLAYGROUND. A CAR PASSES BY. CRICKETS ON A SUMMER NIGHT.

MICHAEL: Hey, there. It's Michael Aquino, host of Songs on Site.

This is the first of two episodes with Jackson Pines, a band that hails from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. I’d like to start with a quick background about The Pine Barrens, an ecosystem of pinelands that stretches across seven New Jersey counties. The woodlands were originally inhabited by the Leni Lenape people and later settled by European colonizers who built industries around the area’s natural resources, such as timber, iron, and sand. The New Jersey Pine Barrens is home to New Jersey’s infamous cryptid, the Jersey Devil, and the mighty and talented folk duo—Jackson Pines.

MUSIC: “WE’RE FAR” PLAYS UNDER.

MICHAEL: Billboard magazine described the band’s sound as “a unique lyrical take on life, bringing a rustic flair to the world of indie-folk slash acoustic music.” Songwriter Joe Makoviecki sings lead vocals and plays guitar and harmonica with James Black on upright bass. Jackson Pines sometimes tours as a band with guest musicians Cranston Dean—you’ll hear him during this interview—as well as Max Carmichael and James Herdman.

Jackson Pines recently released Pine Barrens Volume One, the first in a series of folk EPs highlighting New Jersey folk music. You’ll hear them talk about the album and much more in our conversation in the Pine Barrens.

A FIRE CRACKLES NEARBY. SONGBIRDS CHIRP AND TRILL. A FIRING RANGE IS HEARD IN THE DISTANCE.

MICHAEL: Describe what you see at this site.

JAMES: There's a fire about five feet from my leg. There's plenty of birds chirping. Pretty much surrounded by nature at the moment.

JOE: I can see James's house. It's an old brown house from the 1930s, and I see his shed that was given to him by our friend Jim Doyle. I can see an old pond that is dry right now. It was full for a couple years.

JAMES: The water table changed, and everything doesn't really fill up in there anymore.

CRANSTON: I'm looking at one the last places, it seems, that you realize what a beautiful nature New Jersey has.

CHARLIE THE DOG BARKS SOFTLY.

CRANSTON: And a place that I'm definitely fortunate to be spending any time at all playing music in.

MICHAEL: Please introduce yourselves.

JAMES: My name's James Black. I play upright bass in Jackson Pines.

JOE: My name is Joe Makoviecki. I sing. I play guitar and harmonica in Jackson Pines. I also write the songs.

CRANSTON: My name's Cranston Dean, and I play mandolin. I do some background harmonies, and I play some drums with Jackson Pines.

A FIRING RANGE IS HEARD IN THE DISTANCE.

MICHAEL: Where are we? And why did you want to play here?

JOE: So, we're in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. We're in the northern reaches of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And specifically, we’re in my and James's hometown, Jackson, New Jersey. And we wanna play here because this is where James lives. This is where our band has recorded our last two albums. It’s where we rehearse. It's where we do everything as a band. It's our headquarters. That's why we're here.

MICHAEL: Where in New Jersey have you lived? James?

JAMES: I've been here for my whole life. Just moved down the road a few miles.

MICHAEL: And you’ve had family that have been here for a very long time.

JAMES: Yeah. Yep. Down the road is Cassville, and we had a family general store there. My grandma, she grew up there making sandwiches, and that was there for a long time. She came down from Paterson when she was probably, like, three or four, I think. Here I am today. So, I'm just keeping the train rolling.

MICHAEL: Joe?

JOE: I grew up in Jackson since I was a kid. After that—when I was about 9, 10, my dad left my mom and had a house in Fairhaven, New Jersey. So I spent time between Jackson and Fairhaven as I grew up. And then I left the state to go to college, but then dropped out because me and James's band started traveling the country when I was 20. I lived just down the road from here and New Egypt for a year as well. And then I lived in Whiting for a couple years, which is just down the road from here as well in the Pine Barrens. And now I live out of state for the time being.

MICHAEL: Cranston?

CRANSTON: Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, up by Sandy Hook. The more I get to hang out with these guys, we play a lot with Pineland Conservancy and Albert Hall. So, meeting more and more people from The Pines has been really cool to me ‘cause it is a little a different way of living than where I’m from in Atlantic Highlands.

A SONGBIRD SINGS.

MICHAEL: At what age did you all start playing music? James?

JAMES: Probably around 13 or 12? Somewhere around there. I didn't want to play sports, so my mom made me learn an instrument. So I started with flute clarinet, and that didn't last long.

CHARLIE THE DOG PANTS. SONGBIRDS SING.

JAMES: So I got a bass, and my neighbors had a drum kit and a guitar. So we started a little band, probably around sixth grade or so.

MICHAEL: Joe?

JOE: Well, I started singing, I guess, really, really young. My dad was a musician and a music teacher, so I started singing when I was, like, 3 or something. Wanted be a musician since that age. And I started playing guitar seriously around age 10. My dad took me to his best friend, used to be the guitarist of his band. Taught me my first few chords, two lessons. Then I did the rest on the internet, looking up tabs and looking up my favorite songs. Looking at the shapes of the chords and hammering it out. By the time I was 11, I started writing some of my own songs for the first time.

MICHAEL: Nice. How about you, Cranston?

CRANSTON: Similar. Kind of a musical family and it was encouraged. So I was banging on pots and paints at an early age. I started on piano around age 11. Bit later on the songwriting and the guitar playing. Started early. Always loved it. Had a music teacher growing up that was really influential.

MICHAEL: Music big all of your lives. That's beautiful. Now, describe your music in three words to someone who has never heard it before.

CRANSTON: Honest.

JOE: Kitchen table music. ‘Cause That's what the Ridgeway family—who was a Pine Barrens family of musicians whose songs we've interpreted on our latest album—that's what they called it in the 1940s and 50s. It's what you would play right here at this fire if we were all having like lunch together, making some food on the barbecue.

MICHAEL: James, do you have any thoughts?

JAMES: I think Joe nailed it with that. Can't sum it up much better than that. It's honest. Cranston was right with that one too. I defer to those two guys.

MICHAEL: So, I grew up in Union City. It's up north. It's very concrete, not a lot of trees. It's one of the most densely populated cities in one of the most densely populated counties of the country. Embroidery capital of the world. There was embroideries there when I was growing up. The embroidery located behind my house and the diverse music blaring from the cars and the apartments are what really inspired my songwriting. Are there any Pine Barren sounds that influence the music you write?

JOE: The rhythms of work find their way into folk songs. Some of these songs that we're playing, the ones we're interpreting, have to do with the rhythms of working as a clammer on the Barnegat Bay. We do this one song, it's not on this record, it's gonna be on the next one we do, Pine Barrens Volume Two, called Clam Diggers Blues. And it's a really slow song. Like, it’s slow-for-blues, slow. We all, when we play it, are consciously trying to play it even slower than we want to be playing it. And that has to have something to do with the fact that going on the bay can be a very slow, trawling experience when you're dragging your rake through the Barnegat Bay, where shallow and your Garvey boat is in, like, two-foot water all day, but you're dragging that rake real slow. And that is in that song.

CRANSTON: I think you do get inspired by nature a lot. Like, the song “Sweetwater”—that's about creeks that you'd go swimming in around here, and they run the color of tea because they're steeped in old cedar. I've always taken that nature is a big influence.

JOE: Now that you say that—we grew up in this town, which is very wooded, especially compared to places in north Jersey and other places surrounding in the northeast in general. We grew up as this town became very, very suburban. In the 70s, it was like a chicken farmer town. Then it changed. As we grew up, things became more and more built out. The woods are getting cut down, they're building more subdivisions. So as kids and teenagers, we always grew up going out into these woods. Escaping the cul-de-sac that was in our town by walking to the end of it and going off into the woods behind our friends' houses. And we’d take our guitars, make a fire, whether we were supposed to or not. And we would sit at night and drink some beers and play some songs, and it spun out into this life that we've actually been living now since we were teenagers.

And that sound in our ears is actually on our new album, Close to Home. We have a song called “Ride,” made during the Covid lockdown. I hadn't seen James in almost six months when we finally met up to record this record right here in his house. We decided that in the jam part, instead of a guitar solo or a piano solo, we took the sounds of a party that we had had right before the lockdown happened. I had all this footage on a camera of 25 people in James's house. It was the last show we played everything locked down. So we took all those sounds and made it into a collage of just voices. People go—Hey, what's going on?

It’s not literally the sound of a woodpecker or a tree frog, even though you hear frogs in the distance, and we do love those sounds—we did up with them. But it's the voices of people escaping the banality of the cul-de-sac, subdivision culture, and hanging out in the woods at night with a bunch of your friends. That is our version of the sounds of our growing up in the pines.

MICHAEL: If you can get into a time machine, go to any point in Pine Barren's history with your instruments, of course. Where and when would you go back to and why?

JOE: That’s such a good question.

JAMES: Wow.

JOE: Like, to hear what was the music they playing in Kiers Mills—now it's a nature preserve in Jackson—Kiers Mills in the 1800s, they had fiddle contests. And people would come all around and meet up. And they would have throwdowns, like, who was the most badass fiddle player. Someone from North Jersey Appalachians would come. Somebody down from the Cape may, like, flatlands come. Someone would come from, like, Gloucester County. And they'd decide, right then and there, who is best based on, like, crowd reaction.

CRANSTON: Devil went down to Jackson.

JOE: Yeah. That idea isn't just a concept in the South. It's a folk tradition. So, I'd like to be witness to one of those nights. Kiers’ Mills—fiddle battle and seeing if any of the tunes that we've heard on these recordings that we're studying if they were around at that time.

CRANSTON: And what ones were around that got lost.

JOE: And bringing, like, a little recorder and bring the field recording back. That's what would break the space-time continuum, though. You can go, but you can't bring back the recording. The thing would be erased when you get back probably.

MICHAEL: How about you, Cranston?

CRANSTON: Maybe Merce Ridgeway’s time and being able to hang out at Albert Hall when it was just a hunting shack.

JOE: Mmm.

JAMES: Mmm.

CRANSTON: The home place days—that probably would've been really cool.

JOE: Albert Music Hall in Waretown is where the tradition of Pine Barrens folk music and country music lives on. They have a concert every single week. We play there two, three times a year. It began as an informal hangout with the Albert brothers, who had a hunting shack out in the woods in Forked River. And people would meet up and play folk music. Fiddle music, banjo music, old-timey, ragtime music. Show tunes sometimes, believe it or not. That's like the 60s. And Merce Ridgeway Jr—his music is what most of our new record consists his family repertoire—he started playing folk them out there. They were older gentlemen, had older friends, and Merce was in his, like, 20s, early 30s. They started having weekly hangouts, and they learned a lot of music and had a great time. Eventually, it got so popular they had to shut it down because kids coming and partying and trashing the yard.

CRANSTON: I think that would've been a fun time to be around playing music. Or 2007 or ‘08, whenever you guys were drinking beer out in the woods here. That would've been a fun time to show up.

MICHAEL: James?

JAMES: I think I'd like to be here. This used to be a working cranberry farm. The home I live in now is a home for the workers, but it's been added on since. You can see the original layout of the house when you're in the living room where the wood stove is. I think it'd be cool to see this place doing its thing back in the heyday.

MICHAEL: You like to introduce new instruments to your repertoire. Is there an instrument you'd like to feature that you haven't?

JOE: When we first started as Jackson Pines, we were transitioning out of our earlier band. And one thing that James did a lot was play key slide acoustic guitar, kinda Dobro style, but it wasn’t a metal guitar. I'd like to bring that back.

JAMES: I still got it. Gotta maybe change the strings, but yeah, that'd be cool.

CRANSTON: I could stand to see pedal steel guitar or uilleann pipes if we were doing a slow folk ballad.

JOE: The uilleann pipes are an Irish version of the bagpipes that are smaller and sweeter. Steel guitar is being worked on as we speak. A member that plays us at some of our bigger shows, Max Carmichael—James gave him his steel guitar, and if anyone's gonna learn it, it's going to be this guy. On this new record alone, he plays the octave mandolin, which is larger and deeper. And he plays the banjo, and he plays the wooden flute.

CRANSTON: And the Shruti box, which is a drone instrument.

JOE: With his foot at the same time as he plays the flute. So, this guy is gonna be the one who's probably gonna feature some new instruments over the next year, for sure.

MICHAEL: James?

JAMES: I'm excited to see what Max does with the pedal steel. He's had that a few months now, so he is probably already a wizard on it. And bringing back the other slide guitar, the acoustic slide, would be cool. Yeah, pipes, anything really.

THEME MUSIC TRANSITION.

MICHAEL: Tune in next week to hear Joe, James, and Cranston talk about the music community in the Pine Barrens. And now, enjoy “Depression Song,” written by Merce Ridgway Senior and performed by Jackson Pines.

TRANSITION SOUNDS.

JOE: This is called “Depression Song” by Merce Ridgway Senior. He wrote it in the early 1940s about the 1920s in the Pine Barrens. It goes like this.

MUSIC: “DEPRESSION SONG” LIVE IN THE PINE BARRENS.

JOE:
Things were mighty tough down in the Pines in 1929
Set in the city for a bowl of soup, city folk waiting in line
FDR sent me down some Jack, sent me down some hobnail boots
Folks started dancing on Saturday night, my how the splinters flew

JOE & CRANSTON:
‘Cause they had good times with those bad times
And a lot of making-do-with-what-they-had times
No money to spend, holes in their shoes
But I never heard nobody singing the blues

JOE:
I used to work ten hours in the cranberry bog
for a long green dollar bill
Folks don’t know how we survived
and I guess they never will
You get your flour in a bag
with your tater in a sack
A big yellow onion, too.
Walk in the woods with your daddy’s shotgun
Got the making of a deer meat stew

JOE & CRANSTON:
Oh, we had good times with those bad times
And a lot of making-do-with-what-we-had times
No money to spend, holes in our shoes
But I never heard nobody singing the blues

JOE:
Oh, early in the spring when the weather got warm
And the catfish started to bite
Ya just dig a little hole, and you pull up worms
And then you go, and you fish all night
Smoke home roll, a nickel a sack
And then you tell a lot of lies
Put some ol' pitch pine into the stove
And yourself an ol’ fish fry, baby

JOE & CRANSTON:
Oh, we had good times with those bad times
And a lot of making-do-with-what-we-had times
No money to spend, holes in our shoes
But I never heard nobody singing the blues
But I never heard nobody singing the blues

SONGBIRDS SING.

CRANSTON: What did you do?

JAMES: Jesus.

LAUGHTER.

JOE: Well done, Charlie.

MUSIC: SONGS ON SITE THEME (INSTRUMENTAL) PLAYS UNDER.

MICHAEL: Thanks for listening to Songs on Site. I’m your host, Michael Aquino. Songs on Site producers are Michael Aquino and Dania Ramos for Cocotazo Media; and Ed Magdziak and Alice Magdziak for You Don’t Know Jersey. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you’d like to hear bonus content with the featured musicians, you can unlock it by supporting us at Patreon dot com slash Cocotazo M.

MUSIC: SHIFT IN THEME MUSIC (INSTRUMENTAL) CONTINUES UNDER.

ALICE: Audio editing, design, mixing, and theme song by Michael Aquino. Story editing, script writing, and additional audio editing by Dania Ramos.

The featured musicians were Joe Makoviecki, James Black, and Cranston Dean of Jackson Pines. “Depression Song” was written by Merce Ridgway Senior and performed by Joe on guitar, harmonica, and lead vocals; James on upright bass; and Cranston on mandolin and backing vocals. Learn more about Jackson Pines and their recent release, Pine Barrens, Volume One at Jackson Pines dot com. You can find a link to their website and our website in the show notes.

This episode was recorded at the home of James Black in Jackson, New Jersey, and was produced in Essex County, New Jersey. Both locations are situated on the traditional territory of the Leni Lenape people.

As always, thanks for listening.

KIDS ON A PLAYGROUND. A CAR PASSES BY. CRICKETS ON A SUMMER NIGHT.

SONGBIRDS SING.

JOE: See, it's like a human head. Look at this microphone.

CRANSTON: No way.

JOE: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

CRANSTON: That’s awesome.

JAMES: Wow.