Jackson Pines | Pine Barrens

JACKSON PINES | PINE BARRENS

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. We’re back this week with the second half of my interview with Jackson Pines. If you haven’t heard the first part, go back and listen to that episode before continuing with this one. Go ahead. You know we’ll wait.

MUSIC: “WE’RE FAR” PLAYS UNDER.

MICHAEL: In part two of my interview with Joe, James, and Cranston, we dive deep into the Pine Barrens music community, past and present, and the commonalities of New Jersey music across genres. Let’s get to it.

A FIRE CRACKLES NEARBY. AT TIMES, BIRDS CHIRP & CHARLIE THE DOG PANTS.

MICHAEL: Describe the current music community in the Pine Barrens. And how has its history influenced today's musicians from the area?

JOE: It took a long time for us to really figure out what Pine Barren's music was and what it sounded like because so much of what gets played around here is a lot of country music from, like, Nashville. If you go to a bar in the Pine Barrens, you're more likely to hear someone singing Johnny Cash than singing Merce Ridgeway. In fact, Albert Hall, a large amount of the musicians play things like Garth Brooks and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. That's the history of American country music and that's part of what Albert Hall is there for. But over the last couple years, we've noticed there's more people—not just us—that are playing the Pine Barren's repertoire. And a lot of them play at Albert Music Hall. That's the place to go if anyone is interested in hearing the historical music you're not gonna get it all night, every night. But if you go once a month for a couple months, you will find some of these artists. There is Red Bird. She's an amazing singer and is now interpreting a bunch of old tunes, some of the ones that we don't do.

Albert Hall had two anchor bands that really helped start this whole movement in the 70s of bringing back this older music. And one was the Pine Hawkers, and that was Merce Ridgeway Junior's band. That's what we've been interpreting on this first record. His dad had the first-generation Pine Hawkers in the 40s, so he was bringing back their old music, songs they wrote, songs they just played that were old folk tunes, and then Merce Junior wrote some of his own. The other side were the Pineconers. Pineconers had Sammy Hunt, who's like a legendary garvey builder, which is like the clamming boat in the Barnegat Bay. He built banjos. James has a CD of him playing some tunes and they were called the Pineconers.

JOE: So you have these two lineages of bands. It was gone for a few decades and now over the last couple years—not just us—more and more people are playing the older tunes again and interpreting them and keeping them alive, and we're starting to record them again as well.

MICHAEL: That's so important to have. And the changing nature of New Jersey in general, even driving here, there's all these subdivisions that are popping up and storage units and things like that.

JOE: Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: And it's easy for that music history erased.

JOE: Right.

MICHAEL: And it's fantastic that you guys are actually trying to preserve that. There's not many people doing it in New Jersey. And it’s probably gonna become tougher and tougher the further we get away from that history.

JOE: Absolutely. I always thought New Jersey country music was a bunch people who heard the radio, and were just doing what they heard coming from Nashville and Texas, and it's really not. Those same influences that influenced Nashville and Texan music were already influencing east coast musicians before. Because people had been living there longer. So the folkway traditions were established first. It's not to say that it's not original what happened out further west, it was all coming from the same tradition of English, Irish, Scottish, and Black music, and Indigenous music mixing in this old land—people thought they were in a new land—but they were in old land, and all these folkways started folding together. And it just so happens that you can write a country song about being on the bay clamming.

CRANSTON: Working in a cranberry bog, like, those are very country things to do.

JOE: Those are the folkways of everyday life and, you know, picking the guitar that way, which I kind of am lifting off of a Merce Junior recording is not just a thing you do in South Carolina and in Mississippi. It's something that people have done when you're in lowlands across the country for hundreds of years. When you're down by the lowlands, people tend to pick the guitar a certain lilting way. And when you go up into the highlands, people tend to really slam on those banjos and guitars a little harder with a higher pitch. And there's examples that break all those rules. I would argue that what we're playing is not a copy of Mississippi or North Carolina music. We're all playing lowland Atlantic music or Gulf music.

CRANSTON: And you kind of Piedmont pick a lot, and that gets his name from the Piedmont Region.

JOE: Which we have.

CRANSTON: Of which Jersey is a part of. So, I mean, Piedmont picking is a stylistic thing that has been all over the country in so many different kinds of music now. But it's named after a region that we're a part of.

MICHAEL: There are 1.1 million acres in the Pinelands in New Jersey.

JOE: Yes, sir.

MICHAEL: We’re pretty far north in that area. What are some of the regional differences within these 1.1 million acres?

JOE: When you think of the deep pines, you think of nothing but pitch pine and cedar. But where we are in the northern reaches of the Pine Barrens, there's a lot more oak trees. So most people from south Pine Barrens would say, this is not really the Pines. But it truly ‘cause it actually goes up, even though it's not protected this far north, the Pine Barrens actually goes as far north as Neptune, almost Asbury Park, believe it or not.

MICHAEL: It's wild.

JAMES: I work with a lot of guys from down there, and it's almost comparable to people, like, living in the Carolinas or somewhere in the south. They kind of have a different way of going about their day. You know, you come up here, everybody's freaking out trying to get A to Z. And down there, they'll spend all day cooking a piece of pork, and that'll be their whole day.

JOE: I do notice that people from north Jersey are surprised sometimes when they go down further south in the Pine Barrens that it feels very much less like what they think Jersey is. Big tracks of nothing where there's not even a crossroad with a light for about 20 minutes. It is a more insular and introspective kind of lifestyle. And there's a distrust too down there of outsiders. Again, we are kids that grew up in the suburbs in the northern reaches of the pines. But we would never, like, call ourselves pineys. Not because we don't wanna be, but because we respect that culture and that lifestyle. And for a hundred years, they were treated less than by the state government. And by communities that surrounded them. They're the warmest people in the world and the kindest folk, and they are loving, but they just don't want people coming in and trashing the woods, or they don't want people coming and trading on their name. It's a beautiful place. You wanna respect it, come on down.

MICHAEL: What is it about Pine Barren's music—music with a very localized sound that makes it universal?

JOE: It's universal in the way that it's just about people living their lives trying to survive. People singing about working at that cranberry bog or being in love and it not working, or a song about getting over grief because people die and it's really sad. There's songs about looking to your community. There's songs about working hard, not as a means to get money, but as a means of just getting through your day in survival. And I think that'll always be central—whether it's punk music folk music, or pop music, frankly.

MICHAEL: James, do you have any thoughts?

JAMES: Pretty much that. It's getting by day to day, making due with what you have or don't have. And going from there and seeing where it takes you. And trying to make the best outta things.

CRANSTON: I don't think folk music necessarily means acoustic instruments and certain traditions, I think hip-hop is folk music right up and down. It's telling a story, and it's talking about, like, what you were saying, Joe, about just people getting through life. It, kind of, sprung out in a time where we didn't have the connectivity that we have today, for better or worse. That was a really viable way to spend time with people that you enjoy spending time. It always has throughout history, just making music. And I think with, uh, the folk music that we've been visiting from the Pinelands, it's the closest collection of songs geographically to where I live personally. So it's really nice to have that affirmation like — Oh yeah, Jersey people they've lived just the same as everyone else.

JOE: Like Cranston said, this is something that we have a hand in this tradition, we're allowed to take it up and interpret it, and help keep it alive. All these people before us did, and many of them are now no longer with us. To give breath to an old song is, like, the ultimate form of immortality.

CRANSTON: You have to keep giving the song CPR every—

JOE: Yes.

CRANSTON: —every so many decades. We definitely hope that it's not just in the local conversation or the regional conversation. But, you know, there's a lot of great American folk music, and we argue that these songs Jersey can be added to that conversation.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Now, taking this a step further, do you think New Jersey music has a sound? And, if so, what is that Jersey sound to you?

JOE: I think it definitely has a sound. Its sound is less related to instrumentation or less to an exact form of orchestration. But it absolutely has to do with a delivery method. We have to remember, we're performers. We are like restoration carpenters of songs, right? Keeping these old edifices—not exact— but, like, in the right style interpretation.

But at the end of the day too, we're just performers. It's the delivery of it. It's what's in common between someone like Frank Sinatra and the Misfits. There's something similar in the way it's delivered to you. It's in the presentation, it's in the love you into the thing. I think people in Jersey like the everyperson, the common man. Something about the work ethic of being some kind of blue-collar aesthetic that is self-aware and has a sense of humor, and doesn't take itself too seriously.

MICHAEL: Cranston?

CRANSTON: It's a delivery and it's an attitude. And we’re in a state full of performers. That guy that's always at that one pizza shop and is always like, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a performance to him. And I think that mixed with—you had mentioned you're growing up Michael and you had this cacophony of all these great different sounds. You can't really get away from that in New Jersey and I think that's a beautiful thing. Like, SZA, that woman is as Jersey as it comes. And then like Ace Enders and The Early November, that's New Jersey just the same. And the songs, a lot of the times they're singing nice, sweet songs, but there's this attitude to it. When all the states around you hate you—you just band together Jersey.

JOE: Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: All right. Tell us about your upcoming album.

JOE: The newest record that we released earlier this year is Pine Barrens Volume One. And it's a collection of songs from around here. Some as old as the 1700s that came with the early colonists. And songs, actually, a fiddle tune that's as new as the 2010s. But is a Pine Barrens fiddle tune through and through that we included on the record. And we just recently got vinyl of it. So you guys can check out our website, jackson pines dot com. And we'll eventually, we're gonna have a vinyl release concert for it.

In addition to that, just recently, we released our new single. And that's our first original song that we've put out in about two years since our last full-length Close to Home. And that's a new song called “Wheel.” And the first single off a record that we're gonna be releasing a new single every three months or every two months, throughout the year. It'll eventually be part of a collection of ten songs that will be called “Wheel” as well. Right now, just that first single is out and that's our newest recording and one of the tunes we're gonna play you today.

MICHAEL: That's a great way to transition. Are you guys ready to play some music in the Pine Barrens?

JOE: Absolutely.

MICHAEL: Let's do it.

THEME MUSIC TRANSITION.

MICHAEL: And now, enjoy “Wheel,” written by Joe Makoviecki and performed by Jackson Pines.

BIRDS SING.

JOE: This is “Wheel.” It’s our new original single out now everywhere. 1, 2, 3.

MUSIC: “WHEEL” LIVE IN THE PINE BARRENS.

JOE:
God damn, this wheel don’t roll anymore
Feel we’re always stuck in no time
Hold me, I know you will
Anyway, don't let me down

JOE & CRANSTON:
Don’t let the whistle whine
Let off it the chain for once
Hound dog sniffing through southern pines
Let me get what I want, or let me go

Let the wheel
Roll along
Let it roll down the street
Let the wheel roll, oooh
Let it roll, right over me

JOE:
And when times get tough
Who will speak the silent word?
Or love you on a rainy day?
It’ll be me in the storm

JOE & CRANSTON:
And when your eyes went dark
So you didn’t have to feel
I only cried because I cared
You were scared
But you spun the wheel

Let it roll
Roll right on
Let it just roll to the sea
Let the wheel roll, oooh
Let it roll, right over me

CHARLIE THE DOG BARKS SOFTLY. BIRDS SING.

CRANSTON: Tell them Charlie-woo. Tell them.

MICHAEL: That was perfect.

JOE: That was perfection.

MICHAEL: That was great.

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. We’ll be back in two weeks with the next episode of Songs on Site.

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. “Wheel” was written by Joe Makoviecki. You heard 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.

As always, thanks for listening.

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

FIRE CRACKLES. BIRDS SING.

JOE: Yep.

JAMES: That was like 2012, or something.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah.

JOE: Yeah. That was really fun.

MICHAEL: You guys were young, man.

JOE: Yeah. That was fun.

MICHAEL: I mean, you're still young.

JOE: No, but I mean. hey, we're all young on planet Earth, man.

MICHAEL: True. True.