MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Albert Music Hall is a live country, bluegrass and folk music venue in Waretown, on the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. For nearly 40 years, the Pinelands Cultural Society (PCS) has promoted the hall as a site that preserves, fosters and honors what they call the “Sounds of the Jersey Pines” and the memory of brothers and musicians George and Joe Albert. In the 1950s the Alberts left the suburban, industrial central Jersey town of Sayreville for their Pine Barrens fox-hunting cabin, affectionately known as “the homeplace,” where they hosted weekly jam sessions. When the gatherings became too boisterous, local musicians and friends of the Alberts worked to find a location that would allow them to continue the music and spirit of the homeplace gatherings. Archival records that document the “Sounds of the Pines’ ” move from the Alberts’ cabin to an auction hall in Waretown reveal that the PCS and musician-organizers both explicitly and implicitly constructed, negotiated and defined what would become the Albert Music Hall (AMH) in terms of family and home. In this presentation I examine the early development of AMH within the context of the vernacular—primarily music and language but also material culture—that in turn ensures the AMH remains a “homeplace” in the vein of the Carter Family Fold and other “little Oprys.” I do so by looking at the repertoire of the early musicians, the lyrics some of them wrote and the language PCS and musician-organizers used in planning documents. I explore whether it is simply nostalgic or backward-looking to hark back to a “homeplace” or is it a way, especially in a place like New Jersey, to construct a sacred musical home, what Richard A. Peterson, in his book Creating Country Music, Fabricating Authenticity refers to as a “rustic alternative to modern urbanity?”