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PINE BARRENS VOLUME ONE, OUT EVERYWHERE JANUARY 27TH
"The Unquiet Grave" is the second single from our new album, and is perhaps the cornerstone of this project. A very old song about dealing with grief.
The lyric goes back as far as 1400CE England, and the music we sourced was recorded in Ocean County, NJ in the 1930's. Its journey from where it began to where we found it is one of the reasons we made this album.
This tune is referred to as a Child Ballad. It's not a song for children, and is not a song about children. Far from it. In the 1800s, Francis Child spent his career collecting 305 English and Scottish ballads, writing down every version of every one he could find. Although many ballads have been found in NJ, No. 78 had only been found in Newfoundland and Kentucky, until...
This song was heard by songcatcher Herbert Halpert in 1937, when an 82 year old man by the name of Allen Clevenger sang his version of this song in Magnolia, NJ, a town that no longer exists. He said he learned it from his mother-in-law, Mrs. Grover, who grew up in Colliers Mills, where we grew up fishing with our dads in our hometown.
The melody was different from the many Appalachian versions we had heard, and so we created our own arrangement around the melody and devised this interpretation. We felt the flute a correct addition for a tune that also goes by "Cold blows the wind."
Our version continues the tradition by applying the Pine Barrens melody to an older version of the lyrics, with accompaniment created by us in the Pine Barrens in 2022. Quite the story.
lyrics
'The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.
‘I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.’
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?’
‘Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.’
‘You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
‘Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
‘The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.’
credits
released January 27, 2023
Produced by Jackson Pines.
Engineered by John Sell.
Mixed and Mastered by The Phantom.
The Boghouse, Jackson, NJ.
Joe Makoviecki - vocals, guitar
James Black - stand-up bass
Cranston Dean - vocals
Max Carmichael - wooden flute
Single art: From "Folklore Songs of The United States"
Special thanks to Dorothea Dix Lawrence, whose book Folklore Songs of the United States we used to research the Pine Barrens variation of this ballad and who put Pine Barrens folk music "on the map", literally.
New Album "Pine Barrens, Volume One" and single "Wheel" out now!
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"A cross between Mississippi John Hurt-like country blues and Paul Simonesque folk-rock." - The Aquarian
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