His fingers move effortlessly over the fretboard, his body language as relaxed and soothing as his voice. In his white cowboy hat, Brick resident Jim Murphy, 75, may not look quintessentially Jersey, but he embraces his home state, singing in one of his country-inflected tunes, “Go New Jersey/and you’ll be sure to find/a people great/who give the state a Jersey state of mind.” Last summer, Murphy became the first New Jerseyan inducted into America’s Old Time Country Music Hall of Fame. His band of 40 years is called the Pine Barons, and the group’s latest CD, Go New Jersey, is packed with tributes, such as “The Garden State Waltz.”
The state embraces him in return. Brick declared August 31 “Jim Murphy Day,” his induction was recognized by the state legislature, the governor, and the Ocean County Board of Freeholders, and next April, the New Jersey Folk Festival will honor him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Music filled the Plainfield home where this son of Irish immigrants grew up. His mother sang around the house, and his father plunked a jaws harp and listened to country music. In 1950, he spotted a dime lying on the Seaside Heights boardwalk, placed it on number 27 at the nearest arcade and won himself his first instrument—a ukulele.
Drafted into the Army soon after, Murphy spent much of his two-year hitch stationed in Panama, listening to Hank Williams and other greats with his fellow soldiers. Back in Jersey with his wife, Shelagh, and six children, music—“not just bluegrass, or gospel, or country, or mountain music, but all of that wrapped up, the country-western sound”—permeated his life, even as he worked as a teacher and administrator in nearby schools. In 1963, he started a radio show, “The Folk Concert,” on Asbury Park’s WJLK, which gave him his first opportunities to perform in public. And in 1969, he founded his band. The faces of the Barons have changed over the years, with a couple dozen string pluckers rotating in, but the band Murphy headlines still performs at local events and festivals.
Murphy got a thrill—and a flashback to his Army days—in 1999, when Gov. Christie Whitman invited him to join her in Panama as the battleship New Jersey steamed through the canal on its way to Camden from Washington State. There, he sang “Welcome Home, Big J,” a song he wrote when he heard the ship was returning to Jersey and “the inspiration bug bit.”