From Where?

Song 276: For this week’s playlist track, you can hear I’m From New Jersey by John Gorka, who also wrote the song.  Once again it comes around to seven weeks since my last personal friend song post, and in this case, I’d probably more accurately call John a friend of a friend. From the late ‘80s up through the mid-‘90s, I moved through the same folk circles as him, and a number of my singer/songwriter friends knew John well. We met occasionally, and were quite friendly, though I’m not sure that he would recognize my name, but I well remember once playing a short set at Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse in Bethlehem, PA, (a set that included Under the Table, which is the latest lyric video from the Who Said What CD to be posted on my YouTube channel), and John had good things to say about my songs after the set, which made me feel pretty good. I saw John perform in a number of settings, from intimate coffeehouse rooms to expansive outdoor festival stages, and he often sang this tune, which never failed to please the crowd. Doing it live, he would often draw out a few of the funnier lines, for comic effect, and it worked every time, bringing smiles and laughter to the entire audience. The line about which exit would often get a smile from people in the area around NJ because residents from the state would regularly refer to their home area by exit number rather than place name, which is a phenomenon I never encountered anywhere else. I’m not from New Jersey, but I have lived there for a few stretches, and somehow I could never remember what number my exit was, though maybe that happened because I sometimes took different routes, and I often caught the train when and where I could do so. There were a few different ways to get to Maplehurst Farms, where I lived when I recorded As Long As Merle is Still Haggard, and where my friend Gabriel Lopez shot the scenes for the Merle song video that included my landlord Herb, but not long after we shot the video, he sold the place, and now Maplehurst Farms is just a set of soulless McMansions, or Houses in the Fields, as John would have called them. When I lived on that farm, at least one of the other tenants referred to it as paradise, and I felt it was a very special place to live, like a hidden island of country surrounded by clueless suburbia, but the For Sale sign was already up before I moved out, so I didn’t expect too much. These days, if I drive down to the end of Maplehurst Lane in Piscataway, I don’t like what I see, but the old Maplehurst Farms ended, and so I have to adjust. Somehow, I think John would understand.