Jim Murphy thanks God he's a country boy
Brick man looks back on lifetime love of country music
BY PATRICIA A. MILLER Staff Writer
So how does an Irish kid born and raised in Plainfield end up in America's Old Time CountryMusic Hall of Fame?

America's Old Time Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Jim Murphy prepares to tune up his guitar at his home in Brick Township. Murphy and his band, Jim Murphy and the Pine Barons, will celebrate their 40th year in 2008.

It all began when Jim Murphy was a boy back in the late 1930s. He would hunker down next to the family's radio and tune into WAAT, out of Newark. The station had just started to play a smattering of country and western music.

There the boy would sit mesmerized, as he soaked up the sounds of singers like Roy Acuff, Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family.

"It was the old-time country sound of the '30s and '40s," said Murphy, 75, of Brick. "I really loved it. It was just starting to grow around the country. The first time I ever heard it, man, I just loved it."

He couldn't get enough of the melodies, the simplicity and the stories of country and bluegrass music. And he realized at a young age he had a gift.

In high school his friends called him "Murphy the Hillbilly."

"I had an innate gift, a blessing, to remember words," Murphy said. "I could hear a song maybe two times and remember it. It would just stick in my head. Everybody has a blessing. That's mine. Music."

He founded Jim Murphy and the Pine Barons in 1969. They have been playing in Albert Music Hall in Waretown for almost 40 years.

And the man who has written many songs during his lifetime doesn't know a note of music.

"I don't know one note from another," he said. "All I know is chords."

Jim Murphy was inducted into the Hall of Fame on Aug. 28, the only New Jerseyan to ever achieve that distinction.

The walls of his study in his Brick Township home he shares with his wife Shelagh are studded with proclamations from politicians - the Ocean County Board of Freeholders, the Brick Township Council, both branches of the New Jersey State Legislature - all honoring him for his induction.

"But I'm most in awe of this," he said, as he pointed to St. Dominic R.C. Church's weekly bulletin.

"They put me right in the church bulletin," he said with a smile.

His country music career was born in 1950, on the Seaside Heights boardwalk. Murphy and a friend were walking the boards when he spotted a dime. He picked it up and played the number 27 on a boardwalk amusement. He walked away with a ukulele.

Forty years later, Murphy and the band had just finished a performance at Albert Hall when a man approached him.

"He said, 'Do you remember me? I was the guy who was with you the night you found the dime,' " Murphy recalled.

Jim Murphy can do an Irish brogue that rivals Barry Fitzgerald in "Going My Way." But most often, you'll hear a twang from the hills in his voice.

He didn't spend much time in the hills. He and Shelagh married young. He was 20, she was 19. Together they had seven children, including a baby who died in infancy. They have 13 grandchildren.

The Murphys still live in the same home they moved to in 1960, when the children were young.

"Five traffic lights in town," he says of that long ago Brick Township.

Murphy went to Seton Hall at night on the G.I. Bill after he returned from two years in theArmy during the KoreanWar.

He earned a bachelor's degree in education and went on to teach for several years. By 1960, he was the teacher/principal at the Bay Head School. That was followed by teaching stints at the Ocean Road School in Point Pleasant and in Brielle.

In 1963, Dick Lewis, the radio voice of WJLK, Asbury Park, suggested Murphy do a weekly show on country music. He played and told stories on his show for years.

Murphy earned a master's degree in school administration from Rutgers University in 1966. He came to the Brick Township School district in 1969, where he and Brick icon Warren Wolf both served as assistant superintendents.

He stayed in Brick for almost 25 years, and retired in 1993.

"I've done nothing but music since I retired," Murphy said. "It's been a blessing."

The walls of his study are lined with pictures of Murphy with some of country music's legends - Tom T. Hall. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton.

A 1970 photo features a grinning Murphy with a string tie posing with a shorthaired, tie-wearing Willie Nelson at the then-Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel.

HankWilliams, the country music icon who died at 29, is his hero. A Hank Williams bobblehead sits on Murphy's desk. A copy of the latest Hank Williams Fan Club Newsletter is on a nearby table.

He can talk about Hank Williams and the singer's short, troubled life for hours.

"It's the whole persona," Murphy said. "His music, the way he sings it, the message of it. The first time I ever heard his voice I said, 'Wow!' "

Murphy and his band's latest record is "Go New Jersey," an ode to his beloved home state that includes songs like "Jersey Blue," "Forked River Mountain," "Chatsworth Town," "Lenni-Lenape," "Run Molly, Run" and the "Garden State Waltz."

The inside jacket of the CD is dedicated to Murphy's parents, Dominick and Julia Dyer Murphy, who left County Mayo in Ireland in the 1920s for a new life in New Jersey.

"They brought with them a great love for life, for each other, and a deep love of music," Murphy wrote in the liner notes. "I can see Pop sitting by the radio with his 'jaws harp' playing along, and hear Mom going around the house making the beds, singing as she went … She left her lilt to me and it's a joy that I can share with you in these songs."

JimMurphy- singer, songwriter, musicologist, humorist, husband, father, grandfather, former teacher and school administrator - has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

"I'll keep on rolling until the wheels fall off the wagon," he said.

Jim Murphy and the Pine Barons are slated to perform at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 26 at the Albert Music Hall inWaretown and at noon Feb. 10 at the hall for a bluegrass festival.

For more information, call (732) 892- 1466, or send an e-mail to Jim Murphy at jimmurpb@verizon.net.