Back Road Joe knows what it means to be poor.
The folk singer, whose non-stage name is Joe McCay, will appear at the Secaucus Senior Center on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. to raise money for the town’s food pantry.
The 56-year-old McCay grew up at the end of the pig farm era in Secaucus, just before the New Jersey Turnpike paved over many of the farms.
“Our farm was on Secaucus Road,” he recalled during a telephone interview last week.
His stage name is derived from the nickname many residents of Secaucus call the southern portion of town, Back Road.
Although poverty then, like now, often existed side by side with relative prosperity during McCay’s upbringing, “Many of the farmers were well off,” he pointed out. It was the workers on his farm that painted a portrait of poverty most people now cannot imagine.
Characters like “Chicken and Shorty and Cockeyed Joe,” from one of McCay’s songs, were old men he called the Swiner Priests, the men who cleaned out pig stables for a small stipend. Many of these men originated in Poland, came to America as workers on ships, and were often abandoned here. Over time, they wound up in places like the Bowery, homeless souls whom the pig farmers recruited for work.
“I saw their faces through the eyes of a child at play,” one of McCay’s songs recalled. “Those saddened smiles as they went their way through the junkyards of humanity. That’s where they roamed in a pair of rubber boots that they wore till they died alone.”
“There were a lot of poor around where I worked,” McCay said. “My father hired a few on our farm.”
Although such people had real names, McCay knew them by their nicknames, which nearly everybody on the Back Road had. McCay recalled that these people used to boil their own grease to make soap, an image of poverty that still remained fixed in his mind.
In his autobiographical song “Back Road Joe,” McCay sings that he “was born on a pig farm down on Secaucus Road, near the banks of Penhorn Creek.”
In this song, Back Road Joe’s father advises him to work his “hands to the bone,” to get up early when the sun starts to shine, and to get home after dark. He warns him against “gambling and running wild,” and not to get drunk and never get married.
McCay said the Back Road was an unusual place, full of pig farms and saloons, where workers often drowned their sorrows in whiskey.
But it is a Secaucus that is difficult to find now, he said.
“There’s not much to look for,” he said with a laugh, recalling a truck farm he worked for where the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicle Inspection Center is now, and another farm across Secaucus Road where Meadowlands Ford is.
“I went to school and worked the farms after school for spending money,” he recalled. “There were a lot of characters working those farms, and some of my songs are about the characters I met there.”
He remembered other kids whose families suffered divorce or alcoholic fathers. He remembered people struggling to keep off welfare.
“But we wanted to work. We wanted to emulate the older men, those who had worked very hard all their lives,” he said. “In those days, you had kids 12 and 13 years old driving tractors.”
Music of the pig farms
As the son of a Polish family, McCay’s early musical endeavors involved playing polkas and the accordion. But his older brother soon introduced him to folk music, and he was particularly taken by a group called The Kingston Trio.
For a time, he even delved into rock and roll, playing with other locals in places like Union City from about 1964 to 1966. But folk was always his true love, and he gravitated more towards music like the songs of Woody Guthrie.
“It was very spiritual,” he said.
Yet he also heeded his father’s advice about working hard and – after testing the waters of numerous professions – became the owner of his own trash truck firm.
“The job paid well if you can stand the smell,” one of his songs says, “especially in the summer heat.”
Once music got into his blood, however, he could not shed it completely, and around 1993, McCay heard that one of his heroes, John Stewart from the Kingston Trio, was holding a songwriting workshop in New York State. McCay could not resist.
McCay said Stewart wrote a lot of songs about people he’d met during his life, and when McCay mentioned growing up in the Secaucus pig farms, “John told me I must have a lot of songs.”
McCay went out onto the open mic circuit, playing these songs and developing a reputation among the coffeehouse crowd.
“Not all the material comes from those days,” he said. “But I when I began to sing those, people really got into them. I was very surprised.”
This is not McCay’s first visit home. Last year, he paid a musical visit to the First Reform Church when his CD was released.
The Social Services Department asked him to come back this year as part of the annual fundraiser for the food pantry, and he said yes.
“We heard his CD and thought people would love to hear him,” said Karyn Urtnowski, director of Social Services. “He has some catchy tunes and they are very nostalgic.”
The event costs $20 at the Senior Center, 101 Centre Ave. For more information, call (201) 330-2014.