NJN and music hall were perfect together

As New Jersey Network faces the threat of being turned over to private ownership, hanging in the balance is a plan that has been evolving over the past year for the rebroadcast of a historic television series on bluegrass music from 1977 to which I had the honor of contributing as scriptwriter, narrator, and producer-for-stage, roles similar to the ones I played as host and producer of weekly shows at the Englishtown Music Hall in the mid- to late-1970s.

Praised in The New York Times and New Jersey’s main newspapers, the eight-part series that emerged from this first-ever bluegrass festival created specially for television was called “Bluegrass at the Englishtown Music Hall.” Taped live and on location at the hall in two nights of live performances by 14 musical groups, it was broken into eight half-hour programs with one show airing each week on what was then called New Jersey Public Television (NJPTV) and on the public stations of the Eastern Educational Network (EEN) in 1978 and 1979.

Thanks to having a public station willing to take the leap into a musical field that was then attracting hundreds of thousands of Americans to outdoor festivals all across the country while being ignored by network TV, viewers in New Jersey and EEN member states were treated to weekly broadcasts by more than a dozen top masters of “pickin’ and singin’ bluegrassstyle,”

Featured were Texas-born fiddler Tex Logan (a resident of Madison, N.J., and a mathematician at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill); Ricky Skaggs, a 14-time Grammy winner, then age 23 with his very first band Boone Creek; and bands from Ohio, California, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Delaware, Massachusetts and Kentucky, plus New Jersey bands from Point Pleasant and Mendham, and the Greengrass Cloggers, a 16- member dance troupe from North Carolina.

Since the discovery last year that the original audio and video masters for the show exist and are in mint condition, efforts have been under way at NJN to find funding for rebroadcasting the series and to develop a new show looking back at the music hall’s history and at performers from the show today. With the changes taking place at the station and an undetermined future, these plans have been put on indefinite hold.

Would privatization of NJN mean the end of original New Jersey programming like this, and make the station’s programming indistinguishable from that of the network stations?

Would new management of the station have respect for the archive of past NJN productions such as the Englishtown series and would the NJN archive even survive in private hands?

For me, New Jersey’s not-forprofit broadcasting organization showed more than 30 years ago that a state-run public station could equal and even surpass the forprofit networks in quality, originality, and content.

Furthermore, “Englishtown” happened in New Jersey. It was audiences from New Jersey that made the music hall a place of renown.

Without a channel like NJN that broadcasts hour upon hour of firstclass programming on New Jersey events, people, and cultures, the purely New Jersey phenomenon of bluegrass at Englishtown, which would surely not have been aired on the New York or Philadelphia stations, would not have made it to television at all.

Watching from Ohio, I’ll be hoping that the people of New Jersey and their elected officials will not let public broadcasting at NJN go down.

And hoping, too, that the idea of rebroadcasting “Bluegrass at the Englishtown Music Hall” survives the current production slowdown at NJN so people can get to see the caliber of entertainment that public television once famously brought to them and get a sense of what, if allowed to go on, public television can continue to bring them today!
Geoff Berne
proprietor and host
Englishtown Music Hall
1975-1979
Hamilton, Ohio