A version of this story was first published in 2022.
Eddie Rabbitt grew up in East Orange and became a country music superstar in Nashville, but never stopped being a “Jersey Boy.”
One of his lesser-known songs endures, more than a quarter-century after his death, as the tale of his improbable rise. It namechecks the Jersey Shore, Palisades, Pulaski Skyway, Clairmont Diner, Hurricane Bar in Newark and the “streets of Old East Orange,” not the usual fare of country music.
“Jersey Boy” is what Rabbitt titled his 1990 song.
“Coming out of New Jersey was unusual, for a person who became as big as he did in country music,” Michael McCall, associate director of editorial for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, told NJ Advance Media in 2022.
Rabbitt, who would have turned 84 on Nov. 27, had 26 songs that topped the country music charts between 1976 and 1989. At his peak in the early 1980s, “I Love a Rainy Night,” “Drivin’ My Life Away,” “Step by Step” and “Someone Could Lose a Heart Tonight” crossed onto the pop music charts.
Rabbitt’s duet with Crystal Gayle, “You and I,” was Billboard’s 12th most popular song in 1983. Two years later, Rabbitt performed “You and I” on TV’s “Solid Gold” with six-time Grammy Award winner Dionne Warwick, who is 11 months older than Rabbitt and also grew up in East Orange.
It was a remarkable rise for a son of Irish immigrants who was earning $50 per night singing at the Hurricane Bar in Newark before deciding that, to have any chance of being discovered, he would need to move to the nation’s unofficial capital of country music.
Ellen Emery recalled watching Rabbitt sing on weekends at the Hurricane Bar and how she and her friends got to know him, sometimes sharing meals at a diner.
“He’d sit there having breakfast, and have a napkin there, and start writing on it. He was always writing lyrics,” Emery said in 2022.
Rabbitt, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, was also acclaimed as a songwriter. His big break came in 1969, about a year after leaving New Jersey, when Elvis Presley recorded “Kentucky Rain.” He wrote Ronnie Milsap’s first No. 1 song, “Pure Love,” released in 1974.
“His writing appealed to people long before he was making hit records,” McCall said.
His first two country No. 1 hits, “Drinkin’ My Baby (Off My Mind)” and “You Don’t Love Me Anymore,” were released in 1976 and 1978.
Rabbitt is not among the 158 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, which typically inducts three members per year via an anonymous panel chosen by the Country Music Association. He might have a better chance at making the New Jersey Hall of Fame, which lets the public vote every year on dozens of nominees from a selection committee.
A spokesperson for the New Jersey Hall of Fame said in 2022 that Rabbitt had been “recommended for consideration,” but he was not among the inductees in 2023, 2024 or 2025.
“Jersey Boy,” on the album of the same name, was released eight years before Rabbitt died of cancer at 56. It opens with Rabbitt’s parents immigrating from Ireland in 1924, settling in New Jersey and buying a house “with a big front porch.”
The lyrics recount his Boy Scout master teaching him how to play the guitar, tossing snowballs with his best friend Charlie, his “first true love” Carol and the decision that changed his life.
“I remember thinking long ago when telling a bartender named Stewart / I don’t think I’ll be discovered singing country music here in Newark / So I took a Greyhound Bus on down to Nashville knocked on doors and made some friends / One opened up and I walked through and I never was the same again.”
McCall said “Jersey Boy” reminded him a little of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the iconic 1970 song by Loretta Lynn about growing up in Kentucky.
“It’s a great song, and also that idea of getting later in his career, talking about his earlier life and roots. It’s a ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ sort of song,” he said.
Rabbitt told an interviewer in 1990 that “Jersey Boy” happened by accident.
“I wrote a song one night … a song I never planned to record, actually. I was just noodling around on the piano, just singing about the George Washington Bridge and the Clairmont Diner and the Hurricane Bar and all these places and I was just having fun with it, singing, oh I’m a Jersey boy,” Rabbitt said while appearing on “Sudzin Country,” a longtime music program hosted by Herb Sudzin.
“Jersey Boy” is the source for some of what is known about Rabbitt’s early years in New Jersey. His family’s house was on North 19th Street in East Orange. He attended an elementary school “down on the corner,” not named in the song, but a graduation program posted online shows he attended 8th grade at the former Our Lady of All Souls school.
Rabbitt appears to have gotten his musical interest from his father, who played the fiddle and accordion. It is believed he attended East Orange High School but did not graduate.
While Rabbitt performed in other clubs, Emery credits the long-closed Hurricane Bar’s late owner, Morris Weber, with giving him wider exposure.
“Back then, it was the place to go for country music,” said Emery, who was living in Belleville at that time.
When Rabbitt performed at Drew University in Madison in the early 1980s, he invited some who knew him before he was famous, including Weber and Emery, and they all got together after the show.
“I think he gave me roses,” Emery said. “He never lost being humble of where he came from.”
Rabbitt was married and had three children. One of his children died very young following an unsuccessful liver transplant.
His 14th album was released in 1997 after Rabbitt underwent chemotherapy and had part of a lung removed. It was entitled, “Beatin’ the Odds.”
Rabbitt died eight months later. His death was announced publicly only after his funeral.
“He died too young,” Emery said, a sentiment often shared by his fans.
In the 1990 interview upon the release of “Jersey Boy,” Rabbitt seemed content with everything that had come his way.
“I’m a guy who sat in East Orange, New Jersey,” he recalled, “listening to a radio, sitting on the edge of the bed with my guitar, listening to the country music coming out of that radio and loving it, and learning it, and remembering it and playing it … who dreamed about being a country star.”