As Bob Coltman stated, the Pineconers played what people wanted them to play. They put out a cassette tape, that was sold at the Hall, that contained a lot of audience favorites and some of the traditional tunes that they knew. I sat down with Janice Sherwood, one of the banjo players and lead singer one night before a show at the hall and she played me all of the old tunes that she remembered learning from her father and uncles. She also gave me the history of where the tunes came from. One of her uncles did a lot of traveling for his employer, and always seemed to bring back tunes. He also learned a couple of waltzes from a Norwegian fiddler living in Jersey City in the early 1900's. Other tunes were learned crew members of ships that docked in Tuckerton (a major shipping port at one time), which would explain how Gaspe Reel, a popular French-Canadian tune, ended up in their repertoire. In later years, the Pineconers took on a mandoling player, who was in his 50's, and by far the youngest person in the band. He pushed them to perform some of their obscure fiddle tunes, and later as a member of my band, taught them to us. Janice would occasionally sit in on our weekly sessions and was kind enough to write down the music for these tunes.
It's always bothered me that the big-wigs at Columbia and Victor who recorded all the Appalachian musicians felt that the only authentic country musicians lived in the southern mountains. Countless musicians from the Midwest, Northwest, New England, New York and the southern coastal regions were ignored, and a lot of good music was probably lost. The Victor studios in Camden, where the likes of Kelley Harrell and the Carter Family recorded, was just a stones throw from the Pine Barrens, but due to the notion that there was no music in the north worth recording, some great music and musicians were ignored and lost to time.
There were a few good songwriters in the Pines, too. Merce Ridgeway Sr and Jr., and Bill Britton (Janice Sherwoods uncle, also a noted fiddler). One of Bill Britton's songs is in the DT, "Down by the Southern Jersey Shore", a song he wrote during a bout of homesickness in Hawaii during WWII. Merce Ridgeway Jr. did two cassette tapes of his and his father's songs for the Marimac label in the '80's, but the company went out of business and the tapes are out of print. (I still have copies of each, though).
Another thing about the fiddle tune repertoire: as the Pine Barrens were isolated for a couple of centuries from the rest of the world, most of the tunes were probably English in origin, and pretty similar to the same English tunes that have survived everywhere else in the U.S. There are also tunes that originated as popular melodies and were adopted by country musicians, such as Red Wing. I'm also sure that Pineys were regular listneers to the Grand Ole Opry and Wheeling Jamboree, which were broadcast by stations with high wattage on clear channels, and could be heard throughout the northeast.
As I said earlier, if anyone wants to PM me, I can try to make up a tape of my band playing some of the Pinelands tunes.