Jay Ungar composed “Ashokan Farewell” in 1982, shortly after that summer’s Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps had ended. He and Molly Mason had run the camps since 1980 at Ashokan, in the Catskill Mountains not far from Woodstock, New York. Ashokan is also the name of a town, most of it now under the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to New York City. Ungar has said he came home from the camp that year with a sense of loss and longing for its music, its dancing and its people. He went looking for a Scottish lament that would say how he felt, could not think of one, and simply started playing. The melody that came out moved him to tears, and for months he kept it to himself. He sometimes introduces the waltz, which is in D major, as “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.”
In 1983 Ungar’s band Fiddle Fever was recording its second album, Waltz of the Wind, and needed another slow piece, so they tried the still-unnamed lament. The arrangement came together quickly in the studio, with a guitar solo by Russ Barenberg, string parts by Evan Stover and Mason on upright bass. Mason suggested the title. Flying Fish released the album that year.
The filmmaker Ken Burns heard the album in 1984 and asked to use the piece in his PBS series The Civil War, broadcast in 1990. The Fiddle Fever recording opens the film, and that version and others are heard twenty-five times, for almost an hour of the eleven-hour series. One of them runs under the reading of Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife. Ungar, Mason, other members of Fiddle Fever and the pianist Jacqueline Schwab played much of the nineteenth-century music on the soundtrack, and “Ashokan Farewell” is the only contemporary composition in it. Viewers have often taken it for a melody of the war years, and Mason has said many people are surprised to learn that Ungar wrote it.
Words have since been set to the melody. Grian MacGregor wrote a set in 1991, and Priscilla Herdman sang it on her Flying Fish album Forever & Always. In Barnes’s English Country Dance Tunes the melody appears as “Leah’s Waltz,” the name of a dance Fried de Metz Herman made up to it in 1989. Mishearings of the place name have given it titles such as “The Choking Farewell.” At the Ashokan camps it became the waltz that closes each summer’s session.
