Track Listing

1. The Girl I Left Behind Me/Waiting for the Federals
2. Lorena
3. Cumberland Gap
4. Hard Times
5. The Yellow Rose of Texas
6. Tenting on the Old Camp Ground
7. Hard Crackers
8. Marching Through Georgia
9. Hit's of the 60's (Kingdom Coming/Battle Cry of Freedom/Dixie/Battle Hymn of the Republic)
10. The Faded Coat of Blue
11. President Lincoln's Hornpipe
12. Fisher's Hornpipe/Leather Britches/Bill Cheatham
13. Ashokan Farewell

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50600 in Music
• Released on: 1997-06-15
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Live

Album Description
This is a live concert at the Civil War Institute by Jay Ungar & Molly Mason. Ungar & Mason are known for their musical contributions to Ken Burns PBS series The Civil War and for Ungar's haunting theme, "Ashokan Farewell," which they performed both for the series and on this CD.

Ken Burns, Florentine Films
Jay Ungar and Molly Mason play music from the heart, which reminds us of the best in all of us.

Joyce Marcel, The Brattleboro Reformer
I could close my eyes and see...people traveling in buggies and...men swinging women in long cotton skirts...

Customer Reviews

a stunning sample of music from the mid 19th century
When I first heard this CD, I had just returned from a week at Ashokan, the camp behind the famous song 'Ashokan Farewell' that is included on this album. Most of the songs on this album are so lively that one wonders how anyone's fingers can fly over the fiddle so quickly. However, there are also several hauntingly slow songs that remind one of the lives lost during the Civil War. I enjoyed this CD so much that I listened to it daily for months and now it resides in my small stack of favorite CD's.

Live at Gettysburg College
This record is a live recording of Jay and Molly at Gettyburg College. Jay and Molly both sing and primarily play fiddle, banjo, piano, and guitar. This is great if you wish you could attend one of their performances. They are a talented musical couple and I wish they would do more civil war music. However, civil war music is just one of their focuses.

The music generally includes an introduction and sometimes audience participation.

Fine Fiddling and Much More
Jay Unger and Molly Mason are best known for their performance of the hauntingly beautiful tune Ashokan Farewell, a tune that Ken Burns used as the theme for his monumental PBS documentary The Civil War. Though Unger composed the tune in 1980, the Burns documentary has forever linked it with the Civil War. Unger and Mason perform it on this live album together with many songs of the Civil War and Civil War era.
Unger and Mason put on quite a show. They display a mastery of a variety of instruments as they play fiddles, guitar, banjo, piano, and harmonica. They sing, harmonize, tell stories and jokes, and induce the audience to participate in their show, all to a fine effect. Unger's voice is somewhat less than impressive, but loaded with sincerity, and when he harmonizes with Mason his vocal defects disappear and the result is quite good. They give brief but helpful introductions to these old war folk songs, providing useful information on song histories and context. But above all, they play with a sublime simplicity that can melt your heart, particularly when playing fiddle or piano.
The standout tracks on `Civil War Classics' are the fiddle tunes, where their talent absolutely shines. Ashokan Farewell is available on a couple of other CDs, but if you don't yet have it in your collection, that would be reason enough to buy this CD - it is one of the most haunting tunes that I have ever heard, and played here with simplicity and beauty in a five minute long version. The three fiddle tune medleys that they play are toe tapping lively, and a nice counter point to the slow, haunting grandeur of Ashokan Farewell. Molly Mason sings The Faded Coat of Blue with a clear, honest voice, and Jay Unger puts his less than perfect vocal abilities to great use on the joking soldier's parody song Hard Crackers.
Jay and Molly thoroughly captivated their audience with this performance at Gettysburg College, and if you love old time folk and Civil War music, you too will be captivated by this charming live CD.

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