This is from Jay Ungar and Molly Mason's website:

What was that "haunting" melody and where does it come from?
The piece used as the theme music for The Civil War is called Ashokan
Farewell. (Pronounced a-shó-kun or a-shó-kan). Ashokan Farewell was named for
the Ashokan Field Campus of the State University of New York (in the Catskill
Mountains). This camp, generally just called "Ashokan", is where Molly Mason
and I run a series of week-long music and dance camps for adults known as
Fiddle & Dance Workshop.

Ashokan is the name of a town, most of which is now under the Ashokan
Reservoir, a very beautiful and magical body of water that is across the road
from our home. According to our local historian, Alf Evers, Ashokan first
appears in print as a place name in 17th century Dutch records. He thinks
that it may be a corruption of a local Indian word.

I composed Ashokan Farewell in 1982 shortly after the summer programs had
come to an end. I was experiencing a great feeling of loss and longing for
the lifestyle and the community of people that had developed at Ashokan that
summer. The transition from living in the woods with a small group of people
who needed little excuse to celebrate the joy of living through music and
dancing, back to life as usual, with traffic, disturbing newscasts,
"important" telephone calls and impersonal relationships had been difficult.
I was in tears when I wrote Ashokan Farewell . I kept the tune to myself for
months, slightly embarrassed by the emotions that welled up whenever I played
it.

Ashokan Farewell is written in the style of a Scottish lament or Irish Air. I
sometimes introduce it as, "a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from
the Bronx." (I lived in the Bronx untiI the age of 16.)

In 1983, our band, Fiddle Fever, was recording its second album, Waltz of the
Wind. We needed another slow tune. We tried my yet unnamed lament. The
arrangement came together in the studio very quickly with a beautiful guitar
solo by Russ Barenberg, string parts by Evan Stover and plucked and bowed
bass by Molly Mason. Molly suggested the title Ashokan Farewell.

Film maker Ken Burns heard the album in 1984 and was very moved by this
piece. He used a version played by Matt Glaser in the film, "Huey Long", and
planned to use Ashokan Farewell as the theme for The Civil War. The original
recording by Fiddle Fever is heard at the beginning of the series. This and
other versions are used 25 times throughout the series including behind the
reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, for a surprising total of 59
minutes and 33 seconds of the 11 hour series. The members of Fiddle Fever
(plus pianist Jacqueline Schwab, Jesse Carr and others) play much of the 19th
century music heard throughout the soundtrack. Ashokan Farewell is the only
contemporary tune that was used.

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Karlyn Knaust Elia
Ulster County Historian
Saugerties, NY  12477