Grand Traditionalists: Jay Unger and Molly Mason
by Peter Aaron

If you live in the Hudson Valley, it’s hard to escape the presence of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason—not that anyone drawn to authentically moving music would ever want to. Whether it’s through the duo’s monthly “Dancing on the Air” broadcast on WAMC, their frequent guest appearances on NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” long-running Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Workshop camps, Wednesday-night jam sessions at New World Home Cooking in Saugerties, or via the countless dances and concerts they perform year round as a twosome or with their larger Swingology band, it seems like Ungar and Mason’s stirring sounds are always echoing through the same Catskill Mountains the couple calls home. In 1990, however, the pair’s popularity was extended far beyond our region when filmmaker Ken Burns tapped Ungar’s profoundly poignant “Ashokan Farewell” as the theme to his documentary series The Civil War. The program went on to win Grammy Awards for both its director and its soundtrack, and Ungar’s haunting air was also nominated for an Emmy.

“It’s really weird, how everything happened with that song,” says the soft-spoken, mustachioed Ungar. "Before Molly and I started working mainly as a duo, we were in a band called Fiddle Fever. When that band was making its last album in 1984, I had already written ‘Ashokan Farewell’ but it didn’t even have a name yet and we weren’t planning to record it. But when we were almost done with the record, we decided it needed another slow tune. Russ Barenberg, the guitarist, said, ‘Hey, Jay, let’s try that new waltz of yours.’"

“So we ended up recording it and it sounded great,” continues the fiddler-mandolinist in the basement office of the couple’s West Saugerties home. “Molly suggested the name as a tribute to the Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Workshops, which we’ve been running since 1980. Two of the guys in Fiddle Fever were working on the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ second film, The Brooklyn Bridge. They
played him the record and he was really affected by ‘Ashokan Farewell,’ so when he started working on The Civil War he asked to use it.” Since then, Ungar and Mason have been featured on the soundtracks of several other of Burns’ PBS films, including his most recent, The War, as well as on those of Legends of the Fall and Brother’s Keeper.

Bassist and guitarist Molly Mason grew up in the tiny town of Battle Ground, Washington. While a member of The Mostly Sisters, an Andrews Sisters/Boswell Sisters-style swing trio, she first met Ungar in the late 1970s during a tour stop at Dutchess County folk club The Towne Crier. From 1978 to 1979 she lived in Minneapolis, where she worked as the house bassist for “A Prairie Home Companion” when it was still just a regional phenomenon. “It was in the pilot stage then, only going out to about six states altogether,” recalls the tall and slim Mason. “At that point, NPR wasn’t sure if people living on either of the coasts would get the whole homespun Lake Wobegone thing. But eventually the show got picked up by stations all over.” From there Mason moved east and joined Fiddle Fever; she and Ungar also began performing as a duet, continuing
after the parent band broke up.

Raised in the Bronx, Ungar began playing the fiddle at age 7 and during the early 60s went on pilgrimages to North Carolina and Tennessee in search of old-time musicians. In 1967 he joined roots rockers Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys as a bassist, but ended up leaving the New York band for college prior to its hit single-bearing, Jimi Hendrix-produced debut, The Street Giveth... and the Street Taketh Away (1969, Polydor). Ungar rejoined the group, however, for its second album, 1970’s less successful Albion Doowah (Polydor), and then signed on with folk and blues festival favorite David Bromberg. Although in the early 90s Bromberg decided leave the stage in order to concentrate on violin making, when the esteemed guitar stylist was ready to return to performing, Ungar and Mason were among the first musicians he called.

“I quit playing live for almost 20 years, but when I got back into it there were only two bands I wanted to play with—my own and Jay and Molly’s,” says Bromberg. “(Ungar and Mason) are both very deep musicians, but even though they have such respect for the music they don’t take themselves too seriously. And besides being such a great accompanist, Molly’s a really excellent producer, too.” As evidence, the one-time Bob Dylan side man points to the gorgeous-sounding Rabbit Ears Treasury of Tall Tales (1995, Rabbit Ears Entertainment), a two-CD collection of popular folk stories read by the likes of Nicholas Cage and Angelica Huston over original music by Bromberg, Ungar and Mason, and others.

But despite their fully loaded concert and recording schedule, it’s obvious that the work with their Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Workshop camps is the couple’s foremost love. Designed to give enrollees a total immersion in particular folk music and dance styles, the multi-day seminars are open to all ages and held at the State University of New York’s lush Ashokan Field campus. The programs feature classes, jam sessions, guest performers, dances, workshops, song swaps,band clinics, indigenous food, outdoor recreation, and more, and are offered via four thematically oriented sessions: New Year’s at Ashokan (December 29-January 1); Western and Swing Week (June 29-July 5); Northern Week (July 20-26); and Southern Week (August 10-16). “The Ashokan campus just really makes it easy to do the camps,” Ungar says. “The way the buildings are set up, the grounds, it just makes for a great community feeling. The place just has this special energy.”

One longtime recipient of that energy is Mammals fiddler Ruth Ungar Merenda, the daughter of Jay and his first wife, folksinger Lyn Hardy. “Growing up, to me music was just the family business,” says Ruth. “Other families ran car dealerships or whatever, and I just figured that music and the camps were what mine did—it didn’t hit me until later on, how special it all is. But I really absorbed so much amazing music, different traditional styles. And I got to see people like (Cajun fiddle legend) Dewey Balfa play when I was just a kid.”

“There’s an upside and a downside to the Internet age we live in,” says Mason, who had to relearn the guitar after undergoing brain surgery in 2003 and 2004 to have a benign tumor removed. “It makes it so much easier to find out about different music and other things, and to communicate with other people, but it can also keep people (physically) isolated from each other. It feels so good to bring people together at the concerts and dances we play, to get everyone dancing or singing along or sometimes even playing along. By the end of the show, it always feels like it’s one big community.”

It’s difficult to imagine anyone with genuine emotions getting sick of hearing “Ashokan Farewell,” but do Ungar and Mason think they’ll ever get sick of playing it? “Well, maybe if I’d written a song like ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ we’d get sick of playing that,” Ungar says with a laugh. “But, no, we’re not tired of it yet.”

“We get hundreds and hundreds of letters and e-mails from people telling us how much the song means to them,” says Mason. “People have had it played at their weddings, at funerals. Someone even wrote in about how they played it to someone that was in a coma.”

“Yeah, when we play it now those are the people I think of. I’m playing it for them,” says Ungar. “That’s what makes it feel like it’s worth doing over and over again.”

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason will present “The Pleasures of Winter,” a special holiday concert also featuring Ruth Ungar and Michael Merenda, Swingology, and Genticorum, at SUNY Ulster’s Quimby Auditorium in Stone Ridge on December 1. On December 8, Jay and Molly will perform with dance caller/instructor Eric Hollman at the Woodstock Community Center’s monthly contradance. The duo will host their annual “Dancing on the Air” holiday radio special at WAMC’s Linda Norris Auditorium in Albany on December 12.
www.jayandmolly.com.