Jay Ungar & Molly Mason
American Dreamers
by Kerry Dexter

"We live in a rural area, and I think that really has had an impact on our music," said fiddler and composer Jay Ungar, who with his wife and musical partner, Molly Mason, lives in the Catskill Mountains of upper New York state.

"I think, just by driving by what we drive by everyday to get to the printer or the grocery store, we're reminded that we have the luxury of a lifestyle that's probably somewhat slower than most," added Mason. "Then when go out on gigs and travel, we notice we're back in the mainstream of a faster world."

Neither Mason nor Ungar, who are perhaps most widely known for their work on the Grammy-winning soundtrack of the television film The Civil War, grew up in the midst of the country lifestyle they now enjoy — but they both were raised with plenty of music.

"I grew up on the West Coast in a family who listened to country music and Western swing. That was the big thing, Bob Wills and Western swing," Mason, who hails from Washington state, recalled. "I had an uncle who was a fiddler, and then my brother started playing fiddle, too. He's younger than I am, so I was already playing guitar at that time, and we started playing together. I kind of grew up trying to search out folk music and fiddle music and explore it further, finding little bits here and there. I loved the sound of it, and I think hearing my uncle play live when I was a little kid had a big impact. If it's live in your own living room as a kid, it's gonna make a huge impression, because it's such a magical wonderful gift to have, to be able to play music, to perform."

Ungar's first experiences with music were more formal, but live performance was a turning point for him, as well. "At the age of seven, I took classical music lessons — was interested in classical music, but really, I was interested in any idiom that I heard. I just wanted music," he said. "I remember being at a bar mitzvah in Brooklyn when I was 11 or 12, and this branch of the family had hired an incredible band. At that time I hadn't really seen a band play popular music, and they had a guy, a fiddler in this band, who was playing just everything, all sorts of popular styles. It just knocked me on the ear, and I thought, 'Wow, you can do all this with the very same instrument I've been playing classical music on.' So I started to experiment with things.

"When I got to high school," Ungar continued, "I made friends with people who were interested in old-time and bluegrass music, and we'd trade tapes and records, which weren't all that easy to get in the north then — this was about 1960. I became completely infatuated by that and then at about 17 began making trips to North Carolina and Tennessee with a friend of mine who played banjo, to encounter the lifestyle of the old timers. I just got completely drawn into that music."

This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #87 (Apr/May '00).