The Steel Guitar Forum

looking for an mp3..or tab...or some type of recording of "Ashokan Farewell".......prefer a dobro version, as that is what I would like to learn to play....
any help appreciated..

website with tunes i can download........ok....
thanks
ch

A simple Google search for "ashokan farewell dobro" found this:
http://www.folkofthewood.com/page1581.htm
and this:
http://www.jaybuckeymusic.com/toc.htm

The second link includes both an MP3 and tab. Good luck!

I was in the same predicament a couple of months ago, I hope this helps. The tab is sort of fancy but you can simplify it by following the melody more closely.

http://www.jaybuckeymusic.com/Ashokan%2 ... 0Dobro.pdf

http://www.jaybuckeymusic.com/Ashokan%2 ... Buckey.mp3

Dobro player Leroy Mack (Kentucky Colonels) recorded a fine version on his CD " Leroy Mack and Friends" and its also tabbed in one of his books (http://www.leroymack.com/) ...his versions of tunes are always worth checking out .....

thanks so much for this quick response...I am fairly new to SGF and also to playing dobro....this is such a beautiful tune...so I wanted to learn it...got a real sweet fiddle and mandolin players to play their parts....should be a great tune for the old folks at the nursing homes.....
thanks again,
ch

For what it is worth, the fiddle tune "Ashokan Farewell" is not particularly old. It was written by Jay Ungar and copyrighted 1984 Flying Fish Records. The tune sounded so "old timey" that it was picked up by Ken Burns and used as the main theme in his documentary film series, "The Civil War."

Ungar has a couple of albums of similar stuff, lyrical, slow, beautiful, unforgettable. I particularly like his "The Lover's Waltz," and "The Mountain House." He even gives workshops on how to write tunes like this!

Dennis Coelho
Cheyenne

Jay Ungar runs a fiddle/dance camp in Ashokan Ny every year. This tune was written as something for the fiddlers to play on the last night of the camp. That is where it gets its name.

I remember hearing that now that I listened to it. Beautiful on fiddle.

no tab, but a nice version to listen to and great overhead shot of the hands playing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRa_hGpZiMI

I should add that there is no apostraphe in the name. It's Ashokan Farewell, not Ashokan's Farewell.

The thing to be aware of is that most fiddle players will play it in D so you want to be sure to learn it in that key.

I play it in Bb and everyone follows along.

I play it in G or A if I'm kicking it off, but in every situation where the fiddle player kicks it off at a jam it's in D.

And the fiddle players don't like it much if you play it in any other key, in my experience.

In fact fiddle players don't like you to change any of the keys they are used to. Try playing old joe clark in G instead of A sometime when there are a bunch of fiddlers in the group. In every case I've done that, the fiddle player will say "That's in A" after the tune's done.

Fiddlers always play Ashokan Farewell in D, and that's a good key for high-bass G tuning.

I worked it up in D on standard high bass G tuning about 3 years ago, but haven't played it (or much of anything else) on my Dobro in about a year, or so. (Been playing the Bakelite in C6.)

To give a fuller, more fiddle-like sound I suggest that you frequently use a fretted string in unison with the same note played on an open string. Fiddlers do this a lot. Also, for example, you might play the D note in the first bar on the 3rd string 7th fret to give more vibrato and a timbre that seems to work better than the open string. And you can pick the open 1st string simultaneously for a fiddle-like drone.

When Jay Unger composed this tune he was having some great Scottish fiddlers at the Ashokan camp and this tune is very much in the style of a Scottish slow air. Scottish fiddlers use a lot of pull-offs, so incorporating them into your reso version should make it sound a little more Scottish. Of course, because your reso is not tuned like a fiddle the unison drones and pull-offs will often fall on different notes from those played on a fiddle.

I first heard this tune at Ashokan back in the '80s a few weeks after Jay composed it. He played it one night with another fiddler (Lisa Ornstein, I think), Molly Mason on cello, and a guitarist. There wasn't a dry eye in the place.