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Posted

Someone recently posted a link to a YouTube movie on the Civil War that was about the land that each side held and the battles fought. It moved quickly, through the years, showing what each side held including Sherman's march to the sea. Anyone have a link to this or a title to search under?

Posted

No wonder I couldn't find it at You Tube.

 

We just read about Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Sherman's March to the Sea today and I really wanted to show this to the kids. We read Sherman's March covered a 300 mile by 60 mile swath of utter destruction. So hard to fathom-and here we can see it.

 

Also read about a Union naval blockade that cut off supplies to the Confederacy and how the Union soldiers surrounded the Confederate soldiers causing Lee to surrender and we could see it on the video too.

 

Such a sad war.

 

Thanks, again, Linda-I really appreciate it.

Posted

This video comes from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, IL. In the larger setting of the museum it is even more sobering. The museum is phenomenal; I would highly recommend a visit if you are anywhere near Springfield. And of course you can visit the many other Lincoln sites there, too!

Posted

In fact, you can get a CD recording of the music from Ken Burns' Civil War series. It's great -- all from that historical period and performed the way it would have been then. It's at our local library. You should check yours out to see if it has the CD as well. I highly recommend it.

Posted

My kids really liked the music on the video and we have a few songs from that period on a WeeKids America tape. Will have to check into the Burns cd.

 

the museum sounds great too! I am hoping to get out to VA sometime, perhaps we'd go near Springfield. Will have to look at a map.

 

Thanks to both of you!

Posted
In fact, you can get a CD recording of the music from Ken Burns' Civil War series. It's great -- all from that historical period and performed the way it would have been then. It's at our local library. You should check yours out to see if it has the CD as well. I highly recommend it.

 

 

I think the song that was played during that 4 minute piece is a modern piece called Ashokan Farewell. Burns did use it for the CW series but Ashokan Farewll is not a period piece.

 

The story of Ashokan Farewell.

Ashokan Farewell was named for Ashokan, a camp in the Catskill Mountains not far from Woodstock, New York. It's the place where Molly Mason and I have run the Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps for adults and families since 1980.

 

Ashokan is the name of a town, most of which is now under a very beautiful and magical body of water called the Ashokan Reservoir. I've heard it pronounced a-shó-kun, a-shó-kan, or sometimes ásh-o-kán. The reservoir provides drinking water for New York City one hundred miles to the south.

 

The late Alf Evers, our local historian, once told me that the name Ashokan first appeared as a place name in 17th century Dutch records. He thought it was probably a corruption of a local Lenape Indian word meaning, "a good place to fish." That it is!

 

I composed Ashokan Farewell in 1982 shortly after our Fiddle & Dance Camps had come to an end for the season. I was feeling a great sense of loss and longing for the music, the dancing and the community of people that had developed at Ashokan that summer. The transition from living at a secluded woodland camp with a small group of people who needed little excuse to celebrate the joy of living, back to life as usual, with traffic, newscasts, telephones and impersonal relationships, had been difficult. By the time the tune took form, I was in tears. I kept it to myself for months, unable to fully understand the emotions that welled up whenever I played it. I had no idea that this simple tune could effect others in the same way.

 

Ashokan Farewell was written in the style of a Scottish lament. I sometimes introduce it as, "a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx." I lived in the Bronx until the age of sixteen.

 

In 1983, our band, Fiddle Fever, was recording it's second album, Waltz of the Wind, and 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 upright bass by Molly Mason. Now it needed a name. Molly suggested the title, Ashokan Farewell. It seemed right to me.

 

Filmmaker Ken Burns heard the album in 1984 and was immediately taken by Ashokan Farewell. He soon asked to use it in his upcoming PBS series The Civil War. The original Fiddle Fever recording is heard at the opening of the film, and this and other versions are heard twenty five times for a surprising total of 59 minutes and 33 seconds of the eleven hour series. Molly and I, along with members of Fiddle Fever and pianist Jacqueline Schwab played much of the 19th century music heard throughout the soundtrack. Ashokan Farewell is the only contemporary tune that was used.

Jay Ungar

 

http://www.jayandmolly.com/ashokanfaq.shtml

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