My Blue Mountain Home: A Song History

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"My Blue Mountain Home" is credited to Jay Ungar in the online store he runs with Molly Mason, which lists it among mountain dulcimer arrangements of the couple's music.[1] It appears on page 44 of their collection Catskill Mountain Waltzes and Airs, which, by the couple's own account in its introduction, gathers decades of their writing, mixing pieces already played on stage, on record and in documentary scores with others that had never before left their private notebooks.[2] Ungar wrote "Ashokan Farewell," which Ken Burns chose as the main theme of his PBS series The Civil War; in the early 1980s he also started the Ashokan Music & Dance Camps, held near Woodstock, New York, and he and Mason married in 1991.[3]

A path winding through a grassy field toward a farmhouse and trees

Alexander H. Wyant, Arkville Landscape, oil on canvas, about 1890. A landscape at Arkville in the Catskills, shown for the mountains of Ungar and Mason's collection; it has no connection to the tune.

For mountain dulcimer, Melanie Johnston sets it in DAD tuning in 22 Selections From Jay Ungar & Molly Mason's Book "Catskill Mountain Waltzes And Airs", a 61-page tablature book she publishes herself, packaged with piano-voiced MP3 renderings generated from the tab as listening guides.[4]

Our book that contains the song "My Blue Mountain Home"

Sources

  1. Jay Ungar & Molly Mason store: "Catskill Mountain Waltzes & Airs for Mountain Dulcimer".
  2. Jay Ungar & Molly Mason store: "Catskill Mountain Waltzes and Airs".
  3. Jay Ungar & Molly Mason: "About Jay & Molly".
  4. Melanie Johnston: "22 Selections From Jay Ungar & Molly Mason's Book 'Catskill Mountain Waltzes And Airs'".
  5. Image: Alexander H. Wyant, Arkville Landscape, oil on canvas, about 1890. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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