Songcatcher (2000) on Netflix
Passed over for promotion at her university, Dr. Lily Penleric visits her sister Eleanor in Appalachia and hears old ballads still sung in the mountains. She sets out to collect them.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/103,875 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes74%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1907, Dr. Lily Penleric teaches musicology at a university that passes her over for promotion. She travels to the Appalachian mountains to visit her sister Eleanor, who runs a rural school. There, Lily hears English and Scotch-Irish ballads that families have sung for generations. She resolves to write the songs down and make recordings so that people beyond the mountains can hear them, hoping the work will win her the promotion she was refused. Deladis Slocumb, a musically gifted orphan, guides her to singers in the most isolated areas. Tom Bledsoe, a war veteran and musician, suspects Lily of exploiting his community's traditions as she gathers its songs.
Cast
- Gregory Russell Cookas Fate Honeycutt
- Erin Blake Clantonas Polly
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Songcatcher (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producer Ellen Rigas invested $3 million in Songcatcher, money which her family borrowed as part of the Adelphia Communications fraud.
- Although Songcatcher is a fictional film, it is loosely based on the work of Olive Dame Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, and that of the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp, portrayed at the end of the film as professor Cyrus Whittle.
- Following his 1915 meeting with Campbell, at which she showed him her collection of over 200 ballads, Sharp and his assistant Maud Karpeles planned and carried out their own song collecting expeditions in Appalachia over the period 1916 to 1918.
- Betty Smith states that the character Alice Kincaid, the poor woman with the philandering husband, is surely modeled after Emma Bell Miles, an Appalachian who found some local fame as a writer, poet and artist before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 39.
- The watercolors attributed to Alice in the movie were in fact created by the Appalachian artist Elizabeth Ellison of Bryson City, who also worked on the set of the film.
- The score was written by David Mansfield, who also assembled a roster of female country music artists to perform mostly traditional mountain ballads, among them Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Maria McKee, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch and Patty Loveless.
- The soundtrack album inspired a 2002 follow-up from Vanguard Records, Songcatcher II: The Tradition That Inspired the Movie, compiling recordings of some of the songs selected for the film as performed by authentic Appalachian artists.
- Greenwald consulted the performer Mary Jane Queen when researching the film, and the character of Viney Butler was based on her; Queen lived until 2007, having received a number of awards for her continued folk heritage activities.
