In 1907, Dr. Lily Penleric, a professor of musicology, is denied a promotion at the university where she teaches. She impulsively visits her sister Eleanor, who runs a struggling rural school in Appalachia. There, she discovers a treasure trove of traditional English and Scots-Irish ballads, which have been preserved by the secluded mountain people since the colonial period of the 1600s and 1700s. Lily decides to record and transcribe the songs and share them with the outside world. With the help of a musically talented orphan named Deladis Slocumb, Lily ventures into isolated areas of the mountains to collect the songs. She finds herself increasingly enchanted, not only by the rugged purity of the music, but also by the courage and endurance of the local people as they carve out meaningful lives against the harsh conditions. She becomes privy to their struggles to save their land from Earl Giddens, representative of a coal mining company. At the same time, Lily is troubled when she finds that Eleanor is engaged in a lesbian love affair with her co-teacher at the school. Lily meets Tom Bledsoe, a handsome, hardened war veteran and talented musician. Despite some initial resentment, she soon begins a love affair with him. She experiences a slow change in both her perception of the mountain people as savage and uncouth, and of her sister's sexuality as immoral. Hoping to help share the culture of the mountain people with the wider world, Lily convinces Clementine McFarland, an art collector, to purchase a painting done by a local woman. Events come to a crisis when a young man discovers Eleanor and her lover, Harriet, kissing in the woods. That night, two men set fire to the school building, burning Eleanor, Harriet, and Deladis out of their home and destroying Lily's transcriptions of the ballads and her phonograph recordings. Rather than starting over again, Lily decides to leave, but she convinces Tom and Deladis to "go down the mountain" with her to make and sell phonograph recordings of mountain music. As they depart, Cyrus Whittle, a renowned professor from England, arrives on a collection foray of his own, ensuring that the ballads will be preserved in the manner that Lily had originally intended.
Cast
The character of Viney Butler was based on Mary Jane Queen, whom Greenwald consulted when researching the film.
Production
Producer Ellen Rigas invested $3 million in Songcatcher which her family borrowed as part of the Adelphia Communications fraud.
The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 74% approval rating with an average rating of 6.34/10 based on 88 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "The story may be a bit too melodramatic, but great performances abound in Songcatcher. The real reason to see the movie, however, is the hypnotic music." Metacritic assigned a score of 63 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
