The Blue Ridge Mountains provide the scenic background for Songcatcher, directed by Maggie Greenwald. Dr. Lily Penleric (played by Janet McTeer) is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University, where the male faculty have turned her down once again for promotion to the rank of Professor despite the fact that her publications outnumber those on the promotion committee. The only faculty member who claimed to have spoken up on her behalf voted against her in order to cover up his amorous relationship with her. Almost determined to resign her position, she decides to visit her sister Elna (played by Jane Adams), who lives in the hills of the mountains above Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches school. Upon arrival, Deladis Slocumb (played by Emmy Rossum), an orphan who lives at the school, sings a song for her. Lily is so impressed with the song, which she never heard before, that she telephones her faculty colleague, asking for state-of-the-art equipment for 1907–a phonograph machine and recording cylinders–along with music paper and pencils so that she can record the songs of the mountains. She also sends him a few ballads by mail. Lily goes from one home to another to record the songs, some of 16th century Scotch-Irish and English origin, with the objective of exalting the culture of the hillbillies. Although Tom Bledsoe (played by Aidan Quinn) at first objects that she is exploiting and stealing for her own benefit, she eventually wins him over, especially when she tries in vain to stop Earl Giddens (played by David Patrick Kelly) from buying up land owned by the impoverished hillbillies at bargain prices. (Beneath the land are enormous deposits of coal.) Meanwhile, Elna is a lesbian, shocking Lily when one paramour is the youthful Deladis, though Bledsoe is accepting. When two men observe Elna having sex with fellow teacher Harriet Tolliver (played by E. Katherine Kerr), they set fire to the school, including Lily’s recording cylinders and transcribed sheet music. Homeless, Lily decides to return to the city, inviting Tom to come along and make a fortune by recording and selling the songs. He agrees, and Deladis joins the pair. (The Dolly Parton song as credits roll attests to the later success of hillbilly music.) En route to the lowlands, they encounter the musicologist who was hired for the professorship instead; having received copies of a few ballads, he planned to assist her in the songcatching project. Lily then bequeaths the project to him, though he promises to give her senior authorship in the future publication of songs. The fictional story speaks volumes about how hillbillies lost valuable real estate and thus may serve to explain the origin of at least some of the “white trash” of the South. The music is an extraordinary ethnographic and musicological delight. MH