The sweet, haunting songs "caught" on film in "SONGCATCHER: represent some of America's most powerful musical influences - the Appalachian roots that later sprouted into the spirited twang of American country music, the lively atmosphere of bluegrass, the urgent relevancy of folk and eventually the Southern-influenced birth of Elvis Presley's rock n'roll. Today, Appalachia remains a hotbed of creative music with new stars such as Iris DeMent rising out of the old traditions with the rarest of gifts: a high lonesome voice and a simple song that can shatter a person's heart.

Many Appalachian churches even have a fundamental faith in the power of music. As Virginia Reverend Bobby Akers has said: "For us, guitars and drums and rock n' roll [have become] the instruments of God."

Appalachian music is America's most primitive music, our equivalent of the African drum-beat. In fact, the influences on Appalachian music are the very make-up of America: African banjos and rhythms merged with European fiddles and ballads. Throughout the 19th century, songs carried from homes far away kept their singers linked to the lives of their ancestors in the Old World. Soon these timeless ballads met the wood-carved instruments of the wild American mountains and Irish and English folk melodies blended with the intensely personal tone of Southern blues.

The Banjo Begins It All.

Long before there were guitars in this county, there were banjos brought from Africa, played primarily by African-American slaves. During the Civil War, soldiers from mountain villages came into contact with African-Americans and their banjos for the first time. These soldiers brought the newfangled instruments home, sparking an entirely new sound as pluckers sat down with fiddlers on rickety old porches and found a way to combine the two.
It wasn't until the late 19th century that guitars and mandolins entered the picture - again introduced by African-Americans who were inventing a new form of playing known as the blues -- and they were still a rare find in the 1907 of SONGCATCHER. Other instruments tended to be those that could be hand-crafted out of local materials, including penny-whistles, flutes, fifes, mouth-harps and dulcimers. The instruments themselves shifted from song to song and sometimes stopped altogether for a haunting a capella ballad. The songs themselves addressed everyday concerns of the people - most telling stories of hardship and hope, from lost love to family tragedy, from growing up poor to finding your way. The songs were sometime centuries-old narratives about universal concepts such as love, family, murder, fueds and war; and sometimes they were more recent adaptations, telling of important local events or heroes. Later, when coal mining began to affect the lives and land of the people, many songs even took on a political nature, expressing anger, sadness and frustration at the drastic effects of the mines.

The songs of those times survive even now because they were part of the very fabric of people's lives. There was no way to make real money from music, so people played it to entertain themselves and to pass on legends and lessons to their children. The music was never elite or exclusionary - everyone in Appalachia, whether Scots-Irish or French or German or African-American, could either sing, play an instrument, dance or tell a story, often in a style distinctly their own. In those times, families might gather around to sing songs or tell stories before bedtime, or a whole village might gather after raising up a barn to dance, play music and share tales. It was just an organic part of everyday existence.

A Secret Music

Throughout his period of time, Appalachian music remained obscure to most Americans, a secret known only by musicologists and others who traveled in the remote mountain country. Not only did few Americans travel to Appalachia, but almost no one ventured out. Many mountain folk remained highly suspicious of life beyond their close-knit villages. In the 1920s, however, record companies discovered the music's appeal, coining the phrase "hillbilly music" to boost sales and bringing talented musicians out of the hills. Many of the Grand Ole Opry's first stars hailed from Appalachia, including Uncle Dave Macon, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Gully Jumpers, Deford Bailey and Dr. Humphrey Bate. Over time, "hillbilly music" evolved into bluegrass and country music, producing major popular stars.

Sadly, this shift signaled a lessening of the traditional ways. Now instead of passing songs down from generation to generation by word of mouth and live performances, the mountain peoples began to listen to phonographs and radios. But that traditional style of clear-as-mountain-air expression and the use of heart-rending, true-to-life stories persists in country-style music, especially that most untouched by commercial trends.

Enter Flatfooting

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Appalachian music was often accompanied by dancing, a loose-limbed, percussive dance style known as clogging, buck dancing or flatfooting. Like the music, the dances were passed down from parents to their children and remain a tradition even today.

Flatfooting is an improvisational style of dance, with each dancer free to express himself or herself in any way as long as they maintain a steady pounding rhythm. Flatfooting is also a particularly versatile style of dance, allowing for villagers to dance alone, in pairs or in large groups. Today, flatfooting has become a show-stopping form of entertainment across the world - and has even entered the arena of performance art. But people can still be found clogging away on a small square of wood at mountain music festivals or alone in a backwoods cabin.

THE APPALACHIAN "MOUNTAINEERS": AN INTRODUCTION

Known as "mountain people" or mountaineers, the people who inhabit the remote, rural stretches of the Appalachian mountain chain have long existed as an American mystery. Reclusive and with their own fiercely strong traditions, the Appalachian mountain people have nevertheless left a profound influence on such popular American arts as music, story-telling, art and woodcrafts.

The Appalachian mountains, which stretch down the eastern coast of North America from Newfoundland to Georgia, are soft, rounded, heavily eroded mountains with the appearance of lush, undulating green hills separated by hidden valleys or "hollers." Most of the mountain territory is forested swampland, covered in ferns and mosses. This has been both a blessing and curse for Appalachia. On the one hand, it has provided astonishing physical beauty and remoteness; and on the other, this same fecund ground has compacted into enormous deposits of valuable coal - which has been a source of fierce battles, greed, environmental destruction and repression since the 1800s.

After Native-Americans, the first settlers in this wild part of America were primarily Germans, Irish and Scots, arriving in the 1700s. It is said that those who felt crowded in the bigger urban settlements struck out for more liberty and more room in the far-off hill country, not fearing the wilderness. Myths arose around these brave "hill people," many unsubstantiated, but what remains clearly documented is a way of life that highly prized loyalty, family, self-sufficiency, storytelling, living on one's own terms and love of the land. Due to their isolation, everything the mountain people owned was made by local craftspeople, from furniture and tools to musical instruments. Most food was grown by each individual household, with few store-bought goods. In fact, little money was needed or used in the mountains.

William Price, a writer who chronicled early mountain-life, wrote of the mountaineers: "[They are] of fiery temperament, free-and-easy, sport-loving, gallant, fighting at the drop of hat, racing horses, playing cards, pitting game chickens, indulging in whisky as freely as water . . . With their faults, nevertheless, they are endowed with resplendent virtues of personal character."

Later, in the late 1800s and early 1900s people of Welsh, Italian and African-American descent moved to the mountains to work the coal mines. All of these cultures melted into Appalachian culture of today. But as railroading, timbering, coal mining and cotton mills began to industrialize the mountain regions in the early 20th century, many Appalachian traditions began to change. Subsistence agriculture gave way to industrial work - with subsequent losses in independence, isolation and simplicity of life. One of the biggest changes was from a barter economy to a dollar economy - one in which families now sought to buy the essentials of life, including music. With so many hours spent in mines or mills, families no longer had the time to gather together just to sing songs and the old ways were overtaken by the shock of the new.

Today, Appalachian folk culture - not just music, but the dance, arts and craftsmanship of an earlier era - has undergone a vibrant revival. There is a broad, youthful movement to get back to simpler, more primal roots-based music and arts - and a fascination with what the "mountaineers" of American history may have known about the mysteries of living the good life.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

"SONGCATCHER" is a journey deep into the heart and soul of American music. This tale of unexpected romance takes audiences into the rarely seen Appalachian mountains where on the rickety porches of banjo-picker's cabins and subsistence farmer's shacks the everyday music of the people - music filled with storytelling, protest, politics, history, romance and sheer celebration -- was born. At times haunting and at times hilarious, the music of "SONGCATCHER", it is important to note, was performed by the actors themselves.

Few people have experienced the hidden lands where the wild-growing roots of bluegrass, country, folk and popular music first took hold. This was what drew writer/director Maggie Greenwald to take a peek into the backcountry of America where, at the turn of the century, the ballads and tunes that would later inspire everyone from Dylan to Guthrie to Garth first became known to the world.

"I was inspired to tell this story after doing some research into the early days of country music, going back to the roots of it before there even was a recording industry," explains Greenwald. "I was intrigued by these wonderful ballads that were being sung in the mountains for a century before the world ever knew about them. And I was further intrigued to find that the people who brought this music to the mainstream were women - the teachers and missionaries who were up in the mountains at that time, and who realized for the first time the power of this music and culture."

Greenwald took the basic essence of her research and melded it into an adventurous, fictional tale about a woman music professor, one of this country's first, who makes a solo journey into the mountains to research Appalachian music -- only to fall in love with a local musician who changes not only her feelings about the music but her entire outlook on life.

"Like Lily, I fell in love with the world Maggie unfolded in the script," says producer Ellen Rigas Venetis. "She takes us to an incredible place in which two worlds are clashing - one the sophisticated, modern world of Dr. Lily Penleric, the other the primitive, freedom-loving world of the mountaineers - and yet out of it comes this fantastic romance. I also was very excited to find at the core of this story a truly unique, strong and unforgettable female protagonist. This is a story not only about the history of American music, but about a woman's strength, perseverance and her discovery of something wilder and more primitive not only in American culture but in herself."

Adds producer Richard Miller: "You really have two stories in one in "SONGCATCHER": one is the breathtaking untold story of how a lot of popular music got started in this country and the other is a very compelling love story about two people you would never expect to come together. It was a script full of revelations and surprises."

Songcatching: The Heart of the Tale

While researching her script, Greenwald came across the old mountain term "Songcatcher," which refers to anybody who collects songs, whether a singer or an outsider. She also uncovered the real-life history of one of Appalachia's most renowned songcatchers, an East Coast-bred woman named Olive Dame Campbell, who boldly journeyed to the mountains with her minister husband in 1908, a time when few outsiders came to Appalachia. Olive was immediately taken aback by the astonishing music and crafts of the mountain people and began collecting their ancient ballads and studying the ways of their handicrafts. Eventually, she founded the John C. Campbell Folk School, dedicated to fostering traditional Appalachian ways, in Brasstown, North Carolina.

Although Olive Dame Campbell brought many of the songs she heard to the outside world, it wasn't until the British musicologist Cecil J. Sharp published them in 1915 that they began to gain renown. This irony that the songs only escaped national attention until a man became involved didn't escape Greenwald's eye. She decided right away that she wanted a woman at the center of her story - one who, like Olive Dame Campbell, had to fight to be taken seriously, and who's number one priority was making the music last.

Dr. Lily Penleric never existed in real-life, but her experiences in the mountains echo many of the real-life Easterners - a number of whom were among the country's first female college graduates -- who made their way deep into the hills hoping to bring improved health and education, while preserving the soul-stirring ways in which art naturally mixed with life there. The dilemma Dr. Lily Penleric faces - to simply take the music for her own advancement or to help preserve and be a part of the freewheeling lifestyle that led to its creation - was also very real. "The culture of the mountains was hidden and preserved for a long time simply by geography, because the mountains held the music in and kept other people out," explains Greenwald. "But as more and more people began coming to the mountains, the traditions became threatened."

"I found this period of time very exciting because there was a real clash between the modern world and the primitive world and it was all exploding in this one isolated place. The battle between progress and tradition being waged then is one that still continues," adds Greenwald.

Greenwald also gave to Dr. Lily Penleric something Olive Dame Campbell and the other song-collectors of the early 20th century never had: a primitive, fragile recording machine she drags into the hills not unlike the piano in Jane Campion's "The Piano." This first-generation machine recorded directly onto wax, which in the sunny atmosphere of North Carolina, meant that even the slightest exposure to heat could leave Lily with liquid music.

Greenwald took a trip from her home in New York City into the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, looking for more inspiration. She found it everywhere she went . . . and in hundreds of singing voices among the ordinary people living there. "The music itself was the biggest inspiration for this story," she comments. "The a capella style of singing I experienced all over North Carolina is some of the fiercest, most beautiful folk music I've ever heard."

Another phenomenon struck Greenwald: the role of women in preserving Appalachian ballads. "I realized that songs are very much a women's tradition - handed down from mother to daughters, from grandmothers to children around the house. It was really exciting to me to discover a form of music that was primarily created by women, passed down through the generations by women, and even discovered by women," explains Greenwald. "I began to see the potential for Dr. Lily Penleric."

Dr. Lily Penleric Becomes a Songcatcher

Once Greenwald had gathered an enormous amount of research about turn-of-the-century Appalachia, she began to create Dr. Lily Penleric, the outsider who finds herself changed by the mountains. Greenwald saw Dr. Lily Penleric as a timeless woman, someone who would have fought similar battles whether she was born 500 years ago or today. "Lily's story has occurred throughout history, in that she is a very independent woman who tries to make her way in a man's world by trying to imitate men and be like them, destroying her own soul in the process," she says.

"But I saw Lily being changed by the mountains," continues Greenwald. "The hardships of dealing with nature and the experience of discovering music as something that stirs her soul and not just an intellectual subject of study eventually open her up to a love that will be transforming. Until she meets Tom, she has shut herself off from feeling in order to achieve. But in the mountains, and through the music, she finds a new freedom. She begins to live more in her heart than her head."

To bring Dr. Lily Penleric to life with the depth, charisma and complexity of a true heroine, Greenwald needed an uncommon actress. She found what she was looking for in Janet McTeer, fresh off her extraordinary performance in "Tumbleweeds," for which McTeer garnered a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination. "Working with Janet was incredible," offers Greenwald. "She's brilliant and big-hearted and fierce in a wonderful, wild, strong sense. She's truly one of the most amazing talents I've ever experienced." McTeer introduces the film with a startlingly beautiful rendition of "Barbara Allen."

McTeer was drawn to the utter uniqueness of Dr. Lily Penleric's life - although she never anticipated the challenges of wandering around in a corset in the 90 degree North Carolina heat. "I found Lily fascinating, and someone I could easily identify with because she is so driven, and has paid such a big price for her dreams," she says. "She reminded me of modern women because Lily has succeeded in a man's world but she's lost herself along the way, becoming harder and tougher. It's just like so many people today who are so busy working and achieving that they start to miss some of the magic of a simpler way of life." But McTeer was also intrigued by Lily Penleric's times. "Lily was born at a time when women didn't even have the right to vote," she observes. "Women had only just started going to college in limited numbers, so she was really ahead of her time."

Nevertheless, Lily Penleric never finds satisfaction in academic kudos. She finds it in dancing barefoot in the Applachian hills. "Lily really finds her emotions and the richness of life through the people she meets in the hills," says McTeer. "She finds herself through the strong, spirited women she meets and through her lover, Tom. After a whole lifetime of trying to be a part of a man's world, it is only in the mountains that she learns to be a woman."

Tom Bledsoe - Mountaineer

At first glance, it would seem unlikely that Dr. Lily Penleric might fall in love with a mountain man, but Tom Bledsoe turns out to be a very surprising person. Explains Greenwald: "Tom is a true man of the mountains, a hard man and a sad man who has seen the outside world and come away wary of it. He's a war veteran and he's had his heart badly broken by tragically losing two wives. When he first meets Lily, he's mostly trying to keep the outside world away because he's very worried that big business is going to come in and crush the mountain ways, including the music. But eventually Tom and Lily are drawn together by their profound passion for the music."

From the beginning, Greenwald imagined Aidan Quinn in the role. "He brings an amazing depth and soulfulness to every character he portrays - and Tom Bledsoe is no different," she comments. "Aidan is an amazing actor and watching him and Janet work together was a wonderful learning experience."

Quinn quickly fell in love with every aspect of "SONGCATCHER". "I loved the story, I loved the music, I loved the history, Janet knocked me out and I'd always wanted to work with Maggie Greenwald," he summarizes. He was also taken by the private and rugged character of Tom Bledsoe. "Tom is truly a man caught between two worlds," says Quinn. "He's traveled around and he's seen what the outside has to offer so in that sense he's very sophisticated. But he also fiercely wants to protect what's left of the mountain people's isolation. He doesn't want anyone to ruin the place he loves."

Quinn was particularly touched by the love affair between his character and Dr. Lily Penleric. At first, Tom Bledsoe is suspicious of Lily, not least of all because he thinks she is only in the mountains to exploit the local talent. "But when he sees her genuine love for the music, that's what wins him over," explains Quinn. "They've been butting heads like crazy, but he begins to realize he's more than a little attracted to her."

To prepare for the role, Quinn read books about the period and even collected periodicals of the time to get a feel for how people lived and looked. To keep himself immersed in mountain culture, he even lived in a Blue Ridge mountain cabin during production. He also learned, for the first time in his life, to sing and play. "This was the real crux for me," he laughs, "because it's pretty scary to pick up an instrument as an adult and know that you have to look like an expert in just a few weeks. Luckily, I had a tremendous amount of help." In addition to guitar lessons, Quinn worked with a voice coach to learn the shape-bending notes of Southern singing.

"It was really important that I get it right," adds Quinn, "because music is the only place Tom can really express himself." Quinn, who grew up on Irish traditional music, was so won over by the ballads and folk songs in the film, he admits he may have developed a life-long addiction. "This music was a real revelation to me - it's so fun and full of emotion," he notes. "It inspired me to want to keep playing the guitar, and after "SONGCATCHER", I think this music will be even more a part of my life."

The Mountain Balladeers: Viney and Deladis

While Tom Bledsoe's quiet charisma begins to open Dr. Lily Penleric's heart, it is the local women of the hills who begin to open up her eyes and ears to the incredibly rich fusion of music, art and life around her. Two women in particular decide to help Lily in her quest to learn the traditional ballads of the region: the gun-toting mountain woman Viney Butler, played with panache by Pat Carroll, and the orphan Deladis Slocumb, played by teen-aged operatic singer Emmy Rossum.

The Emmy and Grammy Award-winner and Tony Award-nominee Carroll is best known to movie audiences as the voice of the Sea Witch in "The Little Mermaid," but here she had a chance to go in a completely different direction - and she was drawn to the idea of immersing herself in the rich heritage of mountain culture. "I grew up in the South, but I never really knew about the origins of the music until I read this script," says Carroll. "I loved it - you get history, you get passion and you get to experience these wonderful songs that have been handed down over the generations."

Continues Carroll: "I was very moved by the characters - they believe in the reality of love and in the reality of great music. Coming to the mountains to shoot the film was another revelation because the people who live here haven't changed all that much today. That's a long time to hold onto traditions, to hold onto songs, but it's clearly what keeps them vital."

Carroll also adored Viney Butler's boisterous, buoyant love of life. "Viney might be set in her ways and not too fond of strangers but that's understandable because the mountain people know they have to protect their ways," explains Carroll. "Still, Viney helps Lily because she sees a bit of herself in the doctor. Lily doesn't give up, she's strong and stubborn, and Viney takes the stripe of this woman and decides she's all right."

Although Carroll hung out with locals and read history books like the rest of the cast to prepare for the role, one aspect of her preparation was entirely accidental. The day after she began shooting her scenes, one of Carroll's front teeth fell out. Looking in the mirror, Carroll saw herself even further transformed into Viney Butler.

"I called Maggie and told her my tooth has fallen out and the look is wonderful," recalls Carroll. "She said 'are you sure aren't in pain?' and when I said no she said 'well, then let's use it.'" Carroll waited until after production to have her dentition fixed!

While Carroll grew up exposed to Southern traditions, 13 year-old Manhattanite Emmy Rossum was thrust into a world unlike any she had ever imagined in North Carolina. "Being part of this film has meant learning a lot about the history of music and about this beautiful area and that has been an incredible amount of fun," admits Rossum. "I think it's a very important story because I don't think a lot of people know where all this great music originated."

Trained as an opera singer who has performed with the likes of Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, Rossum found herself also in new musical territory. "I love to sing no matter what the style," she says, "but this was entirely new to me. I'd never heard songs like this before but the more I heard them the more they won me over." The sound came naturally to Rossum, who liked the primal expressiveness of the singing style. "The operatic sound is more in the head, while this kind of ballad singing is more nasal, but it is a very free sound. I had a really great time with it," she adds.

Rossum was also interested in the challenges of playing someone 180 degrees from her own reality. "Deladis is real wild mountain girl," admits Rossum, "and I'm not like her at all. Being from Manhattan, I've never really run around barefoot the way she does! I was also very interested in Deladis' conflict, which is in where her allegiance lies - with Lily, whom she's come to love almost as a mother, or to Fate Honeycutt, her boyfriend who doesn't trust Lily's outsider ways."

Once shooting got under way, another exciting aspect for Rossum was getting out into the wilds herself. "I loved the clean air of the mountains and the whole free-wheeling atmosphere," she offers. "But the only thing I could have done without were the incredible mosquitoes!"

From Banjos and Ballads to EmmyLou, Iris Dement, hazel dickens and taj mahal:
The Music of "SONGCATCHER"

The very heartbeat of "SONGCATCHER" resides in the music - that blissful stuff that accompanied every aspect of living, loving, courting, praising, politicking and storytelling in Appalachia, spreading both warnings and joy, and serving as a release from the daily pressures of life.

Greenwald knew right from the start that the film had to be suffused with incredible sounds from all over Appalachia, reflecting the fantastic diversity and influence of the music. So she brought in the acclaimed composer David Mansfield, who also happens to be her husband, as a co-collaborator on the project. Eventually Mansfield brought in a whole slew of musicians working in this tradition, ranging from country and pop legend Emmylou Harris, who performs the ending credits song, "Barbara Allen," to blues icon Taj Mahal, Iris Dement and Hazel Dickens, who appear in the film. "The songs of Appalachia are basically Scots-Irish ballads and English folk songs that have changed very little from generation to generation," explains Mansfield. "I knew that style, but I didn't know the music in an enthno-musicological way, which is what we got into in this film. I had to do a great deal of research, because it was very important to Maggie and me that we portray this world as accurately as possible," Mansfield continues.

"David really became a co-creator of "SONGCATCHER" because so much of it is about the music," says Greenwald. For Mansfield, the film was a chance to explore the roots of the music he had listened to, loved and played all his life. "Like most people, I grew up listening to rock, blues, folk and country - and what's remarkable is that music of Appalachia is truly a mix of all of them," says Mansfield. "What I think a lot of people will find is that this music sounds unlike anything they've heard before, yet at the same time it gives you a clear indication of where American pop and folk came from. This is one of the most compellingly emotional parts of American culture - and it effects the world at large. Kids listening to Bruce Springsteen in Prague, Moscow and Beijing are really listening to stuff that had its roots in Appalachia."

"What I hoped is that people watching "SONGCATCHER" will get that same kind of excitement that people did when they first heard this music almost a century ago. Sometimes when there were musicians on the set, everybody's hair was standing on end - very few people have experienced music with this kind of power before, but now they'll have a chance."

Mansfield journeyed with Greenwald to North Carolina where he had a blast discovering the music firsthand. "The music was everywhere - on people's porches, in the back of drugstores. There were old people singing centuries-old ballads and 10 year-old fiddlers learning new songs. It was an exciting trip," says Mansfield. "This music is inseparable from the culture it comes from, and that's a very powerful thing to witness."

The more Mansfield researched the music, the more he became aware of the broad extent of its influence. "I listened to a lot of the first recordings of Appalachian musicians that came out in the 20s and 30s and I realized that a lot of people in the 50s and 60s had also listened to this stuff," explains Mansfield. "A whole generation of musicians were so blown away by these recordings that it became a seminal influence. People like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were affected by these songs - these ballads literally changed the course of pop music."

Flipping through Cecil J. Sharp's first published collection of ballads, Mansfield picked a lot of the original songs brought out of Appalachia in 1915 for the film. But he also went beyond that to reveal the many different styles of melody and rhythm that combined to form the Appalachian tradition. "This music was the first time that two distinct traditions met - the African rhythms joined up with melodic Irish fiddle tunes and ballads and it produced a real variety of sounds," comments Mansfield. "We wanted to capture that."

The filmmakers brought in several Appalachian musical experts - including balladeer Sheila Kay Adams and country legend Hazel Dickens - to serve as consultants. But they also brought in some of today's most exciting roots musicians, including blues-folk icon Taj Mahal, folk legend Hazel Dickens and haunting popular singer Iris Dement"I thought it was important to involve people like Iris, Hazel and Taj Mahal to show the continuing evolution of the music," says Greenwald. Mansfield comments that "it was interesting to see how the music had changed over time. I'd sing something to people from the region and hear things like, 'That's not the way I sing it, but that's how my great aunt used to sing it.'" Greenwald summises, "these are the descendants of this legacy and their music is just as exciting today."

Mansfield notes that Taj Mahal's presence was particularly inspirational. "Taj Mahal is someone who is so steeped in the blues tradition and black American musical forms, that he has become a national treasure," he adds. "He knows the music we researched for this film firsthand. Having him involved was like having a combination of musician, charismatic performer, legend and musicologist all wrapped up in one."

Taj Mahal wanted to be part of the film after reading the script, which he says carried him back to a time and place he's always found fascinating. "Americans rarely get a good look at this kind of music and what lengths people have gone to save this music for posterity," he notes. "This film tells a wonderful story about real things that happened in the development of American culture."

Taj Mahal also had a chance to give up his trademark guitar for the banjo on the set of "SONGCATCHER", even writing some original banjo-blues tunes for the film. "I was thrilled to have the chance to play the banjo, which is the authentic instrument of the time," he says. "Since I've always been influenced by the songs of that time, it wasn't hard to write in that style." Mansfield explains that Taj Mahal used a style of banjo playing known as "Claw Hammer," which uses down-strokes rather than up-strokes. "He brought something new to banjo playing that people haven't heard before," says Mansfield.

If Taj Mahal brought out the note-bending blues influence, then Iris Dement went in the other direction - revealing the haunting purity of the high lonesome voice. "Iris is the perfect person to help bring audiences into this world, because she evokes the roots of country and folk while writing incredibly contemporary and sophisticated songs," says Mansfield. "She's helping to reinvent traditional music with a fresh point of view."

The authenticity of "SONGCATCHER"'s live vocal performances was meticulously matched with period instruments. Mansfield, in fact, handcrafted a banjo from cake tines, which Aidan Quinn used in the film, to illustrate Appalachia's reliance on homemade instruments.

Mansifeld concludes, "The story intrigued Maggie; the music fascinated me, and it beclame clear that it was something we could work on together. In that way, it was a godsend."

The Back-Country: Shooting In Appalachia

"SONGCATCHER" was shot almost entirely on location in Madison County, North Carolina, one of the contemporary homes of traditional Appalachian culture. This beautiful, rustic, rural part of America has rarely been captured on film. There was a tremendous excitement about shooting in the mountains - and a great deal of trepidation. Among the difficulties encountered were fields of poison ivy, terrifying lightening storms that came out of nowhere, sopping humidity and mosquitoes immune to any mere bug spray. And then there were the logistical nightmares.

"Being on location in the mountains, you realize just how reliant we have become on modern technology," comments producer Ellen Rigas Venetis. "I mean things we usually take for granted, like cell phones, just don't work up there." Still, the cast and crew were amazed by the ways in which modern and primitive lifestyles mix in the hills. "There are wild contrasts," admits Mansfield. "You have people playing banjos on porches of cabins that have satellite dishes and the internet."

Most of the cast and crew spent time in the mountains before the shooting even began, meeting locals, absorbing the culture and very special pace of life, and working closely with consultant Sheila Kay Adams - who passed down the stories and ballads that had been passed down to her by her mother and her mother before. "Having a chance to hear the ballads sung in their natural home was very moving," says McTeer. "The local people are so passionate and enthusiastic about this music, it was a real honor to experience and capture that," adds Ellen Rigas Venetis.

Particularly drawn to the locations was cinematographer Enrique Chediak who worked closely with Greenwald and production designer Ginger Tougas to give a visceral sense of Appalachian reality on screen. Chediak, who has an extensive knowledge of American landscape painters, was struck immediately by the lush, painterly fertility of North Carolina. "There's just so much green," he says, "so many different tones of it and I really wanted to work with that texturally."

Chediak also worked to contrast the primal Appalachian scenes with those reflecting the influx of modernism. "When we're showing city ways, the look is cooler, more blue, whereas when we're showing mountain life, the look is rougher, more organic, more about the natural colors of the earth and the woods," he explains. "The priority was always to show the mountains with total simplicity, keeping it very, very real, and therefore very beautiful."

To film the many musical scenes in the film, Chediak wanted to go against the usual grain of MTV-style moving cameras. Summarizes Chediak: "Again, the idea was to keep it simple and beautiful, with no pretensions. This is a movie about the power of the music and we really let the music speak for itself."