Songcatcher

Anyone who is just getting involved in mountain music, should make it a point to watch the movie "Songcatcher." Songcatcher is the story of a woman named Lilly, a music teacher from the northeast who visits her sister in rural western North Carolina. While escaping the pressures of her job as a professor, she discovers that the same old ballads she was teaching in Boston are writhing and pulsing in the mountain people's everyday life. This fairly recent film not only explains the origins and of old time music, it does it in a stunningly beautiful way. Filmed right in the southern Appalachians where the first ballads were discovered, it features several songs you'll be learning on the fiddle in no time. Songs like Pretty Saro, Old Joe Clark, and Sally Goodin. It's important to see the not only the people singing them, but the culture that surrounds it - how the hollers cooked and fermented those old Scott/Irish ballads and made them into something new.