The recent soundtracks of "O Brother, Where Art Thou" and "Songcatcher" have featured songs from the American southern Appalachian tradition (and what those mountain songs were doing down in Mississippi in OBWAT we won't ask).

To my eye, which is admittedly rather ignorant of the southern traddy scene, some of the folks who made it on to the soundtracks, (or the commercial cd release, in OBWAT's case) were performers with more name recognition to offer than real dues paid in researching and singing real traditional music. (Or is this just that I only know them from their commercial material, and not their lovely unsellable traddy stuff?)

If you were "casting" the soundtracks of either of these movies, who would you pick? Who are some of the folks out there who really know their stuff and sound like it?

Two rules: 1) the performers must be currently active (sorry, Lee Monroe Presnell is not available), and if they've got recordings &/or web sites you can send people to, cite them and that'll make this a more useful exercise; 2) if you think any of the folks that were cast were the best for the job, defend your position! Recordings and links useful here, too.

Info on the soundtracks for these two movies can be found here: O Brother, Where Art Thou Songcatcher soundtrack (and a quicker way to get to the relevant info also available at the film's site

O Brother performers (they did use some vintage recordings, as well): The Whites, Alison Krauss & Union Station, John Hartford, Ralph Stanley, the Fairfield Four, Emmylou Harris, The Cox Family, Norman Blake and The Nashville Bluegrass Band, Gillian Welch, The Peasall Sisters

Songcatcher performers: Rosanne Cash, Taj Mahal, Iris DeMent, Dolly Parton, Emmy Rossum, Emmylou Harris, Allison Moorer, Patty Loveless, Julie Miller, Maria McKee, Sara Evans, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings & David Steele, Deana Carter, Hazel Dickens, David, Patrick, Kelly & Bobby McMillon, Pat Carroll

I've got two reasons for asking. One is so I can learn more about who's out there on the American scene (I've had a Brit bias lately), and second is to use this as an ancillary to the debate on how (or some might say, whether) to sell more people on traditional music. (There are some interesting contributions to this on the Musical Traditions site here (lengthy and in dense academic language) and here (look for Russ Hatton's letter on "The Tarnished Image") (I believe I fall on this folkie carmudgeon's side), and in Ian Robb's column in the latest issue of Sing Out! (Vol. 45, #2, Summer 2001), and a contribution from Brian Peters in Jeff Davis's Traditional Music column in the Folk Alliance newsletter (Vol. 12, #1, Jan/Feb. 2001).

I'll submit my response in a separate post.

~ Becky in Tucson (Sorry I've run out of time to add the links to previous discussions of those movies. Later.)