I saw the film last Wednesday. Great music, okay acting, but the script needs a lot of work--probably a total rewrite. It's laden with anachronisms and geographical inaccuracies. There are post-modern sympathies placed in the mouths of people who would never have expressed such opinons back in the early 1900s; there are moments of present-day political correctness in the the dialogue that ring false, and a modern feminist attitude towards glass ceilings that is grafted onto a Victorian-era career problem--a woman in that time period might have been disappointed at not being promoted, but she could hardly have been surprised by it, and would certainly have expected it. Then there is someone who is buying out mountain farms in Western North Carolina for coal companies, as though North Carolina and Kentucky were the same place. (There are distinct geographical regions within Appalachia, but the movie chooses to ignore that fact; some areas of Appalachia were exploited for coal and some for lumber, but that part of North Carolina was never coal country.)

But DO go see the movie for the music--there are genuine turns by singers who have been singing mountian music for ages, including Sheila Kay Adams, Bobby McMillon, and Hazel Dickens. Iris Dement sounds like she's a genuine Appalachian singer when she sings "Pretty Saro" (though she's actually from Arkansas). And the "field recording" version of Barbara Allen referred to above by Tedham Porterhouse was actually sung by Emily Rossum, a teenager from New York City. Ms. Rossum's resume includes operatic performances, but she was coached by Sheila Kay Adams and has learned to sound very much like a balladeer from the Black Mountains, the sign of a great young actress, singer and mimic.

One more quibble--while Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp are credited in the closing credits as inspirations for the film, no mention is made of Dorothy Scarborough, whose book "Songcatcher in the Southern Mountains" provided some elements of the plot and the very title of the movie.

--Charlie Baum