I am so pleased "Song Catcher" finally got to Orlando and that I finally got to see it today. Good flick as you'all have said. Wonderfully portrayed styles of song. (all 12-tone & standard keys but giving, I think, an excellent representation of the music for the theater audience.)

I especially appreciated the distinction made between ballad & song; between personal & social music; between instrumental music and vocal; and between instrumental music and instrumental accompaniment. (Good job on that - the fiddle does not "steal" the song from the singer, it enhances it.) Plus the intense social setting and value of the music. All squose into a brief, compressed setting but Great. I don't think the points were overmade that collectors did exploit the music, that guitar is a recent innovation to "folk" song or that a capella was the norm, not the exception or oddity & likely a few others if I thought about it. Polemic, but worth mentioning to a theater, not an academic audience.

I suppose the lead character is loosely based on the work of Olive Dame Campbell who collected from 1907 to 1910. She is barely more than a name to me - Sharp (obviously the "Prof. Whittle" character) prints & credits her with 32 songs plus variants but neither he nor Karples (who did accompany him) says much of annything about her.

I wish I knew more about her. It's odd that so many of the early great collectatrixes were women out in the woods, mountains & logging camps. Good on 'em.