She finds herself increasingly enchanted, not only by the rugged purity of the music, but also by the courage and endurance of the local people as they carve out meaningful lives against the harsh conditions.
That night, two men set fire to the school building, burning Eleanor, Harriet, and Deladis out of their home and destroying Lily's transcriptions of the ballads and her phonograph recordings.
As they depart, Cyrus Whittle, a renowned professor from England, arrives on a collection foray of his own, ensuring that the ballads will be preserved in the manner that Lily had originally intended.
[6] While the film's producers portray the movie as a work of fiction and include the standard "any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental" disclaimer in the film's credits, virtually all commentators agree that the basic story—stripped of its romantic and post-modern trappings—is inspired by real events, and follows quite closely the song collecting activities of Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) in the southern Appalachians from 1909 onwards,[7][8] although with some differences, presumably inserted for dramatic effect: the real Olive Dame Campbell was not a professional musicologist or college professor (Betty Smith, in a 2003 review of the movie, points out that those characteristics instead echo those of Dorothy Scarborough, who visited the mountains in search of folksongs in 1930);[9] Campbell made her transcriptions without the aid of a recording machine; and she already had a husband, the educator and social reformer John Charles Campbell at the time of her collecting, which was in fact initially a spin-off of a 1909 trip funded by a grant from the recently established Russell Sage Foundation to enable John to study the area's social and cultural conditions in hopes of improving their school systems.
[10] Nevertheless, the concept of ballads collected by "Lily Penleric" closely parallels those collected by Campbell (whose exposure to this particular seam of song commenced with hearing "Barbara Allen" sung by a "Miss Ada B. Smith" at Hindman School in Knott County, Kentucky)[7] and ultimately, passed to Cecil Sharp ("Cyrus Whittle" in the film) for his interest, although their first in-person meeting (arranged at Campbell's behest) occurred in suburban Massachusetts in 1915, not on the slopes of an Appalachian mountain.
(Queen was born in 1914, later than when the fictional events are set, thus to be strictly chronological the character would overlap more with the lifespans of her mother or grandmother, who were also noted local musicians).
Betty Smith, whose review of the movie is mentioned above, states that the character Alice Kincaid, the poor woman with the philandering husband whose artwork Lily appreciates and finds buyers for, is "surely" modelled after Emma Bell Miles, an Appalachian mountain resident who lived in poor circumstances with a large family who found some local fame as a writer, poet, and artist before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 39.
[9][14] Smith goes on to note that the actual watercolors attributed to Alice in the movie were created by Appalachian artist Elizabeth Ellison of Bryson City, who also worked on the set.