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Music is a Place: Oprys and the Rural Working-Class Constitution of Public Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2021

Liza Sapir Flood
Liza Sapir Flood*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
*
Email: ejs6yc@virginia.edu
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Abstract

“Oprys” are public musicking events found in Appalachia and beyond. They facilitate regular embodied sociality between strangers and friends in a region often characterized by the social fallout of neoliberal economic trends. Drawing on ethnographic research in Tennessee and elsewhere, I show that oprys constitute rural working-class public space where participants negotiate a precarious cultural order through the affordances of live country music performance. But political discourse in these spaces is articulated primarily through embodied, performative, and aesthetic realms which are not captured in a delimited and classed notion of discourse as primarily text or talk. As such, oprys offer a corrective to our understanding of what counts as discursive contestation. I foreground two particular cultural imperatives that structure oprys: participation and accommodation. These imperatives produce a socio-cultural event that characteristically refuses the monetization of space and privileges dialogic sociality over the production of artistic sound. Approaching oprys through the frame of “counterpublic” reveals a different way of imagining public space, public music making and sociality, and the terrain of political discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 383 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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Footnotes

This research was conducted with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Lewis and Clark Fund. I am deeply grateful to Junior McCumbers and Ray Cadel for introducing me to oprys many years ago, and to those at Roy's Opry and the Leicester, North Carolina opry who generously shared their insights and musical skills with me. I'd also like to thank members of the Field Methods Workshop at the University of Virginia for their helpful feedback on this article.

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