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

Abstract

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.