BCM Museum Speaker Sessions - Holly G on the Black Opry (1-16-2024)

The Birthplace of Country Music Museum hosts a Speaker Sessions program each month that features scholars, musicians, and experts on a variety of topics relating to our museum content, music history, and local and Appalachian stories. Speaker Sessions are free and open to the public and are delivered both virtually and in person.

This Speaker Session features Holly G will joing via Zoom to talk about the Black Opry, the home for Black artists, fans, and industry professionals working in country, Americana, blues, and folk music.

About Holly G
Holly G is a country music industry disruptor. In April 2021, she founded the Black Opry, which began as a website and Twitter account celebrating the Black performers working in country, Americana, folk, and other adjacent musical styles and quickly grew into a “vital voice” (Billboard) within those genres, devoted to advocating for Black entertainers and helping the marginalized group reclaim its place in the American musical canon. The Black Opry Revue, the organization’s national touring showcase, began in October 2022, and Holly G launched Black Opry Records, in partnership with Thirty Tigers, in September 2023. Holly’s writing has appeared on Grammy.com, Holler, Taste of Country, and The Boot, as well as in the quarterly roots music journal No Depression.

About the Black Opry
Black Opry is a home for Black artists and Black fans of country, blues, folk, and Americana music. Country music has been made by and loved by Black people since it’s conception. For just as long, they have been overlooked and disregarded in the genre by fans and executives. Black Opry wants to change that. They invite you to discover, support, and enjoy the Black artists that make magic in this space. One of the most valuable aspects of country music is its versatility and diversity in sound. Country, blues, folk, and Americana music often overlap or weave together – these artists explore all of those sounds and intersections. .

The organization and its work are featured in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibition American Currents: State of the Music 2022, has a year-long collaboration with Wrangler, and, in early 2023, partnered with Philadelphia public radio station WXPN for the first Black Opry Residency, which brought five acts together for virtual workshops and a week of creative work in Philadelphia. (A podcast documenting the residency is forthcoming.) The “hub for Black talent” (Grammy.com) has devoted itself to advocating for Black entertainers and helping the marginalized group reclaim its place in the American musical canon.

The Black Opry Revue, the organization’s national touring showcase, began in October 2022 and has since staged performances at Nashville’s Exit/In; Los Angeles’s Troubadour; the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; Berkeley, Calif.’s non-profit venues Freight & Savage; and several City Winery venues. The Revue has also earned slots at festivals including the Newport Folk Festival (2022, 2023), Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (2022), AmericanaFest (2022), the 30A Songwriters Festival (2023), Cayamo (2023), MerleFest (2023), and the High Water Festival (2023).