WEST FORK — If you wandered into the Little O’ Oprey in downtown West Fork on a Saturday night looking for live music, you’d find it. But first you’d find Susan Greenoe at the snack bar, manning a series of homemade pies stretched out on the counter.

Someone else would take your money and “get you seated and whatnot,” though people can reserve seats if they like. And while the music starts at 7 p.m., the snack bar opens clear at 5:30, giving folks plenty of time to enjoy each other’s company and catch up.

“The show tends to fill up soon before it starts,” said Bill Cook, board member for the Little O’ Oprey. Each time, they’ll recognize the sponsors for the show and give a preview, telling the audience who’s going to be on the show next week, and the week after that. Then the band will crank up and someone will say “It’s show time!” or even “Live and unrehearsed!”

It is always unrehearsed, Cook said.

“They’ll play while they’re setting up, but that’s it,” he said, and that admittedly can lead to some less than perfect moments. But that’s part of the charm. “We don’t mind. … We’re a long ways from Nashville. People are forgiving. Everybody forgets the words once in a while.”

The Little O’ Oprey has been an alcohol-free, smoke free, cursing free establishment — quite fully the kid-and-family friendly environment — since it opened in 1982, but the building itself has been around since about 1886 or so. The nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization has a mission to keep country music alive, the classic kind.

“You wouldn’t hear any of this new, so-called country in here,” Cook said. Rather it’s the old style, the good stuff. To ensure people won’t forget it’s around, and to introduce it to youngsters who may not have heard it before.

You might say Little O’ Oprey is a bit like those YouTube videos of the trend that play an old classic — say, George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — and keep the camera on the person who’s hearing it for the first time, just to show their reaction to a great piece of music. “That, kind of in a nutshell for young people, is what we’d be like.”

WAY BACK WHEN

Ever since the Oprey’s home was built in the late 1880s, it’s had a central location in the little town 10 miles south of Fayetteville.

In the building’s long lifetime, it’s been a general mercantile, a grocery store, a hardware store. It once stored coffins upstairs when a coffin maker “came by.” What’s now the men’s bathroom was once a bank, Susan Greenoe said. Beneath a layer of paint on the exterior of the building are a hodgepodge of writings from its history, covered over as time went on and purposes changed.

“All the high school kids, for graduation, take their picture with the Coca-Cola (mural) part out there,” Greenoe said.

You can find a historical photo of the building in “Images of America: Washington County Arkansas” by Velda Brotheron. The photo, taken shortly before World War I, shows lettering on the front and side of the building, advertising lumber, coffins, glass, stoves, harnesses and more.

In the ’80s, Dan Weithop was looking for a good, clean environment to play music, so he started the Little O’ Oprey. Since then it’s served many functions that placed the community at its center. One performer who also taught music brought his bluegrass guitar students to showcase their budding musical skills, Cook said. A talent show brought lots of families, and grandma and grandpa, to their seats. And for a long time, the West Fork Elementary first grade field trip would include a tour of the city that concluded with watching a show at the Little O’ Oprey.

“Their teachers would get up and sing and the kids were so excited,” Greenoe said.

But that faded away. During the town festival West Fest, the Oprey would be open so people could wander in and take a look, then performances would start late in the afternoon. One year they hosted the pie contest where they also pitted entries of jellies and jams, she said.

“That was our thing here, community involvement,” Cook said. “It brought it along.”

Now, he said, the demographics have changed. Their audience has aged and the population of West Fork increasingly gets pulled to the bigger cities north of it. They’re looking for audience members who haven’t had the Little O’ Oprey experience before.

“We don’t want to change the Oprey,” Cook said.

But they do want to revive some of the traditions that have fallen by the wayside, the little touches that people enjoyed and looked forward to.

What if they expand the jamboree show for the kids, Cook and Greenoe wonder. They think they could expand it. Once upon a time they handed out Bluebirds of Happiness from Terra Studios, awarding one to the person who attended the show from the farthest away.

“We’ve had people come from around the world, from other countries,” Greenoe said. They also used to have a drawing for door prizes at intermission, where a lucky audience member took home handmade goods. “One guy brought his farm eggs every week. Another built birdhouses.”

It stopped sometime around the covid pandemic, when the Oprey shut its doors until people were comfortable being out in public together again.

KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON

These days the Little O’ Oprey has many musicians interested in performing on its stage, enough that Cook has the luxury to be a little selective in determining the programming line up. But before the pandemic, the same five-piece band filled the hall with tunes every Saturday night.

“They were all professional musicians, studio quality, who had been around forever,” Cook said. The leader of the band was Jerry Roller, described as a steel guitar icon who had won a lot of awards. “He knew people all over the place and went to conventions and contests.”

Roller died during the pandemic. Tommy Kemp, who was lead guitarist of the band, still fills in occasionally, but they needed someone in regularly. Larry Poole, president of the Little O’ Oprey, was the drummer. Jimmy Ritchey, whose guitar is in the Springdale Hall of Fame and “plays about everything under the sun,” played keyboard there. He also toured with Carrie Underwood and played in the house band for Ralph Emery’s TV show for a couple of years. Emery was announcer for the Grand Ole Opry in the early ’60s.

The band was a big draw in itself. Between having taken a break from live performances for public safety, and the band dissolving in the pandemic, Cook said the Little O’ Oprey was “in the throes of death trying to get started back.”

When they reopened, people were slow to return. They were nervous to sit in a crowd. Each week they had to put the band back together and Cook had to call around to see which performers were interested.

“Some no longer came, and some had passed away,” he said. “It was kind of like starting from scratch.”

Now, all this time later, the board members feel like the Oprey is nearly back to what it used to be, operationally. They have a regular band and regular performers who rotate through.

The only time the Little O’ Oprey is closed is for bad weather, or when Christmas falls on a Saturday. They celebrated its 36th anniversary in October.

“We’re back on our feet more than we’ve ever been since covid, and I’m really looking forward to it,” Cook said. “I think it’ll be a good year for the Oprey.”