By Mia Prausnitz-Weinbaum, OA Admissions Counselor and Semester 46 Alum

There are so many things that make the OA community strong. For this blog series, I have decided to pick one stand-out aspect to explore. It’s simple: we sing together. 

I was an OA student in 2018, Semester 46. Now, I’m back on Hart Road as the OA Admissions Counselor. During my first few weeks back, I’ve been reflecting on the ways OA has been a throughline of my past seven years, and I’ve found that I can break down its impacts on my life by looking at each of the four cornerstones: Intellect, Craft, Environment, and today’s focus, Community. 

Singing and playing music together is an essential part of building community at Eagles Nest. At OA, singing is the first thing we do together in the morning and the last thing at night. Music turns dish crews and cabin chores into moments of celebration. So, to explore the importance of Community at OA, I have created a playlist of five songs that bring me straight back to being 15 in Pisgah Forest every time I listen. Enjoy!

1. “Take Me Home, Country Roads” – John Denver

This is the type of song that makes everyone a little nostalgic when they hear it. It’s all about going home to where you belong– in Appalachia. When I hear the lyrics “almost heaven,” I picture the dark walk up from study hall in the Library back to the Sun Lodge, when my semester would belt out the lyrics, celebrating being done with homework for the night, and the fact that we were all together here. Together was “home.”

2. “Like Gold” – Vance Joy

Cleaning our dorm (shout out to the Sun Lodge’s East Side!) had its own soundtrack of all of our CDs in a rotation. This song was on Megan’s CD, which was secretly my favorite. The song says, “we were like gold… that’s the way it was, but that’s history.” I knew in the moment that my time at OA was ephemeral, so I latched onto songs like this, already mourning the golden time I had with my beloved semester-mates. I had never lived in the same room as eight other people before, and I haven’t done it since, but my East Side cabin at OA was such a special community within community.

3. “Goodbye Earl” – The Chicks

If you’re looking for a good song to learn every word to, you’ve found it. It’s an upbeat story of two women, partners in (literal) crime, and it’s unbeatably fun to sing along to. One trek group learned this entire song from their instructors while hiking through the mountains. When they joined the bus back to campus, they taught the rest of us too. I knew every word to this song before I had ever heard a recording of it! Even though Goodbye Earl started as an inside joke with one trek group, it was soon shared with everyone for an even louder singalong.

4. “Home” – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

Our semester’s Music Class members learned this song to play at the end of the semester. I played the banjo part, something I had never done before and was scared to try. Most of my fellow bandmates were playing instruments they had never touched before. We all had to be vulnerable enough to sing and try new things in front of each other, a true bonding experience. This song is about how people are what make a place feel like home, which is the epitome of the OA experience. Community is what it’s all about.

5. “Angel from Montgomery” – Bonnie Raitt

One of the coolest people I met at OA was actually a faculty member, Maddog, the music teacher and part of the Residential Life staff. Each night that she stayed in the Sun Lodge, she played us songs before bed. My favorite was when she would play Angel from Montgomery. I would usually drift off within the first minute, so it wasn’t until I got home that I listened to the full song. Now, back at OA, I have been venturing to the music room to learn the song on the guitar myself.

My guess is that most OA alumni have their own playlist of songs that are “OA songs” to them, each representing a different aspect of this incredible community that we all call home.

Honorable mentions include all the classic OA songs: 

• The morning song– “Lift your heads to the rising sun, children of Appalachia…”
• The goodnight song– “May the peace of this valley around us…”
• The community meeting song– “I can hear the sweet winds blowin’ through the valleys and the hills…” (Going Back to Carolina by Bill Staines)
• And my semester’s favorite meal time song– “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mo-orning…” (If I Had A Hammer by Pete Seeger)