A Place To Belong

Residents in a downtown area of Tulsa, Oklahoma, have, on certain nights, heard unusual, frail sounds of music rising from beneath the streets. This went on for two years with no one knowing the source. Some thought it might be coming from a radio that a sewer worker had left on. Though, in reality, a group of Tulsa’s teens literally were going “underground.”

They gathered together in groups of twelve to twenty-five and met there regularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Beneath the city is a maze of passages and tunnels and so the group took advantage of it as a place to go to play music and relax. One Tulsa Junior College student says, “I do my best playing down there.” Playing in a twelve-foot-by-fifteen-foot cave gives their music an eerie acoustical melody, and a single guitar chord may reverberate for sixty seconds.

One young man commented, “There’s no other place we could get together like this without being hassled.”