Lonnie Holley: “My legacy is showing people how to get over the hurdles”

Informed by a life beyond the imagination of most, outsider artist and musician Lonnie Holley has allowed intuition to guide his unflinching, often profound storytelling.

“All my life, I’ve been on an adventure – I’ve experienced the trials and tribulations of what it means to be human,” Lonnie Holley says. “I’ve survived and I am the living change, the root that forces its way into the ground.”

At 75, artist and musician Lonnie Holley has lived to tell the tale of an often traumatic and chaotic life. Over the last four decades, he has established an international reputation as an ‘outsider’ or ‘folk’ artist, constructing enigmatic sculptures on Black identity from society’s junk material. His pieces are gargantuan yet detailed, intricately observed yet sweepingly emphatic. However, it’s in his other medium – music – that the often overwhelming horror of his story is perhaps most unflinchingly confronted and exorcised. On his latest (sixth) solo album, Tonky, Holley is at his most personal, reaching towards the profound.

“Art and music are like joined twins for me,” Holley says in his softly lilting Southern accent over a call from his Atlanta home. “I sing about what’s emotionally driving me at the time. I write and make everything on the spot, so it’s a pure reflection of whatever comes from within.”

Born in 1950 in segregated, Jim Crow-era Alabama, Holley was the seventh of the 27 children his mother bore. Spending his childhood years on the Alabama State Fairgrounds, living among burlesque dancers and dive bars, the story goes that four-year-old Holley was traded for a bottle of whiskey into an abusive guardianship before eventually becoming homeless. At some point before he reached teenagehood, he was hit by a car that dragged him for blocks, leaving him in a coma for several months. Initially pronounced brain-dead, Holley made a miraculous recovery and was then committed to the notorious Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, where he suffered regular beatings and was forced to pick cotton.

It wasn’t until 1979 that he experienced a rebirth of sorts, discovering a talent for visual art and sculpture when he took it upon himself to create the gravestones his sister could not afford for the burial of her two children, who had recently died in a house fire. After carving their headstones from a sandstone-like junk material he found in nearby scrapyards, Holley quietly began making other creations from found objects, until, in 1981, he brought a selection to Richard Murray, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Murray immediately put several on display, and soon his work was being acquired by the Smithsonian and the American Folk Art Museum. Holley’s work was eventually even on display at the White House. 

Sporting grey dreadlocks that hang over a brightly striped jumper and heavy rings on each finger, the Holley who speaks today is warm and effusive but still suffers from the scars of his upbringing. Often prone to speaking in streams of consciousness, he explains that the brain damage he suffered as a teenager has recently made it difficult for him to follow his thoughts as coherently as he once was able to. “I can’t hold them for long,” he says. “I have to take them out my brain and put them in a bottle.” The effect makes conversation kaleidoscopic and unpredictable – forever spiralling on the edge of unintelligibility. Or, Holley is simply speaking in the beautifully impressionistic images that make up his lyrical songs. 

Buying a Casio keyboard and karaoke machine from a flea market in the early 80s, Holley’s start in music was as intuitive as his art, comprising improvised songs sung while he was working. It wasn’t until 2006 that his manager Matt Arnett convinced him to record some of these compositions in an Alabama church, creating several songs on the spot that would make up his debut 2012 record, Just Before Music. Sparse and deeply moving, the seven tracks on the album showcase Holley’s endearingly wavering voice, backed by twinkling keys and expounding on everything from yearning love (Mama’s Little Baby) to harrowing loss (Fifth Child Burning).

In the years since, Holley has released four more acclaimed records and a psych-infused collaboration with Virginia’s Spacebomb producer Matthew E. White. His output ranges from the Gil Scott-Heron-style raging protest at the state of the nation on 2018’s I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America to the soulfully hopeful tones of There Was Always Water and the painful storytelling introspection on 2023’s Mount Meigs. With each song written and sung in one take, and no preparation beforehand except for production sketches of backing tracks, each Holley record is a snapshot of his state of mind at the time. On Tonky, the expansive narratives play out like the raw reflections of a 75-year-old looking back on an astounding life – which is precisely what they are.

“Tonky was my nickname because, at the fairground, I was taken to a honky-tonk, an after-hours getaway spot, where everybody started calling me Tonky, throwing quarters to see me dance,” Holley says. “I was wild as could be, living in the hustle and bustle of humans trying to find fun like looking for a needle in a haystack. All my albums are about trying to find that fun and meaning – recycling our trash and debris, the words and thoughts of my mind, into something beautiful.” 

Ten-minute opener Seeds sets the tone, gently building a collage of synth sounds, staccato strings and skittering kick drums as Holley recounts his life story – from growing up on the fairground to being incarcerated at the Mount Meigs Industrial School and his attempts at running away. “Oh I wish that I could rob my memory,” he sings. “I’d be like Midas and turn my thoughts to gold/ And one day end up just being all right.” Across the album’s winding 52-minute runtime, Holley confronts his legacy (Did I Do Enough?), attacks the racist critics of his “junk art” on (That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music) and ends on a note of hopeful reflection (A Change Is Gonna Come). 

Although personal, the album also features collaborations with the likes of rapper Billy Woods, instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop, and is his second collaboration with REM and U2 producer Jacknife Lee, following 2023’s Oh Me Oh My. “With Lonnie in the studio we just go with the mood in the room. I usually prepare some music and we speak for a bit before he starts improvising over the music. I play along and we follow where it goes,” Lee says. “His instinct is a beautiful thing and he trusts where the art takes him. He is totally free. Time, history, memories, thoughts, words, images, melodies and spirits channel through him. He doesn’t edit himself as it’s happening. It’s always flowing.”

It’s in that flow that Holley now lives, seeing his music and art as ways to provide a hopeful example for generations to come. “My legacy is showing people how to get over the hurdles, since Black people in America don’t get to tell their true stories,” he says. 

Ultimately, at 75, it still feels like Holley is only just getting started telling his story. His time at the Alabama Industrial School was recounted in moving detail as part of the 2023 podcast Unreformed and he now has a forthcoming tour planned for Tonky – consisting of sets of entirely improvised music each night. His sculptural work continues, too, alongside the workshops he has been running with children’s groups since the early 1980s. It all serves to keep his legacy unfurling. “Music keeps my brain at work, it’s the tool to fix my mental energy,” he says. “I won’t stop since my mind is a carousel and my thoughts just keep coming – I sink into the ocean of them and express the blessing of my experience. That’s all I really want to say.” Long may we continue to keep on listening.