Before I joined the Paste staff in January 2023, I wasn’t familiar with Lonnie Holley’s music. Perhaps that is because, despite his 40-year CV of assemblages and sandstone carvings, he’s only been releasing albums since 2012, beginning with Just Before Music. But Paste editor-in-chief Josh Jackson went to Holley’s Buckhead studio to interview him two years ago, as his album Oh Me Oh My was on the verge of being released. “Without my art, I don’t think I’d be alive because of everything that I have experienced,” he said then. Let those words be a marker, as Holley, the seventh of 27 children, was born into poverty in Jim Crow-era Birmingham and lived in a whiskey house on the Alabama state fairgrounds. He was in and out of foster homes, and even traded for a drink at the age of four before, later on, doing time at the horrific, traumatizing Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs—a juvenile correctional facility considered to be, in journalist Josie Duffy Rice’s findings, “functionally a slave plantation.”
Holley, in the years before he entered the vocation of art-making, did rounds as a grave-digger, a trashman, a dishwasher and a Disney World short-order cook. He fathered 15 children of his own and, after being hit by a car, was pronounced brain-dead. After two of his nieces died in a house fire in 1979, Holley carved their tombstones and, soon after, began building sculptures out of found objects in his yard. His exhibitions have been featured all over the world in the 46 years since, in Atlanta, Harlem, London, Boston, San Francisco and a dozen other cities. His music career began in 2006, at the behest of Matt Arnett, in an Alabama church. Holley, strapped only with a keyboard and a microphone, performed improvisational recordings.
Oh Me Oh My was a fascinating memoir. Holley returned to Mount Meigs and walked in arms with ghosts, performing spoken word about the “children after children after children picking cotton, toting those bales, bending our backs, hoeing up and down the ditches and the creeks” against the rise-and-fall of an angular, chaotic arrangement of noise. The current of horns cracked, and Holley put shortened lifetimes into brash, claustrophobic jazz: “Teardrops of boys and girls, girls and boys crying, ‘I wanna go home.’ Old man get up to say, ‘You had a good home but you wouldn’t stay there.’” Oh Me Oh My cast a spell on our perceptions around Black tragedy. “Better Get That Crop in Soon” was a fictional dialogue between an enslaver and his enslaved; in the Michael Stipe-assisted title track, Holley meditated on the never-ending riches of education, remembering his mother’s sacrifices when she was floor-bound after “giving birth to baby after baby after baby after baby.” All of that history—every conversation between ancestors, the Afrofuturist poetry of Moor Mother, the heaven-reaching voice of Sharon Van Etten, the instrumentation of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—was dressed in sequences of free jazz, funk, ambient, bit-crushed noise-rock and wallowing drones. It was perfect, eye-opening, unrestrained and brutal.
Holley, now 75, takes the liberation of Oh Me Oh My and amplifies it into rhythmic, widescreen boldness on Tonky, a record titled after a childhood nickname—and, perhaps, not just a nod to an innocence no longer reachable but Holley’s tribute to a part of himself that was nearly erased. Jackknife Lee returns here, bringing his thickset production and a cinematic gloss with him, and we get a litany of guest stars. Mary Lattimore’s gossamery harp colors Holley’s thesis statement on “Life”: “Life is a reason for us to love / Go to a depth of love that is greater than any love that ever existed within you”; Open Mike Eagle delivers a “Black fist to North Star” verse on “The Same Stars,” which also features the words of Birmingham sculptor Joe Minter; billy woods outros the Mount Meigs-shaped epitaph of “I Looked Over My Shoulder”; Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock funnels a metallic pulse into the bedrock of “What’s Going On?”
Tonky begins in a sprawl, however, as “Seeds” spans nine minutes of contracting strings, teardrop synths and background chants. Holley likens his time at the Alabama Industrial School to slaves “coming in by the shiploads.” He talks, not sings, about going to bed bloody from whippings “for the same damn thing” every day, about “lines of boy and cries of girls,” about being afraid in a captivity of “seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months” where nobody came to help. “Seeds,” like all of Holley’s work, is a memory. “I remember this place called Horseshoe Bend,” he says. “When you got there, nothing but cotton had been planted within, cotton for many a mile. And it almost scared you to death. On one hand, it was so white and beautiful. On the other hand, you had to pick it and pick it right.” On “Protest With Love,” Kelly Pratt and Jordan Katz supply pangs of horns into a glitchy, soul pastoral, as Holley softens the cruelty of “Seeds” with his own lived-in faith: “Let love be your weapon.” You can hear his voice tremble, as if it could give out at any second but won’t.
Hope brightens “The Burden (I Turned Nothing Into Something),” as Holley considers how a family tree can be traumatized from the branch down to the root. “Burdens of our ancestors left for us to unravel and clarify in history,” he says, as Angel Bat Dawid’s clarinet wraps around him. “Imprints of burdens on our children, inheriting the burdens. You can go on and live free, but you still have to think about the burdens.” On “The Same Stars,” Holley makes a declaration: “Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Let my people go and leave my children alone.” As Lee’s synths swell and Davide Rossi’s menagerie of bass, cello, violin and viola trickles in, Holley begins to sing through revelation. The same stars he sees are the stars his ancestors once saw as they arrived, shackled as cargo on slave ships, in America. Open Mike Eagle’s verse works in tandem with Holley’s language, as Los Angeles rapper’s idiosyncratic, hushed flow flexes like a phantom limb: “We came here from deep rifts, exchange quips in the sports bars, thrown stones from cardboard, put hard light in ghost bones, postpone the Star Wars.”
Muscle memory lingers in “Kings in the Jungle, Slaves in the Field” as horns quiver, a synth stabs like a xylophone and Holley talks about Black art belonging to the masters who claimed Black artists. “They tore it into pieces,” he stresses, as the Legendary Ingramettes, Marley Turner, Marchael Harris Jr. and Fidel Harris chant “every piece we made” back to him. “Strength of a Song,” the uplifting, three-minute, piano-led symphony of drones and strings, features Holley’s most profound and simple gesture of clarity and survival. “I found a song that I could sing that held me together and kept me strong,” he belts out, as Alabaster DePlume’s saxophone aches into us in slow-motion. “Many times, I felt so powerless. I have felt so powerless. And my, my, my, my, my, my song helped me over the mountains.”
Tonky, like all of Holley’s albums, is poetry set in motion through fluid, emotional and inventive music composed by Jackknife Lee. His language is rhythmic and his stories are concentrated, even as they span centuries. Isaac Brock singing “We can’t leave together” through the surging, scorched-earth hymnal of “What’s Going On?” is a tempest at Tonky’s midpoint, while the 44-second “Fear” is a brief eulogy of optimism. “Fear the machine, because the damn machine surely ain’t gonna fear you,” Holley says. Purpose defines “Did I Do Enough?,” as Holley admits that he may not be “the greatest human” that he could be, but he wonders if he did “enough to touch somebody and help them along the way.” Those questions vibrate in “That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music,” as he mourns the epitaphs that were written so Black art could be accepted and rejected. Knowing Holley’s history as a sculptor, you can sense the exhaustion in his voice when he repurposes personal critique into a candid, if unintentional, appraisal of humankind’s near-instinctual malice: “Those are not good enough, it’s too rotten, it’s too rusty, too dirty. It don’t have no place, it’s all burnt debris. It’s crumbling apart.” And, as the hope wobbles, Holley retreats on “Those Stars Are Still Shining”: “Even in the midst of the purest darkness, we are there, illuminated,” he recalls. “Chained, the screams, the cries, the death and defecation, all combined.”
The centerpiece of Tonky, “I Looked Over My Shoulder,” finds Holley asking Rossi to score the momentum with an anxious adornment of yowling strings. Lee’s percussion is faint, his fingers tapping against what might be a talking drum or a djembe, as Holley calls himself a bum, a homeless person and a baby, because that’s what “they want to say.” The sound crashes into itself, as samples of incongruous noise undulate and crescendo. Holley remembers the Alabama Industrial School; “I saw my people without food to eat, anywhere to lay their heads, waiting in all kinda lines,” he says. “Lined up just to be lined up.” The coarseness of his details will make you uncomfortable, as he recalls “people crying, quaking and breaking, falling apart,” “bloody heads and skinned bodies” and “dogs chasing them all around, snapping at you to make you bleed.” But billy woods’ outro verse offers respite, turning Black suffering into global kinship. “Put me anywhere in the world, I find my people like trouble,” he raps in one moment; “I’m what the cat drug in, half-dead and gasping,” he raps in another.
After paying homage to Marvin Gaye in “What’s Going On?,” Holley calls to mind another soul great during the finale of Tonky. His “A Change is Gonna Come” is not the poptimistic gospel that Sam Cooke’s was four generations ago, but it’s a beautiful, humanity-driven finale. “The Earth is full of everything, what can we do but help each other?” a woman asks. “Are we ready? How can I love God without loving you?” Tonky is about befores and afters. “Seeds” becomes “Protest With Love”; “What’s Going On?” becomes “Fear”; and “Those Stars Are Still Shining” becomes “A Change is Gonna Come,” as past and present swing through the expanse of sample-heavy, string-accentuated vestiges.
At the album’s end, Holley lays bare one truth he’s learned to believe in: “Everything gonna be alright.” And, like a lot of this music, it’s a lyric sung by someone else. Tonky is profound in that way, as the songs offer an exchange between generations and a sharing of the torch. A change will come, but those who speak the dialect may not live to feel it. I return to the end of “Seeds,” as Holley acknowledges his wish to rob his memory and, like Midas, turn his thoughts into gold: “I try to tell my children, ‘This brain that I have, I’ve given it to you all and I understand the responsibility to the truth we bear.'”
Here, Lonnie Holley is the oral storyteller and the archivist, logging the suffering and abuse that first touched his forefathers and foremothers and trickled down into his own childhood decades and decades later. His language is generous and all-encompassing, even if many of the men and women he sings about, be it those ghosts he knew in Mount Meigs, or the ancestors he has known but not yet met, are gone. And, in days beyond this one, Holley’s generation will leave us, too. So who will continue to tell the stories of those lost in the shuffle of history’s nameless survival? Tonky suggests that it will be Holley’s collaborators, kinfolk and strangers—his progeny near and far, who recite his songs like signposts bound by both blood and water and map what suffering lingers in the vernacular of humanity itself. They will say the names. The forgotten will always hold their shape.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
