You could be forgiven for thinking Lonnie Holley is a fictional character, perhaps one dreamed up by Colson Whitehead, the author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad.

His backstory is jaw-dropping. Born in Alabama in 1950, the seventh of 27 children, he says he was traded for a bottle of whiskey at the age of four; at nine he was hit by a car, dragged for a couple of blocks and spent almost three months in a coma; at 11 he was incarcerated in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a juvenile correctional facility that was nothing more than a slave camp, where the children were sent to do back-breaking work in the cotton fields all day and routinely beaten and abused.

The fact Holley is still alive at the age of 73 is astounding. The fact he became a renowned artist whose sculptures and paintings have been shown at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the White House, is even more remarkable.

On top of this, last year he released his seventh album, Oh Me Oh My, a visceral and revealing collection of songs about his nightmarish past and his optimism and hope for the future, produced by Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers, R.E.M.) and featuring guest appearances from high-profile fans including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Michael Stipe and Sharon Van Etten.

“Thumbs up to the universe!” Holley exclaims in his trademark greeting, speaking from his manager’s home in Atlanta, Georgia.

His left hand is a mass of bangles and rings, which he says protect him when using the tools of his trade while making sculptures from found objects and detritus. He has greying dreadlocks, a hangdog face and large, soulful eyes. His manner of speaking is somewhere between a preacher and a poet, and his answers can wander into discursive asides about the human condition as he talks about planting seeds, seeking water and becoming like the branches of a tree.

Of one thing he’s sure – his art saved him. And it started from a deeply personal and tragic place in his 20s, when he carved gravestones for a niece and nephew who died in a house fire.

He went on to obsessively create sculptures from found objects, and in the mid-1980s his work eventually caught the attention of Bill Arnett, a keen collector and outspoken promoter of the work of African-American artists from the US south.

“Other people saw what I was doing as picking up a bunch of junk and putting it together,” Holley says. “Bill came along and saw the stories behind it and what I was trying to do. He understood.”

Arnett died in 2020.

“My dad was fighting for the world to understand and appreciate black art from the region we come from,” says Arnett’s son Matt, who manages Holley. “He was trying to change museum systems to force this art into those places that had never welcomed it before, or had stereotyped it as a second-class thing. I watched my dad be a champion for those artists my whole life, and Lonnie was one of them.”

For years Matt had been astounded by the music Holley made for himself on home-made cassettes, “but I was a child of Tower Records, where there were all these categories like rock and folk and soul and jazz, and although I loved Lonnie’s music I didn’t know exactly what it was or where it would fit in a record store”.

Seven albums later, it seems the answer is that Holley doesn’t fit in anywhere, and that’s exactly the appeal of what he does. Critics have drawn comparisons with the spoken word/proto-rap of Gil Scott-Heron, the experimental jazz of Sun Ra, or the work of so-called outsider artists like Daniel Johnston. But ask Holley about his music and he’s direct.

“The way I make music is I simplify,” he says. “I don’t want to dress it up in a suit and tie and shiny shoes like a dignitary. I want to celebrate my grandmammy and grandpappy and those who lived before, and tell our stories. I want to tell people what I’ve learned and what I know. I try to tell it how it is.”

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On his latest album Holley really tells it like it is on the central track Mount Meigs, a frenetic and powerful song about his time at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. Over whirring strings, rattling drums and frazzled shards of electric guitar that suggest the early work of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he builds his story to a climax with the words: “Nobody taught us anything. Got no education. Nobody let us have no wisdom. They beat the curiosity out of me! They beat it out of me! They whooped it! They knocked it! They banged it! Slammed it! Damned it!”

At the end he softly repeats the words “Picture me being there”. And you can’t help but do so.

Despite the bad memories, Holley remains surprisingly positive about his life. “I went through trials and tribulations as a child but I grew through it,” he says. “I was like a big ball of air thrown out onto the water, and the water pushed and rolled and tumbled me. Everything is a test, but you have to realise that you’ve been blessed with life and you have to heal yourself. And then, boom! You’re blossoming, you’re branching out, like a tree.”

Matt Arnett knows Holley better than anyone. How does he think he has not only survived but thrived? “The short answer is I have no f---ing idea,” he says. “He’s out there trying to give joy and hope to a world that never gave him any of those things. That blows my mind. It hurts me to think of all these people who have done all these horrible things to Lonnie, and to so many other people, too.”

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Arnett has shared many a hotel room with Holley while on tour, “and almost nightly I can hear him having nightmares and calling out the names of ‘Glover’ or ‘Holloway’ and other people who mistreated him 60 years ago”.

“The word ‘authentic’ is so overused. But the things Lonnie sings about and the things he makes art about are true to his life. And it’s through his art and his music that he’s been able to find peace. They’re his salvation.”

Lonnie Holley will appear with Moor Mother and Irreversible
Entanglements at the Rechabite Hall, Perth, on February 22; Mona Lawns, Hobart (24); Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (26); and Melbourne Recital Centre (28).

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

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