Afro-futuristic jazz, funk, and soul
Atlanta, Georgia
Photo courtesy of artist
“What I’m working with, man, I’m working with all the way down to the nitty gritty, to the grit of the gritty, to the particles,” says Lonnie Holley. Through his unflinching, granular investigation of his life, Holley has emerged not only as one of the country’s foremost creators of visionary art but also as a musician of ever-increasing renown. Holley’s unique musical creations are colored by traces of jazz, funk, soul, blues, and gospel, combined with his personal experiences and expansive reflections on history and current events. He weaves these raw materials into sonic explorations that transcend and transport his listeners.
Lonnie Holley was born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh of 27 children. His childhood was marked with events that seem impossible to fathom yet left a very real and painful legacy: at age four a temporary caregiver traded him for a bottle of whiskey; a few years later he was struck by a car and spent months in a coma. Then at age 11, Holley was deemed “incorrigible” by the Jim Crow court system, and sent to the notorious Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mount Meigs. Children there endured forced labor, routine beatings, and worse. In his song “Mount Meigs,” Holley declares, “All of that information is still within me.”
In his late 20s, Holley began to transform his lived experiences into art that testified both to the trauma and to its transcendence. In 1979, he created his first sculpture, a tombstone to mark the grave of his sister’s two children who had died in a house fire, hand-carved in sandstone byproducts discarded by a local foundry. “It was like a spiritual awakening,” he later recalled. “I had been thrown away as a child, and here I was building something out of unwanted things in memorial of my little nephew and niece. I discovered art as service.” Holley quickly gained widespread acclaim, with work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the High Museum in Atlanta, the city he now calls home. Holley is sometimes categorized as an “outsider artist,” but that misrepresents the profound connectedness of his work, which not only engages the long tradition of African American artists fashioning beauty from salvaged materials but also the urge toward communal action and healing.
Holley’s music began as an accompaniment to his art process: he sings as he creates, the aural becoming yet another layer in his assemblages. Eventually the music became its own expression. Accompanying himself on keyboards, playing only the black notes, Holley improvises musical narratives from history, current events, and personal experience. Much like another Birmingham native, the legendary jazz great Sun Ra, Holley can be understood as part of the tradition of Afrofuturism, the visionary aesthetic of willing a better future into existence through innovation and the materials at hand—in this case the deep wellsprings of Black vernacular music filtered through Holley’s singular vision. He didn’t release an album until age 62, but his six studio recordings and immersive performances are an essential intervention in American culture. As a recent profile in the New Yorker noted, Lonnie Holley “is inviting us to try to make sense of the world together. In person, Holley has an almost shamanistic quality, as if he possessed all the wisdom of the universe, and would happily share it with you, if you let him.”