Lonnie Holley’s Tonky Potently Spans Generations of Survival

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.”