{"id":1680641,"date":"2023-03-27T16:34:30","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T13:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1680641"},"modified":"2023-03-27T16:34:30","modified_gmt":"2023-03-27T13:34:30","slug":"the-music-that-made-cosmic-bluesman-lonnie-holley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1680641","title":{"rendered":"The Music That Made Cosmic Bluesman Lonnie Holley"},"content":{"rendered":"
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5-10-15-20<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Music That Made Cosmic Bluesman Lonnie Holley\u00a0<\/h1>\n
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We talk to the 73-year-old singer and visual artist about the songs that have meant the most to him, from the Temptations\u2019 dispatches of Black life to Erykah Badu\u2019s personality-affirming swagger.<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Madison Bloom<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Image by Marina Kozak, photo by David Raccuglia<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On a recent afternoon,\u00a0Lonnie Holley greets me via video call from his Atlanta studio, where two abstract canvases loom behind him. Each massive painting\u2014one purple, one sandstone\u2014is dappled with gradients of gray and white, and scrawled over with curving black lines that recall Holley\u2019s\u00a0wire\u00a0sculptures of faces. Holley wears a striped hoodie and stacks of silver rings that make his hand look like a steel gauntlet. \u201cLet\u2019s get busy,\u201d he says in a raspy Southern drawl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We happen to be speaking on Holley\u2019s 73rd birthday, which he\u2019ll observe by tending to his paintings and found-object sculptures after our call. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of special to be talking with you on my birthday,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like a celebration to be able to talk to people about emotions and feelings, and how music enhances or draws those ill emotions to a level of making you feel better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holley\u2019s music and visual art have emerged from a lifetime of trauma. Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, Holley was the seventh of his mother\u2019s 27 pregnancies, and was displaced from his home as a young boy. As he\u2019s told it, a woman who took him away from his birth mother traded him for a bottle of whiskey when he was just four. While living with an abusive foster parent in a honky tonk, he absorbed music pouring out of the glowing Rock-Ola jukebox. After fleeing the violent household, Holley says he was hit by a car and declared brain-dead. At age 11, he was transferred to the\u00a0Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, where he was forced into manual labor, collecting highway trash and picking cotton. (Gathering precise dates and facts from Holley\u2019s narrative can prove difficult, and his oral history has occasionally been\u00a0clarified.)<\/p>\n

These harsh memories resurface on Holley\u2019s new album\u00a0Oh Me Oh My<\/em> like fossils emerging from a stone slab. On dizzying jazz scorcher \u201cMount Meigs,\u201d he recalls his days at the juvenile facility in terse spoken word: \u201cPicking cotton\/Toting those bales\/Bending our backs,\u201d he remembers. As the horns and drums whip into a rolling boil, Holley declares: \u201cThey beat the curiosity out of me\u2026 They banged it\/Slammed it\/Damned it.\u201d Holley also references the songs Mount Meigs children would belt out as they worked; on \u201cBetter Get That Crop in Soon,\u201d he imitates the facility\u2019s overseer summarizing the vicious cycle of field work: \u201cMore rain, more grass, more grass \/More grass, more ass\/For me to beat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh Me Oh My<\/em> is Holley\u2019s second solo full-length for vaunted indie imprint\u00a0Jagjaguwar, following his 2018 breakout\u00a0MITH<\/em>. Featuring label-mates\u00a0Bon Iver and Sharon Van Etten, as well as appearances from R.E.M. singer\u00a0Michael Stipe, avant-garde poet Moor Mother, and Malian singer Rokia Kon\u00e9, the new album could expose entirely new audiences to Holley\u2019s fractured Americana. Stipe, Van Etten, and Bon Iver\u2019s Justin Vernon are celestial counterparts to Holley\u2019s gruff, earthen voice; their entries are some of the album\u2019s most serene moments.<\/p>\n

Holley co-wrote\u00a0Oh Me Oh My<\/em>\u00a0with producer Jacknife Lee, who has worked with rock mainstays like U2 and the Killers. Like all of Holley\u2019s music and visual art, the album started with freewheeling improvisation, though the seed of a piece can germinate for years, sometimes starting as a sculpture or a painting. His song \u201cFifth Child Burning\u201d wasn\u2019t officially released until 2012, on Holley\u2019s debut album\u00a0Just Before Music<\/em>, but its origin point dates back to the 1970s, when Holley\u2019s niece died in a house fire.\u00a0\u00a0In 1994, he commemorated the tragedy with\u00a0a piece made from found objects, some destroyed by the blaze. Even when culled from life\u2019s bleakest moments, Holley\u2019s work is a fertile ecosystem of ideas blooming across mediums, growing around one another.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Here, Holley revisits the music that\u2019s punctuated his astounding life, five years at a time.<\/p>\n

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The Pilgrim Travelers: \u201cSwing Low Sweet Chariot\u201d<\/h2>\n

My first encounter with that song was during a period of a loved one\u2019s death. She was almost like my adopted mother. Her name was Mrs. McElroy. She had died, and when Mr. McElroy came and found that she was dead, [\u201cSwing Low Sweet Chariot\u201d] was on the Rock-Ola. He played it pretty well all day. And I was getting a whooping during that period. \u201cSwing Low Sweet Chariot\u201d was one that I\u2019ll never forget because it was a brutal time of my life. I never did get a chance to see Mrs. McElroy, not even her body, anymore. So it stuck with me. For Blacks in America, the lyrics were our only soothers. After coming from the field, the little music that we got a chance to hear was soothing. Especially church music.<\/p>\n

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\u201cMount Meigs Stomp\u201d<\/h2>\n

[Sings]: \u201cKnock time coming and it won\u2019t be long\/You gonna see old Sally with the red dress on.\u201d<\/em> That means we were getting ready to knock off, either go to dinner or lunch. A lot of the time, the lunch would be packed and you would have a peanut butter jelly or bologna sandwich that would be brought on the old Dodge truck. But Sally was the cook, and we sang it cause we were joyful to know that we were going to get out of the fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The overseers, I think we kept them calm by the way that we sang. We sang to keep from getting beat. The quieter we stayed, the more chances you were being watched. The louder [the song] got, the more chances somebody was in a groove with what you were singing. So it is almost like you drew their attention. They wanted to hear what the next part of the lyrics was going to be. Even [the overseer], you calmed him down. He wasn\u2019t so angry. I think what we were doing was protesting our conditions. What I try to sing about is reasonable ways to protest, where you won\u2019t get the hell beat out of you.<\/p>\n

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Joe Simon: \u201cNine Pound Steel\u201d<\/h2>\n

\u201cNine Pounds Steel\u201d was a prison song about prisoners. It was orchestrated around busting rocks. You have to come out of the bars and go to the big stone quarry or the roads that you were breaking. It was an individual song that this human sang, but you can just almost close your eyes and see all of the people with that steel. Seeing some of the stuff that my daddy and my granddaddies had to do in Birmingham, Alabama, working in a place called Sloss Furnaces: busting up the pig iron after it comes out of the foundry, knocking the ends off of the pig iron with those big old double handled hammers. A nine pound steel was a big sledge hammer.<\/p>\n

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The Temptations: \u201cBall of Confusion\u201d<\/h2>\n

The Temptations were bringing us information about the period after the war. My dad was in World War II, and my grandpap was in World War I. And the \u201cBall of Confusion\u201d as it played out before my eyes was to see these humans that had been in the military, like the Tuskegee Airmen\u2014there were a couple of them living right down the street from me. But the Negro soldiers versus the white soldiers at the time, a lot of times they were mistreated when they came home. They weren\u2019t treated with any respect. The \u201cBall of Confusion\u201d is when you are so stressed out or so shell shocked and moody and ill, you can\u2019t keep up with your paperwork or you lose track on reading and writing to the point where you can\u2019t even communicate. The \u201cBall of Confusion\u201d is: you got a house full of babies somewhere and you can\u2019t give those children a good meal. The \u201cBall\u201d means you gotta chuck it somewhere. To get it away from you.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Loretta Lynn: \u201cCoal Miner\u2019s Daughter\u201d<\/h2>\n

Country was something that was not affiliated with Blacks. There weren\u2019t that many Black country singers. But Loretta Lynn was out of the coal mines. Her and Dolly Parton were out of a hard life. And they sang about the hard lives that they had come out of, and a woman\u2019s need to be educated. It makes you really think about the kind of lyrics they put into their music. It helps you understand that country life\u2026writing about the man being under the influence of too much whiskey. Back in those days, a man and a woman would get drunk, and a lot of times lose control at home. A lot of abuse was going on. I grew up with those kinds of abusive situations where the hard times were brought with you from work. I related to what was going on with her lifestyle.<\/p>\n

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The Gap Band: \u201cYou Dropped a Bomb on Me\u201d<\/h2>\n

I found out that they actually lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had an opportunity to go to the\u00a0Philbrook Museum up there, and the Philbrook purchased a work of art of mine. But I also had an opportunity to have an exhibit there where they allowed me to scavenge a lot of the found objects that I was using for this exhibit. And that\u2019s when I found out that the Gap Band was from Oklahoma. The way that\u00a0Black Wall Street was destroyed, they dropped bombs out of the air and tore the community up. And then to hear\u00a0[sings]<\/em> \u201cyou dropped a bomb on me, baby.\u201d<\/em> It hit me: These guys are singing about the history of their community and making it known. But not only did we learn it, we learned to groove with it. We learned to move with it. That\u2019s a good thing that I really, really like about music.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald: \u201cOn My Own\u201d<\/h2>\n

\u201cOn My Own\u201d helped me deal with raising my five children by myself. My wife had gone to prison and she was there for eight years. I had to raise our five little children and continue to be the artist that I was. I was listening to\u00a0 music, but mostly singing. I was singing on my karaoke machine, buying cassette tapes. Sometimes I would start one song and sing it all day. It was soothing.<\/p>\n

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Lonnie Holley: \u201cFifth Child Burning\u201d<\/h2>\n

Mostly all of [my early recordings] had been\u00a0works of art. When my niece lost her life in a house fire, she died surrounded by all of her material things that had been bought, in my opinion, to pacify her and make her happy. New dresses, a TV, a VCR, a radio, roller skates, and all types of cosmetic products. Everything that a little girl did not need. She was at home alone while her parents were out working to earn enough to continue to buy these things. I thought back to the four little girls who were killed in the\u00a016th Street Baptist Church bombing and while my niece didn\u2019t die because of someone having the intention to kill her, her life was lost just the same. We will never know what any of these five children could have grown into.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When I sang the song, \u201cFifth Child Burning,\u201d I was in my imagination, walking through the burned out house and talking about all of the items that had burned and trying to offer a solution for future children and their safety. I was also trying to honor the lives of the other four little girls and every other small child who might suffer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Erykah Badu: \u201cNext Lifetime\u201d<\/h2>\n

When she came on the scene, for me it was kind of a shared personality. I thought,\u00a0I can be myself, I can really be myself<\/em>. I wear a lot of bracelets, and the way that I saw her being an individual with her rings, with her shifting, shaping, reshaping her personality\u2026 it showed me it was all right for me to change my garments and be a different personality.<\/p>\n

Especially when videos came in and you got a chance to see her acting out these parts. Because for a long time you couldn\u2019t see the artists performing. The digital era gave everybody a chance to be the director, to come in the front and not always be behind the scene. And that\u2019s what Erykah Badu did for me. She brought me to the front of the screen saying, \u201cyou don\u2019t always have to be heard, but now you can be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gee\u2019s Bend Quilters: \u201cGive Me My Flowers (While I Yet Live)\u201d<\/h2>\n

I got really deep involved with the\u00a0quilters of Gee\u2019s Bend [Alabama] with [Holley\u2019s manager and longtime friend] Matt Arnett. They were a singing group, but you gotta also think about the hands. For me to get a chance to meet them and see the work they had done with their hands and how they were paying tribute to a lot of the humans that they had grown up around with those quilts. Those quilts became a story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It was very moving to see them do something to\u00a0death<\/em>. They were committed. This is the song that said, \u201cgive us our flowers while we yet live.\u201d They were due those flowers. If you look at all the works that they have done or how they have learned to do those works\u2026 seeing their fathers and grandfathers and parents labor and seeing their sisters and brothers work the fields\u2026 so much going on in their life. It was soaked up by those quilts.<\/p>\n

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Lonnie Holley: \u201cSix Space Shuttles and 144\u200b,\u200b000 Elephants\u201d<\/h2>\n

In 2006 I recorded my own music for the first time in a professional way, down in Gee\u2019s Bend. Matt Arnett was down there recording more of the community\u2019s music and I went. He told me that he wanted to use the recording studio they built temporarily to record my music, too.\u00a0The first time putting on the [headphones] at Gee\u2019s Bend and having the microphone sit in front of me, and being able to close my eyes, and let the music pour out of my vessel. I was just letting it flow and it was pouring out like I was still little, shaking my head to what was on the Rock-Ola.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants\u201d was a song that I did honoring Queen Elizabeth while she was alive. Rest in peace, Queen. But I also did it honoring five other queens on the planet that would get together and build these six space shuttles and do this outer planetary study, inner planetary study, and also water studies with these shuttles.<\/p>\n

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Deerhunter and\u00a0Doria Roberts<\/h2>\n

I\u2019m not sure I listened to much music during this time except my own and the bands I toured with. I got to hear a lot of Deerhunter\u2019s music on tour with them, and I spent a lot of time at my friend Bradford [Cox]\u2019s house\u00a0making music. Usually on different instruments, just to make sounds, or playing with clay and paint. We worked with what we had. We were using screws and nuts and orange peelings and nails in a bag and all kinds of instruments and ladders and drop cloths and everything. He always plays beautiful music on his record players when we make art, but I never know who it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I also used to listen to Doria Roberts around this time. She lived near me in Atlanta and we\u2019d get together and make music. She moved away and her and her wife\u2019s house recently burned down. She lost almost everything she owned. It\u2019s so sad. Also lost the music we\u2019d recorded together.<\/p>\n

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Bob Dylan: \u201cGotta Serve Somebody\u201d and \u201cWatered-Down Love\u201d<\/h2>\n

Bob Dylan is a poet. He draws you into his words by orchestrating them to the point where you can almost see him pulling these words out of his spirit. \u201cGotta Serve Somebody,\u201d that was a beautiful song. Everybody wants to put it in a religious category. It wasn\u2019t so much religious, it was poetic. If you don\u2019t want to serve me, then you\u2019re gonna have to serve the master\u2026 You have to serve your mama, serve your daddy, serve your teacher, serve your preacher, but you gotta serve somebody. We have a tendency, after those people have rendered their services to us, we dump \u2019em. That\u2019s what his music taught me.\u00a0You all are too quick to dump \u2019em.<\/em> That\u2019s what \u201cWatered-Down Love\u201d is about:\u00a0You don\u2019t want real love, you want it to be watered down.<\/em> That\u2019s heavy.<\/p>\n

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Lonnie Holley and Moor Mother: \u201cI Am Part of the Wonder\u201d and \u201cEarth Will Be There\u201d<\/h2>\n

[Moor Mother is] another poet\u2014A spoken-word person speaking of reality. Speaking of our experiences in America as a people, and echoing out the strength of a woman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/features\/5-10-15-20\/the-music-that-made-cosmic-bluesman-lonnie-holley\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5-10-15-20 The Music That Made Cosmic Bluesman Lonnie Holley\u00a0 We talk to the 73-year-old singer and visual artist about the songs that have meant the most to him, from the Temptations\u2019 dispatches of Black life to Erykah Badu\u2019s personality-affirming swagger. By Madison Bloom March 27, 2023 Image by Marina Kozak, photo by David Raccuglia On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1680642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,54],"class_list":["post-1680641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1680641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1680641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1680642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1680641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1680641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1680641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}