Lonnie Holley
Mith
Bloomington, USA: Jagjaguwar Records, 2018
12" vinyl record, gatefold sleeve
Edition size unknown
Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama in the Jim Crow-era South, Lonnie Holley was the 7th of 27 children. He was kidnapped by a burlesque dancer who raised him as her son until he was four, when he says he was traded for a bottle of whiskey. Later he was briefly declared brain dead after fleeing the home of an abusive foster parent and getting hit by a car. By eleven he was picking cotton and collecting trash from the side of the highway as a ward of the "Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children". When released, he found work as a job as a short-order cook at Disney World and eventually as a gravedigger.
Holley's first artworks were tombstones that he carved for his sister's two children, who had died in a house fire. He used blocks of a soft sandstone-like byproduct of metal casting he found discarded from a foundry near her home.
These works led to other carvings and assemblages, which were soon exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art and then included in the 1981 exhibition "More Than Land and Sky: Art from Appalachia" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His work has subsequently been shown at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the White House Rose Garden.
Despite this success and acclaim, his work is still viewed under the umbrella of "outsider art", a term most agree is offensive, but is regularly perpetuated for unclassifiable artists such as Holley.
The music world contends less often with the term, given that many popular genres (rock, hip-hop, folk, punk, etc.) are considered themselves a form of social mobility. "How could I get some dead presidents?" Rakim asks in Paid in Full and the answer is "a pen and a paper, a stereo, a tape of..." Almost twenty years earlier Mick Jagger asked "What can a poor boy do, 'cept for sing for a rock'n'roll band" in Street Fighting Man.
But the term "outsider music" is still used to describe certain self-taught or lo-fi artists, such as Daniel Johnston, The Shaggs, Wesley Willis, Shooby Taylor, Jandek, Moondog and BJ Snowden (whose song "New Brunswick" should be the provincial anthem here).
Holley recorded music alongside his artworks for years, mostly sharing them among friends, on cassette. His first official release came in 2012, when he was 62. The artist's incredible third album, Mith, was released four years ago, when he was 68 years old.
As you might expect with a biography like his, the record is concerned with perseverance and myth-making.
The almost eighteen-minute track “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” (the artist's favourite on the record) originated from a visit to Charleston, South Carolina, where an estimated 40% of enslaved Africans first landed in the US. Inspired by his visit, Holley imagines himself as a captured slave on a ship, then imagines escaping through his imagination. He takes flight and floats to shore, weaving in other histories of intertwined labor and oppression, almost as stream-of-consciousness auto-writing.
If “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” is a dissociative dream, the waking up is no less disturbing. The track that follows the album centrepiece is “I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America” , which sounds like little I've ever heard before.
Over dissonant synth washes, harrowing horns and militaristic snares, Holley howls lines like "I woke up wide and worser than" and "It make me cry and cry, Father cried, humanity cryin'". It's bombastic
and cacophonous, and - it turns out - also a dream. The track ends with the repeated line "Let me out of this dream"
The video for the song - which features many of the artists sculptural assemblages - can be seen on Youtube, here:
Last week Holley announced his new album, Oh Me Oh My, with a scheduled release date of March 10th. It will feature guest appearances from Moor Mother, Rokia Koné, Michael Stipe, Jeff Parker, Sharon Van Etten and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (who sampled him on "22, A Million").
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