On Dec. 9, renowned musician and visual artist Lonnie Holley will perform at the 40 Watt Club, along with Night Palace, Well Kept and Trvy & The Enemy, in a special benefit concert to raise money for Nuçi’s Space and Friends of Advantage.
There doesn’t seem to be a better advocate for mental health than Holley, an artist who has found abundant beauty in the world despite enduring an impossibly difficult upbringing. The story goes like this: Born one of 27 children in Birmingham, AL in 1950, his mother traded Holley for a bottle of whiskey. He survived by working various jobs and scavenging, was pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car, and served time in the infamous Alabama Industrial School For Negro Children.
“I was born to be different,” Holley says. “I went up and down those sewer pipes my first years of study. From five to 11 years old, I was crawling up and down sewer pipes. I was hopping trains and doing everything else that, you know, the homeless people was doing.”
When Holley’s sister’s children were killed in a house fire, Holley used found industrial sandstone to carve headstones for his niece and nephew. It was the beginning of an affinity for material, the fundamental fabric of the world. It was also when Holley realized art could be used to serve others.
It’s immediately obvious upon exposure to Holley’s work that he sees the world very differently than most people. His sculptures are created from found objects: finds from flea markets and antique stores, and industrial and electrical waste all make an appearance. Holley finds the medium of his art where most people would never think to look—at ground level, in the trash cans and creek beds of America—and from it he forms something beautiful, ephemeral and startlingly meaningful.
He also witnesses first hand the scale of waste in America, from food to everyday objects. “There are countries right now that need us to be sending them packages and packages of food,” Holley says in reference to America’s rampant food waste.
Holley’s work centers around themes of Black life in rural America, industry, ancestry, technology, spirituality and love, and has been displayed at The Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and many others.
Music has also always been a part of Holley’s life, although perhaps in a more subtle way. As a child, he would rest his head up against his grandmother’s jukebox and let the vibrations of the music lull him to sleep. He would listen to early instrumental film scores that played on drive-in speakers and immerse himself in the music of fairgrounds.
It wasn’t until Holley was in his 60s, though, that he began sharing his music with a broader audience. Since 2012, Holley has been releasing albums and touring, and this year released the wonderful Oh Me Oh My. It’s at times meditative, at times enraptured, and features artists like Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten and Michael Stipe.
But while his recorded music has been a critical success, Holley truly excels live and in person. No live show Holley puts on is ever the same. The lyrics, the subject matter, the instrumentation are constantly in a state of flux as he reacts in real time to the environment. He compared his concerts to the act of planting seeds. Seeds of information, of love for oneself and the world around them.
There’s an element to every way Holley interacts that is very much like the act of planting seeds. He often says something, whether in his art, music or in conversation, that isn’t always immediately meaningful. It takes time and conscious awareness to see the meaning sprout from the soil of your mind, where it has been gathering energy. And when it reveals itself in all its beauty, and you turn around to commend the man on his genius, he’s vanished, on to plant more seeds.
“I’m not just coming there for Athens alone,” Holley says when asked about his upcoming concert to benefit Nuci’s Space and Friends of Advantage. “I’m coming there for Mother Universe, for this mothership of ours, because it’ll be a while before we find another ship to call ours.”
Nuçi’s Space is a local center that provides resources for musicians and those affected by mental illness. They offer counseling, low-cost and free medical services, suicide prevention training and musical gear rentals. Friends of Advantage is an organization that assists in raising funds for Advantage Behavioral Health Systems through events and fundraising activities. The benefit concert is presented by the Classic City Rotary, which hopes to foster open conversations about mental health, and its Vic Chesnutt Songwriter of the Year Awards.
WHO: Lonnie Holley, Night Palace, Well Kept, Trvy & The Enemy
WHEN: Saturday, Dec. 9, 7 p.m. (doors)
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
HOW MUCH: $20 (students), $30
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