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Mar 26, 2025 Web Exclusive By Mark Moody Photography by Viva Vadim

At 75 years of age, many stories have been told about Lonnie Holley. Most from his own tongue. A world renowned self-taught artist, Holley was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Using improvised approaches in both art and music, Holley has forged his own path. Many similar visual artists have come before and behind him, but his combination of the visual mixed with making songs, and his unique personal history, make Holley one of a kind.

The title of Holley’s latest album, Tonky, is self-referential to a roughly 10 year period from age 4 to 14. As a baby, Holley was shuttled between multiple caretakers and ended up with a couple named the McElroys, who owned a honky-tonk or whiskey house. To put it lightly, not a great environment for a child to be raised and there were abuses on top of that. But it was from those barroom environs that the Tonky nickname came from.

At 10 years old, Holley was incarcerated at the Alabama Industrial Home for Negro Children (aka Mount Meigs), for what started as an infraction for breaking curfew. In the Jim Crow South at the time, there were a myriad of laws meant to trip up the Black population or that were only enforced against them. For more on Holley’s time at Mount Meigs, the Peabody award nominated podcast, Unreformed, is highly recommended.

Holley and I connected via Zoom from his studio in Atlanta. Holley was assisted in getting ready for the call by Matt Arnett. Arnett’s father, William, was instrumental in bringing Holley’s, and so many other artists’, work to the attention of the world in the ’80s and ’90s. After my first question it was apparent that Holley may not exactly answer what you asked in a direct manner, but instinctively tells you what you need to know. Thoughts of asking about recording processes, collaborations (of which there are many—ranging from Mary Lattimore to billy woods on Tonky), and other technical items quickly go out the window. What is of most value and interest is the message that Holley is conveying through his lyrics. “What am I trying to tell you?,” as he puts it later on. And you best listen in order to learn.

Mark Moody (Under the Radar): Hey, Lonnie. How are you doing?

Lonnie Holley: I’m good. How are you?

I’m good. I’ve known your name and your work for a long time. My wife and I lived in D.C. in the early ’90s, and we went to the Passionate Visions self-taught artists exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery. We saw your work and that of so many other talented artists there. I don’t know if you remember that show. I know you’ve shown in a lot of places.

Yes, it’s been a while. A lot has changed since back in those days.

Yeah. For all of us, right? Our magazine primarily covers the indie music scene. So I know you from different avenues. And I’ve been listening to the Unreformed podcast as well, but specifically the interview is to talk about music today primarily, if that works, and the new album, Tonky.

Music is always a good subject to talk about because it’s helping us through a lot of our situations on this planet.

Right, very universal. So I wanted to ask about “Seeds,” first of all, right off the top of the album. You go back again to talk about your time at Mount Meigs. [Holley also had a song titled “Mount Meigs” on his prior album.] It’s a very powerful song, but the one part that stuck out to me is when you talk about little Tonky McElroy: “He didn’t know nobody.” And you’re talking about yourself at an earlier time in your life. Do you look at that time in your life through a different lens? Is it almost like you were a different person?

Well, in a sense yes, when it’s come down to dealing with what I’ve experienced since being that little boy. Even though I was around a lot of different [people] at the state fairground, and for a long time with the burlesque dancers. Having to pick up paper or run around doing hard little jobs at the drive-in theater, at the international racetrack [with the] demolition cars. So there was a lot of fun always going on around me.

I think we have a problem with what is fun versus what is religious purposes and how we should keep church and state separated. Separate the state fairground from the church, because you’re having too much fun at the fairground, or you may be having too much fun at the drive-in theater, or you may be having too much fun at the whiskey house or all of those other kinds of places. So you’re sneaking and doing all of these things. You’re sneaking to go and get these experiences. So this is what Little Tonky McElroy was doing.

Because before [I was known as] Tonky McElroy, maybe one and a half to four and a half, I was raised up at the state fairground, moving from carnival spot to carnival spot throughout the counties of Alabama. My brain was being introduced to all types of people. No matter what their status or means, you can put on a suit, and you can act like you’re a preacher, or you can put on overalls and act like you’re a farmer. You know what I’m saying?

So me being raised with all of that kind of mentality and seeing the best movies that were brought to the drive-in theater. The big screen was no more than a block and a half away from my back door. And the racetrack was not even two blocks across the ditch. I could get up on top of my house and kind of hear people cheering on who’s going to win the demolition race and all of these kinds of things.

Right. So by talking about Tonky McElroy, that’s a really formative time for you.

He was the retriever. A lot of the things that I had done really came out of what I had retrieved as a child. Little Tonky was the one that was getting all the ideas, just putting them in. [Holley cups his hands around his eyes to mimic taking in a multitude of sights.] He was just seeing everything, just not knowing that there was going to come a time when all of this information was going to be pulled out of me like I was the vessel.

In the Bible, your cup runneth over. My cup always is running over. That’s the reason why I do songs only one time. Because it’s the brain set that I have that kind of hinders me from redoing the songs over and over again, but it doesn’t hinder me from going back into the well of thought, gathering the information that’s necessary to bring forth a new piece.

That makes sense. I wanted to ask, because maybe those are fleeting moments for you. I don’t know if you go back and listen to your songs again or it’s kind of one-and-done for you? I had read that, before doing these albums, that you also had made your own music on your own, and I don’t know if that’s correct.

It was more like one-and-done for a long, long time because I was using my karaoke machine that held a little cassette tape. I put my cassettes in, and I’d go out with my keyboard, and just go to playing. And I’ll play, and I’ll sing for hours and hours and hours. I take it out, put another one in, keep on, just keep straight on. A lot of times, I didn’t go back over a lot of them again.

So my thing with the noises, I remember singing a song, “Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord.” All the noises that I had heard, this is the reason why I tried to do my very, very best making music without being the type of musician that had been trained or instrumentally taught. I did my best with whatever I had. I tried to make it sound as good as I possibly could.

I wanted to ask about the title of the song “Seeds.” A seed to me is something that growth comes from or life comes from. I know that was a very difficult time in your life that you’re singing about there, but have you reconciled yourself to any of that or how that shaped you?

You got to see me as a seed, a different seed, but planted, right? Between my mother, my father, my grandparents, and all of those people that I actually came from, my lineage came from. I was separated from them, taken away from them, having to be raised by myself. So if you were talking about a seed that you put in the ground and you plant it, you don’t know what it’s going to bear. You don’t know, when it gets large enough, what you are going to reap when you get the harvest from that seed. Some of us, we are so rare. In our birth, we are rare, but we don’t even know it. It’s just like we have to kind of figure out who we are, where we fit.

That’s a really good point. I want to ask about the song “The Same Stars.” And it’s a very interesting one. I mean, first, Joe Minter is on there, your old neighbor from Birmingham. [Minter is also a self-taught artist who is best known for his African Village in America on the outskirts of Birmingham.] Is that the first time he’s recorded with you? I was wondering if you could maybe talk about your relationship with him a little bit.

Joe has been like a father to me. He’s an artist. What he does with found objects and objects that he’d go out [and get], him and his wife, when she was living. They would go out together in antique and flea markets and wherever else that they found these materials to use. And Joe has used some of the most [sturdy] material when it came down to household appliances. If you look at his works, not only was he creating an African village honoring the ancestors that were stolen and brought here to America and worked the plantations. We did everything from the outdoor toilet to the plumbing of the indoor toilets for the master. We did mostly all of the gardens from the small gardens to the larger plantations of fields after fields of all different types of vegetables and fruits and things like that.

When I met Joe and saw what his contributions will finally be like, it’s going to be so important to the knowledge of African Americans—Blacks, coloreds, and the Negroes. Because we’ve had a long lifetime in the Americas. So [during] that time, we actually created, invented, come up with all types of ideas that we might not have been able to write down. But the masters, they knew how to read and write, and they took the ideas. And they put them into a constructive manner that we’re using today. And I think this is what Joe’s work is showing. He’s showing that our offerings to our ancestors, just say the quilt that’s behind me—it’s such a beautiful quilt. But you can see how much time it took to even put each one of these little bitty pieces of quilt together to make the whole entire thing. But we use what others discarded pretty well all the time. That’s the only thing that we had to use or felt safe enough to use.

Right. So back to “The Same Stars,” and you’re kind of touching on this, you talk about this concept of the stars were there when the slave ships came, and those are the same stars today. But I also may be picking up on the concept that maybe we all came from the stars initially.

We all come from this star, this mothership. She’s a star. If you go far out in space to a place that you can’t go any further, she turns into a flickering star without any identity of who’s on her. I mean, every planet out there got something that we don’t know what it is that’s on that planet.

But when we get to examining space and try to do our very, very best with coming back and reporting to the humanities on the planet, that all of this is going on around you, and there are some dangerous spots out there in space called the black holes, and if we’re not careful, we can slip into a black hole. My whole thing is, if we did slip into that black hole, and that black hole was big enough to swallow our sun at the same time, we would still not know that we had fallen into these black holes. We are going into dimensions that we don’t even know anything about. We are moving through the timescale of the time frame, and we don’t know nothing about it.

So when I laid on my back as a little bitty boy, as Tonky McElroy, on the top of the roof, just laying back, [I was] looking at those stars. I looked at the stars so many times. I did a song called “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” in my imagination. I read the stars in my imagination when I snuck off the slave ship. I came down to a park, and I was surrounded by humanity. I saw what they were doing in development. A lot of my songs, if you listen back at them, they are just metaphors for what not only experiences made me feel like I was involved with, but [understanding] people like Joe [Minter] and Thornton Dial or Ronald Lockett or Purvis Young. [Holley is referring to his fellow self-taught artists, whose work can be seen on the excellent www.soulsgrowndeep.org website.] Because Purvis Young was down in Miami. He was one of the water artists, and he was more bound by the water. His materials and his subject was mostly all waterly bound by us trying to not only come from Haiti and then get to Miami in a different frame of mind. Readjusting most of the things that we had to readjust to was always our material value that we had. And with all of these artists, each and every one of the artists offered something from what they had experienced about their material value.

That makes sense. The last song on the album is called “A Change Is Going to Come,” which is the same name of the famous Sam Cooke protest song. But your song seems to be maybe more about the planet and what’s changing on the planet.

My song is [talking about] that the change has already came. My song is that we’ve already had chances with changing. [Things are] changing every second. Something new is coming about, a new way, a new way of thinking, a new way of living, a new way for our child development centers to offer new educational ways and habits for children. The most frightening thing to me about the change that I’m singing about is that, as we change, there is some things that need to be taken out of the whole big picture to keep us moving forward. I think that song kind of says it all about how we, as the people, we have to be able to peel the fruit in order to enjoy it. We have to be careful, if the fruit has seeds in it, to take the seeds out. And if we’re going to reuse the seeds, take them out, let them dry, and then when it’s time to replant them, to replant them. All of this stuff is [coming at you while] you’re listening to my music. A lot of it needs you to listen to song after song after song to get, “What in the hell is he trying to say? What is he saying here? He’s not actually telling us like Sam Cooke told us that a change is going to come. He’s telling us about the changes that have already come in the past, and we didn’t take advantage of it because we was too lazy or was acting crazy or we was in the quicksand field of stupidity, begging and hoping and praying for a better day.”

And the greatest, they was already with us. The only thing we had to learn to do in all these changes is how to live with each storm, how to live with each earthquake, each tornado, each volcano. There is just not going to stop being the Earth, but we can make it worse by what we are burning, about how we are causing the climate to change. By the ozone layer being taken away, by all of the different types of [chemicals] that are being put together and bogged up and made into a rubber ball, and it punches a hole through our ozone layer. These kind of studies, everybody is not studying as deep as I was.

You got to remember what little Tonky started doing. He was a studier. He was watching people’s movements, watching all those animals [at the fairgrounds]. I was watching them, not only their tamers, but how their owners had grew them up. The vegetation that they were bringing to the fairground, everything that was brought in there and presented as their very best. I got a chance to see it. I remember doing a piece called I Never Had a Trophy. I never got awards for what I was doing, and people that was listening to me, they didn’t ever put me up for no great award. And a lot of these awards that have been given to people only for acting. But I was being for real. They was acting. They had roles. They had scripts. They had all of this stuff that had been written for them to learn from. I was learning from what my experiences [actually] were. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah, I do. And it made me think, at the beginning there, when you were talking about people not realizing the change that’s happening or taking advantage of those things, it made me think about your art. In terms of taking these discarded items and doing something with them that the rest of the world left behind?

I think it’s always there. When you went to the [Corcoran], you probably saw Yielding to the Ancestors While Controlling the Hands of Time.

Yeah. I have the book from the exhibit. So I looked at that today and saw that.

That big, old piece was a found object. All of those kind of things was going to be crushed back down, grinded up, and burned up. A lot of times, they was taken to the landfill. Mostly, everything over the years that I have affiliated with has ended up in the landfill. Has ended up in the junkyard, has ended up in the scrapyard, has ended up being recycled. I was probably one of the first besides Joe [Minter] and Thornton Dial. Thornton Dial, I think, was one of the greater artists that was actually putting recycled material onto the canvas, making sculptures about our humanities. And in one of the greatest manners. I mean, think about Mr. Dial not only having the nerves but having the kind of idea of appreciating Princess Diana by building a whole big sculpture. [Holley is referring to Doll House (As She Lived in Her Castle, Life Came and Flew Her Away.]

Yeah, the scale of his work is just incredible.

And before John Lewis even thought about passing away, Mr. Dial created Crossing the Selma Bridge. [The 42-foot-long found object sculpture, The Bridge, sits in the John Lewis Plaza of Freedom Park in Atlanta.] All of these things out of found materials. All of these things was out of something [discarded]. We took the time to not only see the way to use our skillfulness—we didn’t always have the tools to make it happen. We bind it the best way we could because that’s what we had to do on the farm, right? We had to learn. I had to learn in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. I had to learn to do so many things just with wire, and cutting down a tree and trimming all of the knots off of the tree and making my own hoe handle and all these other things. Sewing up clothes, or slaughtering the animals. All these things, I had to learn these things by sight. And I still learned a lot from my grandma going to the landfill. Not only that, my grandma went to the graveyard to dig graves. I remember her telling me, “One thing I want you to understand,” she said. “You can’t wear but one pair of shoes in your grave, no matter how much money. No matter how many pairs of shoes you get, you can’t wear but one pair of shoes in the grave.”

I try to continue to order that out. I try to help people to understand why she tell me to get back down in that hole because you cannot put a straight coffin in a crooked hole. “Now get back down in that hole and dig it and straighten it out.” See, all of those things in our life was ruled by what we saw and what was taught to us. This is what Mr. Dial was [guided] by. This is what mostly all the artists, if you know anything about [the Southern self-taught artist] vernacular [were guided by]. All the artists that William Arnett was affiliating with, he was involved with those people because they had secrets that they were locking up in their art. They had intentions that were so pure to life, but others would just laugh at us and say, “What the hell are you doing? What is that shit you’re working with? That ain’t no art.” I wrote a song about that.

I was going to ask you about that song, “That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music.”

“That’s not art. That’s not music.” They’re probably going to say that about me pretty well until I’m dead and gone and some years after. But something [that looks] simple [can have] complexity. It takes somebody that’s going to sit down and say, “Wow, I see [what they were saying]. I see what they brought from Africa that they never let go of. And they kept these things.” If you go all the way back through all the sculptures, all the art, everything that was brought on the ship with us from Africa to America, it was mostly found objects. I got some cowry shells on me. [Holley gestures to the many bracelets and rings that he wears.] There were cowry shells brought over from Africa. A little bit of wood sculpture, that’s what they mostly did because that was ceremonial. This is what Joe [Minter] is doing. He’s making offerings to the ancestors. There were two graveyards in his backyard. You understand what I’m saying?

It’s just moving around between graveyards on the planet. I’m not trying to say I’m interested in only the African-American graveyards. I’m interested in every graveyard this planet could have held. And a lot of us disintegrated. They disintegrated out in space. We got lost in space. No lie. A lot of us, we got lost in space.

My wife is a photographer, and one of her favorite things to do is go to graveyards and photograph tombstones and really ancient things. So I understand that appreciation.

The older ones in America are going to have the most artist material. They just used stone [for the grave marker]. They used broken stone. What they did, they just took something and just used it as a marker [to show that that] individual person knew their mom. They took limestone because that’s what Birmingham had. Birmingham was limestone, flint, graphite. They also use lime, alabaster stone, all of these stones, rocks and gravel, everything. So all of those things I had learned to use. I had been up and down the creeks and the ditches where mostly all of the city waste be flushed there. Everything wasn’t taken to no landfill. They took it to the back. They tossed it over, threw it out and washed it away. That is not only in America. That was across the sea in London, Japan, China, and mostly everything was just dumped in the street. They had a little bitty ditch that washed everything down.

Right. I wanted to ask you about one more song on the album that’s more reflective, “Did I Do Enough?” And you’ve accomplished so much and contributed so much to society through your art and your music. And I found that kind of interesting that you were, even at this stage in your career and life that you would be asking, did you contribute enough? Did you do enough for your family?

It was not always about my family. Every part of humanity is my family. Did I do enough? Have I said enough? Have I rendered enough? Have I put forth enough ideas that’s going to help us go on into centuries after centuries after centuries after this century is over? Can we go ahead and deplete our manna and learn to do better? My protest with love is to work on something instead of going out [to protest]. You don’t have to leave your computer to protest with love. All the thing you got to do is just make a piece of art and put on there, “I’m protesting,” and then put that on your monitor. Somebody will see it. You’re globally connected. I mean, I saw some stuff that is happening across the sea, and I’m still going to have to be able to go back over there and do some more on the behalf of humans, just returning to normal, not going back to destroy all of that. But we’ve created everything to now have robots. We have motorization so great that we don’t need humans in the fields no more. We don’t need humans doing the average jobs any longer. So now, what people are arguing about is you’ve got these different unions and those people that are in control of the different unions.

It makes you think about what people are putting on or what they are working against and for. If you try to keep somebody from joining the union or somebody from coming in and winning over the union. Or if you think just because of you having a certain amount of material that you bought from one place that, now, they are not going to let your materials be developed, all you got to do is just change up. You send your material to them. They send their material to you. Learn how to trade instead of arguing. And fucking money is not everything.

No, it’s a mess right now.

I have just a little piece [of metal]. This is my grandma’s old ring right here. But I have more silver on me. That’s a little piece of gold right there. But like I say, “Silver and gold have I none.” I’m not interested in wearing a lot of silver. You can see what I wear. [Holley is pointing to many less precious materials.] This is my attire when I get ready to go out and sing. This is what I have on. It’s not so much of me going out [flaunting] or trying to act like I alone accomplished this. It was an us process—“United Spirit.” It’s going to take us to get together in this universe to make our living on Mother Earth a better place for the future, and that’s where we got to start. We’re going to have to start working with our water, we’re going to have to start working with our air, and we’re going to have to do the very, very best that we can to remove everything from the top of our land, our surface that is going to be harmful to the new bodies that are going to come along and to help them endure.

Right. Lonnie, I really just want to ask you one more thing. I told you my wife and I went and saw that exhibit in the early ’90s, and I know not many of those artists are still with us, and some of them were gone even when that came out. But do you consider yourself to be part of a movement or a group? Along with some of the artists you mentioned like Purvis Young and Thornton Dial.

I got a chance to meet them all. Bill [Arnett] and I traveled, and we went around these artists. Bill was not trying to just purchase their art for the sake of resale. Bill had higher intentions. Bill was intending to try to show not only the ethnicity, but he was trying to show the mentalities, the growth of where we had came from, what we had when we was born, what we was born to endure. And with these artists, a lot of times, by them not being educated enough to read and write, other people would jump in there that were highly educated, and highly critical and come in with criticism. Some of the artists didn’t mind being criticized because they didn’t know what the hell they were being criticized about. But Bill was trying to defend these people such as Hawkins Bolden, a blind artist, doing all that he could with his art and his skills. Not only to pay attention and not harm himself in the process of making this art, but also keeping focused enough to know, “Oh, that’s Bill Arnett. Yeah. He’s an intelligent man, and he got a plan.” We all didn’t know what his plan was, but I knew what his plan were. His plan was to get together with somebody like Andy Young. [Andrew Young is a former U.S. Congressman and former mayor of Atlanta.]

But Andy Young, doing the same for the Olympics during the 1996 games, brought this material out, to put it in a book form where it can be looked at and these materials could be studied as great materials that came along with these slave people. With these people of slavery, and the aftermath of slavery. Because after slavery, you ain’t changed that much. You just got the term free, but you still had to try to live from day to day, [and you were probably] sharecropping. And then, if you were sharecropping, as long as you were sharecropping peacefully and not creating a sharecroppers’ union, you was all right. Because my grandfather was in Dadeville and Camp Hill, Alabama, and he was a part of a sharecropper union down there.

So all of this stuff had to be put into place. And once the place started, they wanted you to be real quiet, not only to hear what was going on on stage, but they wanted to hear the actors again. What am I saying? They wanted us to hear them as the actors, the controllers. The masters hiring actors to control the slaves after being free. They still needed them to work their plantation. Time after time again, they struggled over just trying to figure things out. There are some places still in America that people don’t know [about, where they are] still working the sugarcane. Still working the rice plantations. You’re still living in the back in the quarter houses, the slave houses that your ancestors were [living in], but you might have modified them a little bit. You might have put some siding and stuff on them.

Yeah. But you’re not getting a living wage.

Yeah. Now, we used to talk about it, man. You might have done prettified your house, but it ain’t changed. You ain’t changed.

They call it putting lipstick on a pig, right?

I like that one. Lipstick on a pig. I might use this one. It sounds real good. [Holley laughs for a while at this and it provides a good point of release to wrap things up.]

Well, Lonnie, I really appreciate your time and everything that you’ve shared with me today. So it’s been a real privilege to get to meet you over Zoom.

All right. Thumbs up.

All right. Bye-bye. Thumbs up.

www.lonnieholley.com

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