Lonnie Holley Never Plays a Song Twice. (Even His Own.)-OxBig News Network

In late January, Lonnie Holley was scheduled to perform at a concert in Tulsa celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” as part of a lineup that included Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams. Holley, 75, a venerated visual artist whose work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has been singing and playing keyboards for much of his life, but only started releasing his music publicly in 2012. Initially, he didn’t want to go.

“He was terrified,” Matt Arnett, Holley’s manager, said. “He’d never sung a cover song. Lonnie’s never even played a Lonnie Holley song twice.”

Holley’s approach to music is both extreme and extremely simple. His performances, whether live or recorded, are all improvised in the moment. He’s made a half-dozen hypnotic, soulful, genre-bending albums, including a new one, “Tonky,” which will be released on March 21, but the material has only ever been played the one time it was recorded. Arnett eventually convinced Holley to play the Dylan tribute, and Holley tweaked his approach slightly, using Dylan’s songs as a jumping-off point for his own idiosyncratic performance.

“I get lost in thought when I’m onstage,” Holley said during an interview in Atlanta on an early February afternoon. “My thing is I got so much going on in my brain.”

Holley is tall, with a regal bearing and a gentle voice. His long gray hair was pulled back in braids, a collection of beaded necklaces hung around his neck and his round-framed glasses were perched on his forehead in the manner of an absent-minded professor. He was sitting on a couch at the Grocery on Home, a tiny former community grocery store in the city’s Grant Park neighborhood. Arnett initially bought the Grocery as a place to live, then repurposed it in 2010 into an intimate music venue.

“This is the couch I slept on when I first got here,” Holley said.

Before moving to Atlanta in 2010, Holley had been living in Alabama. Arnett’s father, Bill, a renowned art collector and curator, first met him there in the mid-1980s and worked diligently in the decades that followed to make the case that Holley’s artwork, as well as that of other Black artists from the South such as Thornton Dial and Bessie Harvey, should be considered alongside that of white contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Instead, Holley was frequently minimized as a so-called folk artist, with more attention paid to his biography than his art.

To be fair, the details of Holley’s early life read like folklore. He was born in Alabama in 1950, the seventh of 27 children. When he was a baby, his mother gave him to a traveling burlesque dancer, who traded him, three years later, to a woman who ran a bar in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. That woman died when Holley was 7. Her husband blamed him for her death and beat him mercilessly. When Holley tried to escape, he was hit by a car and dragged two and a half blocks. He lay unconscious in a hospital for three months and was declared brain-dead by doctors.

After an unlikely recovery, he was returned to the custody of the man who beat him. Holley fled again, this time hopping a train to New Orleans. By 11, he’d landed in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a notoriously abusive labor camp where he spent four brutal years before being released into the custody of his grandfather, who reunited him with his mother.

When Matt Arnett first met Holley and began hearing this back story, he “thought much of what Lonnie was saying was fantastical,” Arnett recalled. The stories, he said, “sound like fables if you’re removed from the true history of America. You think they’re created out of whole cloth.” But over the years, he’s met Holley’s living siblings, talked to people who were at the Alabama Industrial School, and verified other stories. “It all checks out.”

Regardless, the constant focus on Holley’s life at the expense of his art chafed. “It’s a way of minimizing the artist while you’re trying to act as though you’re playing the savior,” Arnett said. “It’s about fetishizing human suffering, not glorifying incredible works of human accomplishment.”

Holley hardly shies away from talking about his past. At the Grocery, he pointed out pieces of his artwork sitting on countertops and hanging on the exposed red brick walls, frequently detouring into anecdotes drawn from his upbringing to explain his work. He also mines this history for his lyrics. The opening track on “Tonky,” “Seeds,” is a pulsing, nine-minute, spoken-word meditation drawn from his experiences at the Alabama Industrial School. “The Burden,” which lays an intoxicating clarinet melody supplied by Angel Bat Dawid over a swirl of atmospheric beats, asks whether any of us can ever outrun our pasts and finishes with Holley singing the line “I turned nothing into something” as if it were the defiant crescendo of a gospel hymn.

In both conversation and song, Holley’s words tumble out as a poetic, free-associative stream of candid memories, contemporary insights and philosophical musings.

“I try to hold back nothing,” he said, “because the more I try to hold it back, it just gets so …” He closed his eyes for a moment, then continued. “I even tried to get most of the Alabama Industrial School out of my brain, but I can’t. I have to fight all those terrible dreams.”

Throughout Holley’s peripatetic youth, music embedded itself deep in his psyche, a salve amid the chaos.

“I was singing because I grew up in a whiskey house with my bed right next to a jukebox,” he said. “But because of me getting hit by the car when I was 7, I lost a lot of my memory. I lost who I was listening to. All I know is I was laying there jamming till I fell off to sleep.”

Jacknife Lee, who produced both “Tonky” and its predecessor, “Oh Me, Oh My” from 2023, had heard Holley’s eclectic early albums but endeavored to make more focused recordings with him. In Lee’s Los Angeles studio, he’d typically play some prerecorded music for Holley and give him a prompt, asking him something about his life or the world.

“The way his mind works, it goes off in many different directions,” said Lee, who has also worked with U2, R.E.M. and the Killers. “But I tried to keep him on a single topic. It took me a while to have the courage to stop him mid-flow and say, ‘Can we go back to this?’”

Lee would often record 30 or 40 minutes of material, which he’d then edit into a more concise song, aiming to capture the moments of transcendence when all of the variables of an improvised performance come together: “What I’m looking for is when everybody falls into unthinking, just listening to each other.”

“Tonky” incorporates elements of jazz, gospel, blues, rock, hip-hop and ambient electronic music into a dark and, at times, devastating whole that’s dotted with contributions from a cadre of admirers, including Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, the singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop, and the rappers Open Mike Eagle and Billy Woods. Angus Fairbairn, who records under the name Alabaster DePlume, provides a mournful saxophone part for the quiet, redemptive “Strength of a Song.”

“In his being present, he challenges us to also be present,” Fairbairn said of playing with Holley. “We are with Lonnie in the moment of his song arising. I love making things that way because it belongs to us. It comes from a response to one another.”

Recording Holley is akin to trying to capture that lightning in a bottle, and his music represents a devotion to the very act of creation. The same could be said of his artwork. He’s making it constantly. The trick is figuring out what to do with it.

“Lonnie doesn’t get up and go to work,” Arnett said. “He’s always working. His work and his music are his life.”

For Holley, music and art are two different avenues to process and contextualize his extraordinary journey. “All of it’s coming from here,” he said, pressing two fingers to the side of his head. “Creating became what I had to do.”