For this one you can thank my friend Kent, who listens to more music than any human I know (and considering the humans I know…!). He also frequently posts online about new discoveries.
Kent raved about one such discovery in particular on multiple occasions recently, causing me to pick up Lonnie Holley’s Oh Me Oh My and get an education about the latter’s remarkable career. A noted sculptor and visual artist by the time he hit 40, Holley was in his mid-50s before he began experimenting with vocal recordings of his poems, and 62 when his first album Just Before Music appeared in 2012.
Holley’s fifth album Oh Me Oh My is a bracing, in-your-face, beautiful, tragic, and compelling creation. Once you open yourself to the experience it offers, it’s impossible to look away—and that's a good thing, because you shouldn't. Holley’s songs chronicle what one assumes is a mixture of lived experience and genuinely immersive storytelling, telling tales of the African American experience in this country mixed in with spiritual and cosmological musings. That’s a rich and difficult vein of knowledge, and Holley does not pull his punches, though he's always artful in the way he frames and tells these stories, which emerge as a sort of fluid, song/song-poem/spoken-word hybrid.
Producer Jacknife Lee sets Holley’s creations to relatively sparse arrangements—dreamy synth washes, hints of electric piano and guitar, and appearing/disappearing rhythm sections—that nudge the melody along behind Holley’s arresting delivery. His voice is raw and vulnerable, but fueled by the waves of emotion he pours into his performance. Every singer out there with a young and pretty voice would do well to pay attention to what Lonnie Holley achieves with his; you could learn a thing or two.
Songs found here address topics as varied as faith (“Testing” and “I Am Part Of The Wonder”), slavery (“Better Get That Crop In Soon”), family (“Kindness Will Follow Your Tears” and “If We Get Lost The Will Find Us”), mourning and grief (“None Of Us Will Have But A Little While”), and technology (“Future Children”). Each of these creations features Holley’s haunting vocals veering between singing and intense spoken-word delivery, with a number of guest vocalists adding flavor, texture and alternate sonic perspectives at different points, including Moor Mother, Bon Iver, Sharon Von Etten and Rokia Koné.
Four tracks in particular cry out for a deeper look. “Oh Me Oh My” feels like a sermon, a poem about the importance of community and family and recognizing your place as a part of something larger than yourself. Here Holley easily slips back and forth between spoken word and singing; he’s a performing poet with music decorating and amplifying his message. Guest Michael Stipe’s harmony vocals add dimension at key points as nearly six minutes pass by in what feels like a single, brilliant flash.
The idea of community connects explicitly to the planet itself on “Earth Will Be There,” a salute to resilience of all kinds. It’s a metaphor positing one’s family as literally the ground beneath our feet, the foundation that enables us to stand tall (and will catch us when we fall), featuring a gentle funk backing, snappy horns, and Moor Mother performing the intense spoken-word bridge.
The genuinely harrowing “Mount Meigs” finds Holley reliving the experience of being sent to the so-called Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children as a boy in 1964. Lee sets this nightmare of beatings, abuse and isolation to careening, menacing, discordant music as Holley intones “I was only trying to run away to find my mother / I needed my mother / I needed her hugs / I just needed her…” As the track swirls down to a close, Holley caps it with “All that information is still within me… At 71 years old and I still think of that day / The days and days and days / And more days on top of the days.” It’s every bit as brutal as the stretch of time it describes.
Finally, “I Can’t Hush” is a song of admiration and devotion saluting Holley’s mother and grandmother, and by extension all mothers. In Holley’s world these women dealt with “All the abuses and abuses and abuses / And the abuses and they said nothing / They just let them sink deep within.” He again calls for community and connection as a remedy and source of strength: “Where we put our black hands / Together and act like a rope / No matter what conditions / We have to face / We face them together.”
Fair warning: Oh Me Oh My is an immersive experience; while it’s playing, you can't really imagine paying attention to or doing anything else. It absorbs every millimeter of your focus and sends you back out into the world transformed, a newly birthed recipient of deep and ancient wisdom. Lonnie Holley is one of a kind and this a vital, compelling work of art. (Thanks, Kent.)