Lonnie Holley with Mourning [A] BLKstar

If you read the biographical sketches of Lonnie Holley, there's something of mythmaking about it: born in Birmingham in 1950 as the seventh of 27 children, a tinkling burlesque dancer stole him and raised him. When he was four, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey, later ended up with various foster parents, was hit by a car and declared dead. And so fabulously it goes on. His second life as a visual artist begins in the early 80s and is, after all, vouched for by works of art. 

He draws, paints, photographs, performs, creates sculptures from waste. His works are exhibited in renowned museums. He also makes music with the same improvisational, eclectic, naïve, rambling energy: does it echo Sun Ra or Gil Scott-Heron, Tom Waits or the Last Poets, Lou Reed or Stevie Wonder, or all of them together? Holley works with what he finds and creates radical outsider music with existential depth.