The Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was the kind of educational institution that traumatized its students more than it educated them. Founded in 1911, after the state of Alabama took over a large farming campus in the Mount Meigs community near Montgomery, the juvenile correctional facility became infamous for the horrific abuse and torture it inflicted on poor Black youth. In 1947, inspectors visiting the school found 300 boys “cooped up in cramped quarters with nothing to do or occupy their energies except to eat and live like hogs.” By the 1960s, a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, young inmates were forced to pick cotton from sunrise until sundown; beatings and sexual abuse were common. “This was functionally a slave plantation,” concluded the journalist Josie Duffy Rice, who spent a year and a half researching the school’s history for a podcast series.
Lonnie Holley, who was born into extreme poverty in Jim Crow-era Alabama and spent his childhood being passed from surrogate parent to surrogate parent, was among the souls who did time at the Mount Meigs campus, where he was eventually sent after being arrested at 11. “I was like the Jungle Book child,” Holley reflected in 2018. “I was cast away from society.” The trauma lingers. Even at 73, as an internationally renowned visual artist and musician whose work defies classification, Holley experiences night terrors, haunted by memories of Mount Meigs.
He exorcizes these ghosts on “Mount Meigs,” the harrowing centerpiece of his fourth and finest album, Oh Me Oh My. As a roiling, free-jazz storm of bleating horns and frantic drums erupts around him, Holley transports us 60 years earlier, summoning the fields where he worked and the name of the belt-wielding man who beat him into submission. “They beat the curiosity out of me/They beat it out of me/They whooped it/They knocked it!” he recounts with mounting intensity. Like much of Oh Me Oh My, the song is an extraordinary aural memoir, honoring Holley's story of survival in what can only be called a fucked-up America.
Holley is a self-taught visual artist who specializes in vast, sprawling sculptures and found-object assemblage—work that he fashions from discarded materials such as animal bones and abandoned shoes and pieces of steel and which has made its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Throughout Oh Me Oh My, he applies a similar approach to music, creating unorthodox and moving songs out of the trauma and raw life materials that others would rather forget or discard. He surveys not only his own suffering at Mount Meigs, but the suffering of his mother, who gave birth to “baby after baby after baby after baby,” as Holley yowls on “Oh Me, Oh My,” a stunning track that pairs his narratives with Michael Stipe’s mournful croon.