The WDVX Big Plate with Lonnie Holley & Lee Baines III

Big Ears Artists will take the stage at the WDVX Blue Plate Special for a free lunchtime concert. The WDVX Blue Plate Special® is a live performance radio show held at noon, with your host Red Hickey Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and on Saturday at Visit Knoxville with host Sean McCollough.  On Fridays WDVX takes the Blue Plate Special to Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria for “The Big Plate”. It’s always free to join in so please don’t be shy. Make yourself at home as part of the WDVX family. From blues to bluegrass, country to Celtic, folk to funk, rockabilly to hillbilly, local to international, it all part of the live music experience on The WDVX Blue Plate Special. You’re welcome to bring your lunch.

Featuring:

Lonnie Holley & Lee Baines III

Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events.

Lee Bains is a singer-songwriter and poet whose work is steeped in the American South. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Bains’s songs are hopeful, but far from naive. On their fourth album, the 2022 record Old-Time Folks (Don Giovanni), Lee Bains + The Glory Fires deliver songs that mix sounds of the South — rock and roll, gospel, punk, soul, country, hip-hop — to deliver stories of resistance, and love.