Lonnie Holley Never Plays a Song Twice. (Even His Own.)

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.