Truckload of Art The Life and Work of Terry Allen—An Authorized Biography

The definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.   

“People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years, Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind.
 
In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and sidestage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.
 
Drawing on hundreds of revealing interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.
 

Terry Allen is a songwriter, visual and recording artist, and playwright “renowned,” as critic Dave Hickey has written, “for his effortless command and outrageous combination of disparate genres and media, according to the task at hand.” Over the course of a celebrated career that dates to his graduation from the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) in 1966, Allen has unflinchingly dissected the contested histories and cultural collisions of the American West (and the American imaginary) through his interrelated visual, sonic, and theatrical bodies of work. His artwork resides in the collections of the Met and MoMA, the Hirshhorn, and MoCA and LACMA in LA, and has been exhibited internationally at Documenta and the São Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and Whitney Biennials. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, United States Artists, and NEA fellowships, and you can encounter his playful public art commissions across the US.

In the realm of music, Allen has released more than a dozen albums since his debut Juarez in 1975, many with his Panhandle Mystery Band, including Lubbock (on everything) (1979), often cited as a seminal text for the alt-country movement and one of the most important and influential country albums of all time. His songs have been covered, recorded, and championed by the likes of Bobby Bare, Ryan Bingham, Guy Clark, Richard Buckner, Don Everly, the Flatlanders, Jason Isbell, Robert Earl Keen, Little Feat, Ricky Nelson, Peter Rowan, Doug Sahm, Sturgill Simpson, Kurt Vile, Wilco, and Lucinda Williams. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, since 1988 he has resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife and collaborator, the performer and poet Jo Harvey Allen.
 
Brendan Greaves is founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, in which capacity he has closely collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners, for which he earned a GRAMMY nomination for Best Album Notes. A former gallerist at Philadelphia’s Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (where he first encountered Allen and his work), and thereafter North Carolina’s Director of Public Art and Community Design, he now curates and writes about vernacular art and music in the American South and beyond, with essays published by Yale University Press, Duke University Press, University of North Carolina Press, and assorted journals. Greaves studied art at Harvard University and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has lived with his wife Samantha since 2006. Truckload of Art is his first book.