Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band

Texas Renaissance man Terry Allen is an interdisciplinary artist whose border-blurring work has traversed sculpture, painting, drawing, theater, dance, installation, video, performance, sound, and music, all refracted through a Flatland storyteller’s voice since the late ‘60s. A student at the Chouinard Art Institute (later incorporated into CalArts) and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three NEA grants, Allen’s work resides in the collections of MoMA and the Met and has been shown at Documenta and the São Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and Whitney Biennales. His conceptual art country—including classic song suites JUAREZ and Lubbock (on everything)—has led to collaborations with Guy Clark, Little Feat, David Byrne, Lucinda Williams, and The Flatlanders, while his country-concrète radio plays have been broadcast to car radios across vast expanses of after-hours open roads. Although it spans disparate worlds, Allen makes no distinction between the ostensibly high and low vernaculars his practice puts into dialogue. Art saturates his eccentric songcraft, whether in satiric ridicule of New York artists’ rivalries with their “snotty surfer upstart” “ego counterparts out on the West Coast” or by down home conversation with the Texicans that populate the Panhandle. Channeling creative impulses from his personal trinity of children, criminals, and the insane, Allen’s irreverent humor and compassionate wit give life to memory and the tragicomic lies we tell ourselves. When inquired about country music, Allen asks, “Which country?” And the Thai music, Navajo chants, Aztec poems, and Tejano corridos that Allen has incorporated into his 13 albums while critiquing imperialist warmongering certainly does away with any notion of country music as a fixed, conservative locus. 

As part of his first evening-length appearance in New York in 13 years, Terry Allen is joined by his Panhandle Mystery Band, a long-running family affair that will here feature accordionist (and the artist’s son) Bukka Allen, fiddler and mandolinist Richard Bowden, percussionist Davis McLarty, and guitarist Charlie Sexton. 

Originally scheduled for the no mans’ land of post-COVID 2020 and postponed until now, this concert arrives on the heels of the publication of Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen (Hachette, 2024), a major new biography by Paradise of Bachelors founder Brendan Greaves that charts the musician and artist’s winding personal history.  

See also: Terry Allen: MemWars + Truckload of Art on Wednesday, October 9, 2024