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

Terry Allen is an internationally recognized visual artist and songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music. Truckload of Art is the first-ever biography of Allen's extraordinary life and artistic legacy, featuring analysis of his work and commentary from, among others: Allen himself, his family members, and his friends, colleagues, and collaborators, including musicians and artists Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, critic Dave Hickey, Allen's bandmates in the Panhandle Mystery Band, pioneering visual artists Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Kiki Smith, and the actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen, Terry's wife and artistic partner of fifty-six years.

Allen's 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 S緌 Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and Whitney Biennials. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and you can encounter his public art commissions across the US. In the realm of music, Allen has released more than a dozen albums since the mid-1970s, 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.

Brendan Greaves, Terry's biographer, collaborator, and friend, has known him personally for more than fifteen years, and since 2014, in his capacity as founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, the two have been collaborating closely on a campaign to reissue his music within the context of his visual art. The widely acclaimed 2016 reissues of Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979) that Greaves produced and designed feature exhaustive liner notes with essays by David Byrne, Dave Alvin, Dave Hickey, Lloyd Maines, and the author. To date, Greaves has written more than 50,000 words about Allen for various projects. He has Allen's complete and enthusiastic cooperation on this this project, including full access to him and his archives, his family, his friends and collaborators, and his home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.