Terry Allen with the Panhandle Mystery Band & Jo Harvey Allen: Memwars

Terry Allen is a visionary artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a polyglot painter, sculptor, singer-songwriter, writer, and storyteller raised on the hard luck and wisdom of the Texas plains and reared on the art-world avant-garde. In the late ’70s, Allen made at least two warped masterpieces of outsider outlaw country, Juarez and the indispensable Lubbock (on Everything), albums that used old sounds to articulate a new way of living, to suggest a different paradigm for what it might mean to be a kid stuck between the Permian and the Panhandle. He has applied the same jester’s sense of wonder to four decades of subsequent albums, whether exploring Southwestern myth-making or Middle Eastern peace-keeping. And from his luggage-guarding gargoyles and his playfully anthropomorphized deer bronzes to a universe of self-referential and insightful drawings and collages, Allen is a celebrated visual artist whose intricate world still seems to be revealing itself.

In 2016, Allen premiered Memwars, a multimedia installation that paired stories about several of his songs with a large clutch of his drawings. But in this live version of Memwars, he takes a different approach,  playing his songs with Jo Harvey Allen and with The Panhandle Mystery  Band, featuring Richard Bowden on fiddle and mandolin, Bukka Allen on accordion, Charlie Sexton on guitars, and Davis McLarty on drums. Allen’s songs are so often about empathy for the outsider, understanding for the misunderstood. He and Jo Harvey will intersperse those tunes with stories about their origins, sometimes as twisting and wild as the numbers themselves.