BRENDANGreaves starts and ends Truckload Of Art, his authorised biography of Terry Allen, with acrow. The crow is asculptural work made to immortalise the ashen remains of Allen’s friend and collaborator, fellow Texan songwriter Guy Clark. The two played together as Los Dos Rockin’ Tacos, and Clark’s last playful “fuck you” to his old pal as he suffered with lymphoma was the instruction that Allen should cast abronze goat and store Clark’s cremated remains in its rear. Instead, Allen settled on an enlarged crow, anod to asong Clark had never been able to finish, about two nests he had seen in the American Windmill Museum in Allen’s hometown of Lubbock. The nests were made of scavenged scraps of barbed wire. “He loved that they built those nests so beautifully out of almost nothing,” Allen tells Greaves. “Like asong.” The funerary sculpture, Caw Caw Blues, has its black bronzed feathers dappled with the ashes of Clark, with the remainder secreted within the bird’s ribcage.
There is another crow in the Terry Allen story. It appears in an Allen reminiscence from 1962, after aperformance by the Freedom Singers, when the bandleader and civil rights activist Cordell Reagon played him areel-to-reel tape. The voice, Allen recalls, was “high and scratchy, and mysterious and ancient, and ugly and hypnotic all at once.” The song was about ablack crow. “Reagon said it was this young white kid who called himself Blind Boy Grunt.”
Blind Boy Grunt was an early pseudonym of Bob Dylan, and it’s only slightly fanciful –in atale ripe with symbolism –to suggest that the bird in the song helped construct the barbed wire nest, just as Dylan’s musical scavenging expanded the possibilities for songwriters across Texas.