Terry Allen was born in 1943 in Lubbock, Texas. His parents represent two archetypes of American mythology: a baseball-playing father and a jazz-pianist mother, kicked out of college for playing “devil’s music.” As a teen, Allen was enamored with the beatnik scene when it appeared in Lubbock—everyone started wearing sunglasses at night—and went on to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His record Juarez (1975) is a masterpiece of countercultural country, a song cycle with a cast of characters that cross state and bodily borders: they fuck, fight, flee, and die. An outlaw of the outlaw country scene, Allen is perhaps best understood as a conceptual artist, using Americana to create everything from sculptures and installations to theater. “Terry Allen: Some Pictures and Other Songs,” at Nina Johnson, consists entirely of drawings, all from 2019. In Storm on the Ghost of Jimmy Reed, Allen presents the bluesman Reed with a mustachioed, half-faded face. A text in the bottom-right of the drawing reads: “When we were kids one Saturday night when it was storming they snuck us in the backdoor of the Cotton Club and let us peek in at him from the dressing room door behind the …