A Testament to West Texas’s Wild, Unruly Spirit and the Road That Leads You Back Home
Oh, the roads we’ve traveled, haven’t we? The countless miles put behind us, chasing a dream or maybe just running away from yesterday. And for those of us who carry the dust of West Texas in our memories, there’s one particular highway—and one particular song—that forever embodies that feeling of reckless abandon and begrudging affection for home: “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)” by the inimitable Terry Allen.
Released on Allen’s truly iconic 1979 double-album, ‘Lubbock (On Everything),’ this rollicking track serves as the defiant opening salvo to a complex, hilarious, and deeply moving musical memoir of his hometown. Now, in terms of chart position for the original Terry Allen version? You won’t find it nestled on the Billboard Country Top 40, and that’s precisely the point, my friend. Terry Allen was—and is—far too idiosyncratic, too much of a highbrow-lowbrow conceptual artist whose medium is as much sculpture and painting as it is song, to play by Nashville’s rules. His masterpiece, ‘Lubbock (On Everything),’ is often cited as the urtext of alt-country precisely because it rejected commercial conformity, focusing instead on sharp, regional satire and personal honesty. While his work was beloved by peers and critics, its enduring legacy is measured in its profound influence, not in chart metrics. It’s an album that created a genre, not one that climbed a ladder. However, it’s worth noting that the song’s brilliance was recognized early when country star Bobby Bare recorded it back in 1975, a testament to its raw, undeniable quality.
The meaning of “Amarillo Highway” is a perfect cocktail of satire and deep-seated, conflicted love for the West Texas landscape and the characters who populate it. It kicks off with a faux-macho narrator—a “panhandlin’ man-handlin’ post-holin’ Dust bowlin’ Daddy”—a swaggering caricature of Texan bravado. Allen uses this unreliable voice to both parody the “outlaw” image that was all the rage in the 70s country scene and, simultaneously, to paint a vivid, unflinching portrait of the hard-ass reality of the region.
The story behind the song is woven into the fabric of Allen’s life and artistic circle. The dedication, “(for Dave Hickey),” is significant, honoring his longtime friend, the famed art critic who championed Allen’s dual worlds of visual art and music. Hickey, who was working in Nashville at the time, was instrumental in getting Bobby Bare to record the song, helping it find a wider audience even before Allen’s own definitive recording. The highway itself is a specific, potent symbol: that 124-mile stretch of road (Highway 87, now I-27) connecting Lubbock, the artist’s hometown, to Amarillo. It’s a route of escape and return, of youthful indiscretion and adult reckoning.
Allen, who had moved to California, wrote the songs for ‘Lubbock (On Everything)’ from a distance, realizing only in the process of creating the album how much his roots had irrevocably shaped him. This track, with its ramshackle swagger and driving beat, embodies the collision of identities he felt: the local boy steeped in tradition fighting against the rock & roll, long-haired artist. It’s a joyful, sarcastic burlesque of machismo that, beneath the grin, offers a compassionate, albeit critical, glimpse into a deeply rooted culture. The song is a journey, not just physically across the Llano Estacado, but emotionally, revealing an eventual, though perhaps accidental, capitulation to the magnetic pull of home. It’s a classic because it speaks to anyone who’s ever felt the need to leave their past behind, only to find the dust of the old highway forever clinging to their boots.