I’ve only met Jo Harvey Allen three times, but I swear, she seems like one of my best friends. Let me explain why.
If you don’t know Jo Harvey, she and her husband Terry Allen are West Texas legends, born and raised in Lubbock. And she, like so many of the homegrown artists from around here, attributes being raised in Lubbock as one of the major reasons for her success.
Usually, I devote my newsletter column to performance issues that directly relate to our School of Theatre & Dance, but for our final newsletter of 2024, I wanted to take the time to interview Jo Harvey Allen, to get to know her better, especially because she’s performing one of her many one woman shows, An Evening with Jo Harvey Allen, in the Maedgen Theatre on December 6th at 7:30—a one night only affair. And I can promise you, if you join us that night—and you should—you’ll leave believing she’s one of your best friends as well.
A bit of background: Jo Harvey met Terry at a Rainbow Girls party here in Lubbock when they were 11. They were friends before they fell in love, especially because Jo Harvey knew one of her best buddies had a crush on Terry, and she didn’t want to betray her; in fact, this loyalty to her friend led her to tell Terry to “go to Hell” the first time he tried to kiss her, but, in spite of this, the two remained friends. They talked on the phone every night. They went to dances together (as friends), their second “date” to the Hillcrest Country Club. When they finally started dating, it was with the understanding that, “if something better came along,” they’d let each other take it.
But, of course, nothing better did. And they’ve been together ever since.
Call it fate; call it destiny; call it a miracle (Jo Harvey does)--Jo Harvey and Terry were meant to be.
But I’m jumping ahead.
Born to a dress shop manager mother and a carpenter father on the Day of the Dead in 1942, Jo Harvey grew up in a warm, loving household, one where her family sat out on the porch or on a blanket on the front lawn most nights, inviting any neighbors who passed by to join them: “I lived on Avenue L, and our family loved telling stories. We’d throw a blanket out, invite all the neighbors who walked by, and we’d share stories and watch for flying saucers.” In fact, once she moved to LA with Terry when they were both teenagers, she wrote a long letter to her parents thanking them for the gift of storytelling, a gift that has informed her entire life.
Her move to LA was literally based on chance. She and Terry tossed a coin: heads, LA or tails, NY. Heads it was--so the teenage couple ventured to Los Angeles where they knew absolutely no one. Because each of them had worked several jobs in and around Lubbock, they had a handsome nest egg that gave them a year to be, as Jo Harvey puts it, “high rollers.” They “wined and dined” at some of the most exclusive places in Los Angeles, and along the way, met a host of colorful characters whom Jo Harvey describes as “way more sophisticated” than they were: “They even talked about surrealist art. No idea what they meant, at least at first!” But Jo Harvey could play along with the best of them; after all, she was a born actor (even if she didn’t know it yet!). As that amazing year reached an end, she remembers grabbing an LA Times and going with Terry to the Brown Derby—a very exclusive place at the time—with Terry explaining, “We only got five bucks left!” They opened the want ads, found odd jobs, and started going to school, Terry at Chouinard Art Institute and Jo Harvey at Woodbury College of Design.
She learned much during her time at Woodbury but walked away before earning the BFA degree: “I took all the courses. I completed the degree. But they wanted me to pay a 60-dollar fee before I could get my diploma for a course I had already completed and I said, ‘No way. I’m not doing that!’”
Talk about pluck!
Jo Harvey got her first job working as an interior decorator by knocking on the biggest mansion in the Hollywood Hills: “Hello. I’m an Interior Designer. Need any help?” As luck would have it, the first woman she approached, responded, “Oh darling. Come right in. Yes, I do!” This led to a bevy of related jobs, decorating model homes, lunching with big Hollywood businessmen, and shopping with and for several of the California elite. During our interview, she reminded me often that, when she first arrived in Los Angeles, she was young and extremely naïve: “One woman I worked for, who wore fur coats and diamonds, drove a yellow Cadillac convertible, asked me if I knew what a lesbian was. I had no idea, but I responded, ‘I sure do!’” She admits that, at the time, many of the people she worked for were big time gangsters who even had phones in their cars, but they treated her well and with respect.
You have to understand: Jo Harvey never shied away from a challenge.
She and Terry first showed their art at the Wilshire Savings and Loan Building. Soon after, Terry landed her a job telling stories, hosting Rawhide and Roses, a radio show that featured underground bands and introduced L.A. to Willie Nelson. Of course, the bulk of the stories she shared were about growing up in Lubbock, and it took off. “Everyone wanted to be on it!” Jo Harvey was, indeed, one of the first women on radio. It was so popular, there were attempts to syndicate the show. Even the armed forces wanted it.
The Allens moved back to Lubbock where they planned to record the syndicated shows, but that ended when a station manager heard Jo Harvey’s joke that Lubbock was the wettest dry town in the country.
Then she was hired as a tv weather girl but fired before she even went on the air because at that time the sponsor said, “No one would believe a woman reporting the weather!”
Terry was offered a job teaching at Berkeley and the Allens returned to California, later moving to Fresno.
She remembers the sixties in Los Angeles fondly. She was very dressed up at the time, high heels, fast crowd, hanging with actors who had tons of money—many of them gathering at her and Terry’s house. The job at the radio show taught her all she needed to know about producing. But her real talent was the ability to take risks and her drive to experiment, to embrace every opportunity. Inspired by a waitress in Lubbock, she started interviewing waitresses everywhere. She had never been a waitress so she got jobs in a Fresno truck stop, coffee shop, and cocktail lounge, and wrote her first book, The Beautiful Waitress. She so admired the waitresses she interviewed that she put their words in poetry form, “trying to make people see how important the words of these women were.” Years later, she wrote the play Counter Angel, first performing it at the Chick-N-Burger Café in Anchorage, Alaska, to her surprise with the cook and waitress from Lubbock! People Magazine happened to do a feature and her career blossomed as she continued to perform her plays in theaters, art galleries, and even beside a roaring river.
Jo Harvey never pretended to be somebody she wasn’t (“You can’t fool anybody, cause they’ll find out anyway”), but she was fearless. She told Terry her vocabulary was limited. In Fresno, the Allens were surrounded by fabulous poets. Terry’s advice was, “You need to study with these writers.” She took his advice studying with poet laureates, Philip Levine and Mark Strand, published poetry, sung during her readings, and wrote A Moment’s Hesitation, “a poetry performance” in San Francisco while burning her high heels and crawling on bloody knees. However “out there” her choices were— her eclectic career took off— she is known as one of the first female “performance artists.”
All the while, Jo Harvey and Terry tried for five years to have a family, and right before they were thinking about adoption, she gave birth to their first of two sons. The couple had the family they had always dreamed about. Jo Harvey says her best and most creative job was having kids. Terry was traveling full throttle with his art and music, as was Jo Harvey, performing radio plays, sharing work Off Broadway, supported by institutions such as the Washington Project for the Arts. They traded out trips so one of them was always with their sons. Filmmaker David Byrne was so impressed by one of her shows that he put her in his film, True Stories, where she chose to play “the lying woman.” Byrne was her first film director, and Martin Scorsese her most recent: “My first and my most recent film directors were my favorite!”
That’s saying a lot, especially since she’s been in 30 films.
Jo Harvey passed up many opportunities in order to be with her family, without regret. But she took advantage of the reputation she was fostering. She interviewed amazing people from tent revivals to country stars, like Waylon Jennings, and spent a solid hour giggling on the radio with Linda Ronstadt. She’s sang, recited poetry, wrote and starred in her own and Terry’s plays, produced art… always living by her mother’s good advice: “You’re no better or worse than anyone you meet. There’s always a good spot in everyone.”
Above all, she’s thankful. For her husband, sons, and grandkids, all who wrote songs for their upcoming family album, Blood Sucking Maniacs. For past Chancellor Robert Duncan and President Lawrence Schovenec for inviting her and Terry to house their archives here at Texas Tech. For everything life has to offer.
I learned lots more about this extraordinary woman and artist during our interview, but what stuck with me the most is that Jo Harvey believes strongly that life is a series of miracles that she’s been fortunate enough to take advantage of: “At 82, I’m the happiest I’ve been in my whole life. Every decade you lose something, but you gain more. Life, like art, is an arc. And you need to embrace every minute.”
You can bet that Jo Harvey has had more adventures than many of us combined, and if you are like me, seeing her one-woman show at the Maedgen Theatre on December 6th is, to quote Jo Harvey herself, “is just another damned miracle” that you won’t want to miss!