Too Much Ain’t Enough!
Summer “Ephemera” Show
July 11-20, 2025
July 11-20, 2025
Exhibition Text
All that I do or say is all I ever will be
Too far and too high and too deep ain't too much to be
Too much ain't enough for old five and dimers like me”
– Billy Joe Shaver, Old Five and Dimers (Like Me) (1973)
"A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet"
– Bob Dylan, liner notes from his album “Bringing It All Back Home” (1965)
It is both a matter of chance and circumstance in what survives. And as time moves on, the more opportunities we have to accumulate physical remnants from the past. Historically (and presently), Dallas has the reputation for tearing down the old and building anew. One could argue many factors responsible for this, including zoning laws, the drive to update infrastructure at any cost, the desire for the latest, cleanest, look, or simply a city’s personality. Ephemera, therefore, can sometimes have more chance (and circumstance) to outlive monuments. This exhibition collects a family of objects—ephemera, books, films, t-shirts, and works of art—in an upstairs room at the Texas Theatre.
The Lone Star Café in New York City sat on the northeast corner of 13th Street and 5th Avenue from 1976 until 1989. In October 1978, a 40-foot iguana (“Iggy”) was installed atop the roof made by the artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade just months before in Lewiston, New York, at an experimental sculpture park called Artpark. The menu at the Lone Star Café offered Texas home cooking, such as cornbread and chili. Kinky Friedman played there most Sundays. And for just over a decade, Texas held a strong corner within Manhattan. The banner that hung just below the Iguana out front, was a Billy Joe Shaver line, “TOO MUCH AIN’T ENOUGH!”.
Too much ain’t enough is right, I thought, as I found myself surrounded by 8 or 10 books at a time trying to grasp the origins of Southern music in preparation for this exhibition. The root systems of “roots” music were deep and tangled, it turned out.
Musical histories are often social histories, and the songs and styles that emerge are learned, co-opted, adapted, and offered stylistically anew. Even a self-taught musician draws from somewhere, like self-taught, finger-picking folk musician John Fahey who got hooked on a certain sound upon hearing Blue Yodel No. 4 by Bill Monroe (1946) on the local radio. Influences also pervade Jennifer Sullivan’s t-shirt painting practice, whose work features homages to varied cultural figures like David Lynch, Joan Brown and Hole. This exhibition features three t-shirts referencing Texan artist and musician, Terry Allen. A reproduction of her t-shirt paintings from 2020-2024 are preserved in a book, titled “The things we love tell us what we are” (2025).
Les Blank, too, sold t-shirts of his films (and posters, postcards, DVDs) as film merch outside of his screenings. After his death in 2013, Blank left us with some of the most invaluable films of the characters behind “roots” music (blues, bluegrass, zydeco, conjunto), among other fantastic portraits of gap-toothed women and garlic, to name just a few. With the help of the German folklorist behind Arhoolie Records, Chris Strachwitz, Les Blank connected with and captured some of the known and underrecognized heroes of each niche and subculture, crafting powerful visual poems that are both time capsules, and timeless.
In Les Blank’s films of Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, the vignettes layered on top of the music are visual representations of the lyrics themselves—not always literal, but sometimes very much so. Similarly, Erika Jane Amerika, a self-taught artist in Austin, Texas, paints her favorite country musicians, uniquely interpreted through the meanings behind their lyrics. The painting Fist City in this exhibition is of Loretta Lynn, the famed “Coal-Miner’s daughter”, imagining the singer as the feisty dame in the song (Lynn herself was notoriously well-behaved).
In 1920 at a General Baptist Association of Churches meeting in Buffalo, Texas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, at that time already a local legend, overheard an eight-year-old Sam (later deemed “Lightnin’”) Hopkins playing the guitar, and told him that if he kept at it, he’d be something one day. Blind Lemon Jefferson, born in rural Wortham, Texas, was the biggest blues recording artist in America the 1920’s, and tragically died too soon in 1929, murdered on the streets of Chicago. He gained notoriety by playing on street corners in downtown Dallas, and as he walked amid the buildings, he’d find his way by listening to how his music echoed off of them. In this exhibition, Lane Hagood’s monochromatic portraits of Blind Lemon Jefferson and “Father of the Delta Blues”, Charley Patton, which reference the only existing photograph of each musician, are painted in a hazy wash, with black airbrushed contours and primary colors. Lane Hagood has been referencing the blues in his work for over a decade—his 2014 show was titled “Black Snake Moan” after the Blind Lemon Jefferson song.
Too Much Ain’t Enough! coincided with the screening of Les Blank’s 1974 portrait of Leon Russell, “A Poem is a Naked Person” at the Texas Theatre on July 15, 2025. Russell commissioned the Les Blank documentary after watching “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” (1968) in theaters in Los Angeles and wanted a film of his own. The film is a unique and powerful portrait of a musician and his environment; however, Russell ended up disliking both the film’s portrayal of himself (he declined any further interviews after the first three), and the inclusion of too many shots of rippling water, birds, Jim Franklin’s pet snake, and George Jone’s heart wrenching performance of “Take Me.” This conflict delayed wide release of the film by forty years.
Jim Franklin, the artist featured throughout “A Poem is a Naked Person”—painting Russell’s swimming pool and arguing the ills of the vapid pursuit of fame—is most known for his portraits of musicians (and armadillos), primarily from his time in Austin as the in-house poster artist at the Vulcan Gas Company (1968-69) and the Armadillo World Headquarters (1970-1980). Les Blank’s own Jim Franklin poster of Conqueroo and Mance Lipscomb’s double feature at the Vulcan Gas Company in 1968 is in this exhibition and came from Blank’s studio ceiling in El Cerrito, California. Also included are a painting and four sketch studies intended for a Leon Russell album cover commission, featuring masks from Russell’s personal collection. The deal fell through—Russell declined to use the image when Franklin attempted to make a professional contract.
The Texas Theatre opened in 1931 on Jefferson Boulevard in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas—a rare landmark of preservation. Upon opening, the theatre boasted the first air conditioning unit in town. It later gained cult status when Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended there in 1963, while watching a double-feature of two poorly made World-War-II films. It was designated a Dallas Landmark in 2001, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, and recognized as a Registered Texas Historic Landmark in 2013. The JFK tour bus always stops there, very briefly, on weekends.
The building that formerly housed the Lone Star Café no longer stands (it was torn down in 2006 due to a fire), but the Iguana moved a surprising 2,634 miles in its lifetime and resides close by at the Fort Worth Zoo. A small, browned Village Voice clipping from 1987 of that week’s Lone Star Café lineup, drawn by Lissa Hattersley (sister of Cleve Hattersley, and member of Greezy Wheels, also the manager of the Lone Star Café) made its way into this exhibition. And the Iguana artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade was a member of a group called the Oak Cliff Four (alongside George Green, Jim Roche, and Jack Mims), a group of artists that lived worked and lived not far from the Texas Theatre in the late 1960’s and beyond.
Sometimes histories repeat themselves, and resurface in the collective memory, carried through stories, film, detritus, or works of art. And what is washed ashore can be taken or thrown back again.
Cordially Yours
Tessa Granowski
The Lone Star Café in New York City sat on the northeast corner of 13th Street and 5th Avenue from 1976 until 1989. In October 1978, a 40-foot iguana (“Iggy”) was installed atop the roof made by the artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade just months before in Lewiston, New York, at an experimental sculpture park called Artpark. The menu at the Lone Star Café offered Texas home cooking, such as cornbread and chili. Kinky Friedman played there most Sundays. And for just over a decade, Texas held a strong corner within Manhattan. The banner that hung just below the Iguana out front, was a Billy Joe Shaver line, “TOO MUCH AIN’T ENOUGH!”.
Too much ain’t enough is right, I thought, as I found myself surrounded by 8 or 10 books at a time trying to grasp the origins of Southern music in preparation for this exhibition. The root systems of “roots” music were deep and tangled, it turned out.
Musical histories are often social histories, and the songs and styles that emerge are learned, co-opted, adapted, and offered stylistically anew. Even a self-taught musician draws from somewhere, like self-taught, finger-picking folk musician John Fahey who got hooked on a certain sound upon hearing Blue Yodel No. 4 by Bill Monroe (1946) on the local radio. Influences also pervade Jennifer Sullivan’s t-shirt painting practice, whose work features homages to varied cultural figures like David Lynch, Joan Brown and Hole. This exhibition features three t-shirts referencing Texan artist and musician, Terry Allen. A reproduction of her t-shirt paintings from 2020-2024 are preserved in a book, titled “The things we love tell us what we are” (2025).
Les Blank, too, sold t-shirts of his films (and posters, postcards, DVDs) as film merch outside of his screenings. After his death in 2013, Blank left us with some of the most invaluable films of the characters behind “roots” music (blues, bluegrass, zydeco, conjunto), among other fantastic portraits of gap-toothed women and garlic, to name just a few. With the help of the German folklorist behind Arhoolie Records, Chris Strachwitz, Les Blank connected with and captured some of the known and underrecognized heroes of each niche and subculture, crafting powerful visual poems that are both time capsules, and timeless.
In Les Blank’s films of Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clifton Chenier, the vignettes layered on top of the music are visual representations of the lyrics themselves—not always literal, but sometimes very much so. Similarly, Erika Jane Amerika, a self-taught artist in Austin, Texas, paints her favorite country musicians, uniquely interpreted through the meanings behind their lyrics. The painting Fist City in this exhibition is of Loretta Lynn, the famed “Coal-Miner’s daughter”, imagining the singer as the feisty dame in the song (Lynn herself was notoriously well-behaved).
In 1920 at a General Baptist Association of Churches meeting in Buffalo, Texas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, at that time already a local legend, overheard an eight-year-old Sam (later deemed “Lightnin’”) Hopkins playing the guitar, and told him that if he kept at it, he’d be something one day. Blind Lemon Jefferson, born in rural Wortham, Texas, was the biggest blues recording artist in America the 1920’s, and tragically died too soon in 1929, murdered on the streets of Chicago. He gained notoriety by playing on street corners in downtown Dallas, and as he walked amid the buildings, he’d find his way by listening to how his music echoed off of them. In this exhibition, Lane Hagood’s monochromatic portraits of Blind Lemon Jefferson and “Father of the Delta Blues”, Charley Patton, which reference the only existing photograph of each musician, are painted in a hazy wash, with black airbrushed contours and primary colors. Lane Hagood has been referencing the blues in his work for over a decade—his 2014 show was titled “Black Snake Moan” after the Blind Lemon Jefferson song.
Too Much Ain’t Enough! coincided with the screening of Les Blank’s 1974 portrait of Leon Russell, “A Poem is a Naked Person” at the Texas Theatre on July 15, 2025. Russell commissioned the Les Blank documentary after watching “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” (1968) in theaters in Los Angeles and wanted a film of his own. The film is a unique and powerful portrait of a musician and his environment; however, Russell ended up disliking both the film’s portrayal of himself (he declined any further interviews after the first three), and the inclusion of too many shots of rippling water, birds, Jim Franklin’s pet snake, and George Jone’s heart wrenching performance of “Take Me.” This conflict delayed wide release of the film by forty years.
Jim Franklin, the artist featured throughout “A Poem is a Naked Person”—painting Russell’s swimming pool and arguing the ills of the vapid pursuit of fame—is most known for his portraits of musicians (and armadillos), primarily from his time in Austin as the in-house poster artist at the Vulcan Gas Company (1968-69) and the Armadillo World Headquarters (1970-1980). Les Blank’s own Jim Franklin poster of Conqueroo and Mance Lipscomb’s double feature at the Vulcan Gas Company in 1968 is in this exhibition and came from Blank’s studio ceiling in El Cerrito, California. Also included are a painting and four sketch studies intended for a Leon Russell album cover commission, featuring masks from Russell’s personal collection. The deal fell through—Russell declined to use the image when Franklin attempted to make a professional contract.
The Texas Theatre opened in 1931 on Jefferson Boulevard in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas—a rare landmark of preservation. Upon opening, the theatre boasted the first air conditioning unit in town. It later gained cult status when Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended there in 1963, while watching a double-feature of two poorly made World-War-II films. It was designated a Dallas Landmark in 2001, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, and recognized as a Registered Texas Historic Landmark in 2013. The JFK tour bus always stops there, very briefly, on weekends.
The building that formerly housed the Lone Star Café no longer stands (it was torn down in 2006 due to a fire), but the Iguana moved a surprising 2,634 miles in its lifetime and resides close by at the Fort Worth Zoo. A small, browned Village Voice clipping from 1987 of that week’s Lone Star Café lineup, drawn by Lissa Hattersley (sister of Cleve Hattersley, and member of Greezy Wheels, also the manager of the Lone Star Café) made its way into this exhibition. And the Iguana artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade was a member of a group called the Oak Cliff Four (alongside George Green, Jim Roche, and Jack Mims), a group of artists that lived worked and lived not far from the Texas Theatre in the late 1960’s and beyond.
Sometimes histories repeat themselves, and resurface in the collective memory, carried through stories, film, detritus, or works of art. And what is washed ashore can be taken or thrown back again.
Cordially Yours
Tessa Granowski