Texas songwriter Joe Ely, whose career took him from the dusty and flat landscape of the Texas Panhandle around the world, collaborating with fellow troubadours Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock in The Flatlanders and rocking out with The Clash, died Monday at his home in Taos, New Mexico from complications of Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s and pneumonia. The announcement was made on the singer-songwriter’s Facebook page. Ely was 78.
Born in 1947 in Amarillo, Ely said his earliest memory of music was singing in the First Baptist Church choir, but at age 8, he saw Jerry Lee Lewis perform. “I just wanted to play some kind of music,” he told Texas Public Radio in 2014.
His first axe wasn’t a guitar, though. Ely played violin in the school orchestra. Then his family moved to Lubbock. “When I was about 11 or 12, Buddy Holly had just died, and every kid in Lubbock was playing a Stratocaster,” said Ely. “And so … the violin got put in a case, and the Stratocaster got plugged in.”
Lubbock was a dry county at the time, and as he got older, Ely said he’d travel 15 or 20 miles outside of town and listen in on the type of music that folks were playing.
“I got to see this whole kind of evolution go from the country stuff into the into the early rock and roll era,” Ely said.
In the Panhandle, wind whips across the land, weathering faces and blowing talented musicians out of a town where there wasn’t much else to do in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Ely joined up with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, experienced songwriters themselves, to form The Flatlanders.
“They were able to keep a song in the setting of West Texas, but make it interesting,” he said. “All of a sudden I looked at West Texas differently.”
Ely’s own songwriting caught the ear of an unlikely group of fans in 1978.
“While we were doing a sound check in London, one of the people from the club came back and said, ‘there’s some scruffy young gents that would like to meet you,’” Ely recalled with a chuckle.
The scruffy gents were The Clash, who had a hit on the radio with a cover of “I Fought The Law,” written by fellow Lubbock songwriter, Sonny Curtis.
“We got to talking about things that we had in common. I liked Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and, [Joe] Strummer liked Marty Robbins ballads like ‘El Paso’ and ‘Streets of Laredo’ and all these songs, and so we kind of had this strange thing in common, even though we grew up on different sides of the ocean.”
Ely would later sing backup on another hit by The Clash, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.”
Much like his early days listening to the evolution of music in Lubbock, Ely’s own sound evolved as well, incorporating hyped-up rock, as on “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta” and “Cool Rockin’ Loretta.”
Ely’s kinship with Spanish found an outlet in the supergroup Los Super Seven; his only Grammy nomination and win was shared with the other members of the group, including Freddy Fender, David Hidalgo, Doug Sahm, Cesar Rosas, Flaco Jiménez and Rick Treviño. The collective won Best Mexican-American Album in 1999.
Throughout his career, Ely’s songs shared characters and places that were relatable, whatever one’s background.
Shortly after releasing the pandemic album Love in the Midst of Mayhem in 2020, Ely again spoke to Texas Public Radio. “Two people can see the same thing taking place and report it totally different, you know, in a different light.”
In that way, Ely’s music also rewards repeat listens throughout life.
“There were times when I was working on this [album]… the different pieces of the puzzle, I kind of drifted off to another place, and I thought, ‘well, I can’t do that.’ But then I’d step back and say, ‘Wait a minute.’ That opened up another door. And it wasn’t just pulling me away, it was actually changing my direction in a different way because I started understanding it more.”
Despite a prolific recorded output, tours with The Clash, and even opening for the Rolling Stones in the early 1980s, and the respect of fellow songwriters (he was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2022), Joe Ely never broke out big in the mainstream.
Joe Ely remains a Texas treasure for those who listen to his lyrical sound, carried on the wind.
