Joe Ely, Influential Texas Songwriter, Dead at 78

Joe Ely, the Texas singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was at the forefront of the Seventies’ progressive country movement as both a solo artist and part of the group the Flatlanders, died Monday at 78. According to a statement from his rep to Rolling Stone, Ely died at home in New Mexico from complications of Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s, and pneumonia.

To read the bullet points of Ely’s life is to assume it was fiction. He formed the cult band the Flatlanders with fellow Texans Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, but the music they recorded sat mostly unreleased for decades. He went on to join and travel with the Ringling Bros. circus, where he took care of horses and was nearly trampled by a line of elephants. Returning to music, he released his debut solo album and befriended Joe Strummer and the Clash, who later enlisted Ely to open their tour in support of London Calling.

And that was only the Seventies.

“I made it this far. I had teachers tell me I wouldn’t make it to 21 when I was going to high school, so I beat the odds, you know?” Ely told Lone Star Music Magazine in 2011. “I’ve traveled millions of miles, zigging and zagging in every kind of vehicle known to man, trying to get from one place to another to create some more music.”

Ely was born Feb. 9, 1947, in Amarillo, Texas. Raised in Lubbock in the western part of the state, Ely’s music would forever be influenced and shaped by West Texas, despite his eventually becoming so closely associated with Austin. “Every time I start a new album I head up to West Texas and drive around,” he told Texas Monthly in 2011. “You know, drive on those old cotton roads and in the wide-open spaces — and every once in a while I’ll come across a place where I’ve spent some time.”

After leaving West Texas as a teenager, Ely traveled the country, ending up for a time in Los Angeles, New York, and Austin, where he began making a name for himself in the city’s blooming progressive country scene. In the early Seventies, he became a member of the trailblazing and deeply influential country trio the Flatlanders, alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. The group released All American Music,  their debut, in 1973, but it was barely heard and the Flatlanders quickly disbanded.

“We were just kind of a kitchen band,” Ely said, reflecting on the band’s early years in 2021. “We had a bunch of friends that all lived in a big house together over by Texas Tech in Lubbock”

In the mid-Seventies he assembled the band — including Lloyd Maines — that would end up recording his debut album, 1977’s Joe Ely. “I guess it just came to the point where with me where I just figured that I had stuff in my back pocket that needed to be heard,” Ely told Rolling Stone in 1978. 

That same year, Ely released Honky Tonk Masquerade, a Texas classic that mixed Ely’s masterful balladry (“Because of the Wind”) and his knack for interpreting his Flatlanders bandmate Butch Hancock’s songs (“Boxcars”). And although Ely would forever become associated with the musical capital of his home state, he refused such easy categorization. “I don’t think we’re an Austin band by a long shot,” he said in Rolling Stone.

From the beginning, Ely established himself as a songwriter’s songwriter and a musician’s musician, a career player who evaded mainstream popularity or anything resembling a blockbuster hit but nevertheless attracted a devoted fanbase and legions of famous admirers. 

“It’s got that slight Southern country twang, it’s got a hint of rockabilly,” said Bruce Springsteen, inducting Ely into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2016. “It’s got the depth and emotion of Johnny Cash and it’s as deeply authentic as his Texas roots.” (Springsteen would sing with Ely live onstage numerous times, and record the song “Odds of the Blues” for Ely’s 2024 album Driven to Drive.)

And it took only three years of Ely releasing records for the Clash to pay tribute to him on 1980’s Sandinista!. “There ain’t no better blend,” sang Joe Strummer, “than Joe Ely and his Texas men.” Ely would go on to sing backup vocals on the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and even record his own version of the song.

That same year, the Flatlanders regrouped to release One Road More, their second album. Throughout the Nineties and Aughts, the group would go on to release several records and cement their reputation as the quintessential display of West Texas country storytelling. 

In the Eighties and Nineties, Ely crossed paths with everyone from Linda Ronstadt, for whom he repeatedly opened in the Eighties, to Paul McCartney, with whom he performed in 1990. In 1992, he returned to the record label MCA, which had released his earliest records, for Love and Danger, an album that included his beloved cover of Robert Earl Keen’s “The Road Goes on Forever.”

In 1999, Ely joined forces with a who’s who of roots music legends like Freddy Fender, Flaco Jiménez, and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo for the Grammy-winning album Los Super Seven. The group boasted a rotating cast of members and released three albums, including 2005’s Heard It on the X, which also featured late Mavericks vocalist Raul Malo. Ely sang lead on the band’s version of Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).”

By the time the 21st century came around, Ely was a revered songwriter, recording artist, and performer who’d become associated with his generation of Texas songwriter legends like Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark, and Terry Allen. He continued recording albums even as he was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia and Parkinson’s in his seventies. His final album, Love and Freedom, was released earlier this year.

“I’ve just been lucky that the records seem to find their own audience,” Ely said in 2011. “They kind of wind around, and maybe have to go down some twists and turns and up some alleys and round some bayous and stuff, but eventually they find their audience.”