So Long, Joe

Joe Ely, one of the Lone Star State's greatest sons, shrugged at fame and settled for the love of making music.

Photo by Frans Schellekens/Redferns

Joe Ely lived a life that would sound apocryphal if it weren’t all true. He hopped trains and hitchhiked. He ran away and joined the circus for a spell. He was one-third of a legendary Texas trio, The Flatlanders (along with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore), that was more a mirage than an actual group. He caught the attention of Bruce Springsteen, a kindred spirit who once quipped, “Thank God he wasn’t born in New Jersey! I would have had a lot more of my work cut out for me.” Ely also impressed The Clash to the point where they recruited him to open for them on tours across the UK and US (from which Ely’s incendiary album, Live Shots, was pulled).

Many obits, articles, and essays are describing that time period with the Clash around the web today, and deservedly so. Some point out how “unusual” the pairing between the Clash and Ely was. Yet it wasn’t. For anyone who knew Ely’s music and his approach to it, sharing space with “The Only Band That Matters” made perfect sense. (Ely is shouting the backing Spanish translation of the third verse of “Should I Stay or Should I Go” along with Strummer.) Strummer and Ely stayed friends for the rest of Strummer’s life because they were both artists who lived for the song and for the experience of making music—fame and fortune be damned.

I first caught wind of Ely with his 1981 album Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, which introduced me to Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas” as well as “Hard Livin’” (a song written by David Halley that in 1987 would become a hit for Keith Whitley). Ely was already a Lone Star legend by then. As the ‘80s wore on, I’d find him wherever I sought out music I loved. He even got some rock radio play in my area with 1988’s “Grandfather Blues.”

I always considered him the rightful heir to Buddy Holly. Although born in Amarillo, Ely is most associated with Holly’s home base of Lubbock, and later, Austin. He also shared Holly’s restless energy. His live shows were the stuff of legend, and his choice of backing musicians were always top-notch. Rock’n’roll barnburning guitarists from Ian Moore to David Grissom shared the stage with Ely, as well as stringmaster Lloyd Maines and sax legend Bobby Keys.

Yes, Ely rocked and rolled with a fierce punk energy and a rockabilly heart, but he could also turn around and deliver a true Tex-Mex heartbreaker.

…and spin a tale better than many novelists in just over three minutes.

Ely was also one hell of an interpreter. For my money, he delivered the definitive take on Bruce “Utah” Phillips’s “Rock Salt and Nails.” The first time I heard Robert Earl Keen’s damn-near perfect, “The Road Goes On Forever,” it was by Ely. With apologies to Keen, I still consider it Joe’s song.

Even sharing the mic with fellow Texan James McMurtry, Ely left his mark to the point where it sounded like the classic country/bluegrass standard, “Ole Slew Foot,” came from his pen.

He also made RC Banks’s “Where Is My Love” his own, best captured on one of the best live documents of its time, Live at Liberty Lunch.

With all his interpretive skills, however, Ely was a solid songwriter who could hold his own with every one of his Texas contemporaries, from Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt to Terry Allen and, a tad later, Lyle Lovett. For several years, Ely and Lovett would tour with Clark and John Hiatt in a sort of “in the round” songwriters’ showcase. “They set us up in alphabetical order,” Lovett told me in 2021. “Guy Clark was stage left. And then it was Joe Ely, then John Hiatt. During the show, Joe Ely used to point out, ‘Hey, we’re alphabetical by last name, too!’”¹

A few big-name publications just have to point out that he was a forerunner to what became “Americana.” Yes, of course, but that lessens his legend. He was a rocker, a balladeer, a musician, a Texan, a troubadour, one helluva singer of songs, both poignant, goofy, and everything in between. He was the best kind of artist: the song he was singing at that particular moment was all that mattered in the world. You couldn’t help but get pulled into his orbit. The roots rock boom that occurred in the 1980s was partially paved by Ely’s incendiary live shows—performances that could never be properly captured in the studio.

Ely even had a hand in the creation of Stubb’s BBQ sauce. Stubb’s was a Lubbock BBQ joint ran by Christopher “Stubb” Stubblefield that first opened in 1968 and throughout the 1970s hosted Sunday night jams with the likes of Ely, Muddy Waters, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others. Stubb was the godfather of Joe and Sharon’s daughter, Marie Elena (who was named after Buddy Holly’s widow). Stubb made the first of what became Stubb’s BBQ sauce in Joe and Sharon’s kitchen, and Joe designed the original bottle’s logo.

Sharon Ely shared a story of those days at the original Stubb’s in Lubbock on Ely’s Facebook page in 2021…

STUBB’S had nailed the curtains down in all the booths so people would quit wiping there greasy bbq hands on the curtains.
Tom T Hall never told STUBB’S as long as they were friends that he was a vegetarian.
One night At STUBB’S Joe and Tom played a pool tournament with an onion as cue ball in STUBB’S back room where he kept all the food to cook with. The pool table was back there and sometimes served as a bed for STUBB’S when he couldn’t make it home.
I secretly stole the cue ball that night when Tom and Joe were in the back playing pool continuously.
I was thinking they would come out front and play music for all the people waiting to hear them since there was no cue ball.
It was in my back pocket.
Instead, Joe found a bag of onions and pulled one out and grabbed a broom for a cue stick.
They continued to play pool.
Tom T won because Joe scratched the cue ball/ onion.

Christopher B. “Stubb” Stubblefield, Ely, and Tom T. Hall at Stubb’s somewhere in the late 1970s.

Back to the music. Of all Ely’s albums, I probably turn to 2003’s Streets of Sin most often. It’s a sober song cycle of life and loss and, of course, the road, that hasn’t lost a second of relevance over the years. When the tragic flood at Camp Mystic in the Texas Hill Country occurred this past summer, I couldn’t help but think of this song…

Ely and Springsteen first collaborated in the studio on 1995’s exquisite Letter to Laredo, with The Boss appearing on the album’s opening and closing cuts. He returned recently on “Odds of the Blues” from 2024’s Driven to Drive.

In September, the Ely family announced that Joe had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Over the last several months, Ely and his wife Sharon pored through his vaults of music, finding and completing songs that they felt needed to see the light of day. Even before then, Ely was still releasing music, with Love and Freedom appearing in February 2025. It featured his inimitable takes on songs from Woody Guthrie (“Deportee”), Guy Clark (“Magdalene”), and a young fella Ely picked up hitch-hiking one day in the early ‘70s, Townes Van Zandt (“Waitin’ ‘round to Die”). But he was still rockin’ out with his own material as well…

On Monday, December 15, 2025, Ely died in his home in Taos, New Mexico, with Sharon and Marie by his side. In a cruel twist of fate, we’ve lost two members of the roots-rock supergroup Los Super Seven over the last two weeks. First Raul Malo, now Joe Ely.

Soon after his diagnosis, the Ely family shared this story on their website:

When Joe was just 18 years old, he was traveling in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia with a theater group performing an anti-war play. On his day off, he wandered down to the sea. Rather than follow the crowds to the main diving spot, he chose a quieter, riskier cliff.

He dove beautifully into the water—only to be caught in a rip current. No matter how hard he swam, the tide dragged him farther out. A former lifeguard in Lubbock, Joe knew what to do, but the sea was stronger than him.

As exhaustion overtook him, something extraordinary happened. A calmness washed over him, and a voice—what we believe was an angel—spoke clearly: “Let go. Float.”

Joe obeyed. He stopped fighting, turned onto his back, and allowed the current to carry him. Miles down the coast, the tide delivered him to a safe, empty beach. Hungry, wet, and exhausted, he walked back to the castle where his fellow actors and musicians were staying.

That moment became a life lesson: sometimes the way forward is to stop struggling and go with the flow, to trust life’s current. It’s a message that carries us now—reminding us that life, like a song, has its own rhythm, and sometimes the most beautiful thing we can do is let it play.

For anyone discovering Joe Ely for the first time by reading this or the many tributes to him over the next few days and weeks, I hope you find something in the Mixtape below that’ll turn you into a lifelong fan, just like his music did for me well over 40 years ago.

Click here for the Apple Music version of this Mixtape.

1. Elliott, Michael; Costello, Elvis. Have a Little Faith: The John Hiatt Story (p. 142).