Joe Ely was a country-rock pioneer from west Texas who brought a new audience to country music. In Britain, he won over punk fans thanks to his friendship with the Clash, with whom he formed a perhaps unlikely alliance after the band had watched him playing in London in 1979. They invited him to their London Calling recording sessions, and then decided to work with him. He opened for them at concerts in the US – including a show in Ely’s home town of Lubbock – and they toured together in the UK. In 1982 Ely sang backing vocals (in Spanish) on the Clash hit Should I Stay Or Should I Go. The band’s guitarist Mick Jones said of him: “Ely is a special case. He’s young, he’s doing exactly what he wants to do.”
Ely, who has died aged 78 after suffering from Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease, had eclectic taste. A gifted singer and songwriter, he mixed country, rock, Tex-Mex and folk influences in his music, which ranged from songs of travel and west Texas life to brawny or witty stories inspired by Woody Guthrie. Alongside his own songs he often included work by other new songwriters – including Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, with whom he had lived in Lubbock and formed a band, the Flatlanders. Their recordings were initially a commercial failure (they released an unsuccessful single and an eight-track cassette in 1973), but would later be hailed as country classics.
Ely’s first (self-titled) solo album was released in 1977 and included his rousing country-rocker I Had My Hopes Up High, along with four songs from Hancock and three from Gilmore. Honky Tonk Masquerade (1978) followed the same pattern, while Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (1981) included Gilmore’s memorable song Dallas (“Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes”), which had been released as a single by the Flatlanders in 1972, but failed to get radio play.
Ely was now in demand, and in 1981 he toured with the Kinks, Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones. Bruce Springsteen also became an enthusiast for Ely’s music and a “true friend”. They sang together on stage in Dublin in 1993, and later collaborations included Springsteen’s appearances on the albums Letter to Laredo (1995) and more recently Driven to Drive (2024).
Ely was a compelling performer and his live albums show how he reworked his songs for different audiences. On Live at the Cambridge Folk Festival (1990) he was backed just by his own guitar, while on Live at Antone’s (1999) he was joined by his band for a set that included the stomping Everybody Got Hammered. On Live Cactus he was accompanied by the accordion player Joel Guzman for a Tex-Mex-flavoured set that included his evocative Texas ballad Because of the Wind.
He also joined a series of supergroups. Buzzin’ Cousins (1992) included John Mellencamp and John Prine, and provided music for a Mellencamp film. Later Ely played on two albums by Los Super Seven, including their 1998 self-titled debut on which he was joined by a cast including the Tex-Mex accordion star Flaco Jiménez, Doug Sahm and three members of Los Lobos, for a set that won a Grammy for best Mexican-American album.
And then there was the return of the Flatlanders. Songs from the unsuccessful recordings in the 1970s by Ely, Gilmore and Hancock were rereleased in Britain in 1980, and then in the US (under the title More a Legend Than a Band) a decade later. By now the trio had indeed acquired legendary status. They re-formed to record a song for the Robert Redford film The Horse Whisperer (1998) and in 2002 released a new studio album, Now Again. Two further albums, Wheels of Fortune (2004) and Hills and Valleys (2009), followed, along with the release of previously unheard Flatlanders material from the early 70s.
In 2014 Ely published Reverb: An Odyssey, a novel based on his travels and adventurous early life in Lubbock. He released his last studio album, Love and Freedom, in 2025.
Born in Amarillo, Texas, to Earle Ely and his wife, Margaret (nee Morgan), Joe began his musical career singing in the First Baptist church choir, and playing violin in the Avondale grade school orchestra. When he was 11 the family moved to Lubbock, where his father opened a used-clothing store that attracted Mexican migrants who worked in the surrounding cotton farms. Ely remembers it was a “segregated town”, divided by railroad tracks near his father’s store. “There was really beautiful music,” he said. “I feel real lucky to have gotten to experience that as a kid, because it was a kind of stepping out of one culture and seeing another culture first hand.”
Lubbock was famed as the birthplace of the rock’n’roll hero Buddy Holly, and Ely said that “when I was about 11 or 12 Buddy Holly had just died and every kid in Lubbock was playing a Stratocaster [electric guitar]”. He sold his violin to make a down payment on an electric guitar.
His life became “not so happy” after his father died and the family lost the store. Ely was attending Monterey high school, but was not an ideal pupil. He rode a motorcycle down the school hallways and was expelled when he started singing the Marvin and Johnny song Cherry Pie at a school assembly.
By now he was involved in the local music scene, listening to music in the honky-tonk bars and at the age of 15 playing with his own band, the Twilights. After travelling around the US he ended up back in Lubbock and working with the Flatlanders before starting his solo career.
He is survived by his wife, Sharon (nee Thompson), whom he married in 1983 and was also his manager, and by their daughter, Marie Elena.
• Joe Ely (Earle Rewell Ely), singer-songwriter and musician, born 9 February 1947; died 15 December 2025
