Many young people have looked around Lubbock, Texas, and realized there’s little else to do but share a few drinks and play some songs in a hazy bar with friends until it’s time to move on, or someone makes them. Others have responded to this view as reductive, choosing to take the best of what others will fly over or drive past as a challenge or an inspiration.
Few have lived the best of both these seemingly contradicting mindsets quite like Joe Ely.
According to his family in a Facebook post Monday evening, Ely died Monday at his home in Taos, New Mexico, at the age of 78.
Ely was a Texas music legend who drove humbly at the leading edge of an evolutionary wave in alternative country music, and many talented West Texas musicians came with him.
Ely’s bandmate Butch Hancock said it must be something in the water.
“It's something in the air. It's something in the dirt and dust and the earth. It's something in the blazing sun. It's in everything you encounter,” Hancock said. “There's something in there that's vitally important, whether you like it or not.”
Another Lubbock-native musician, artist and friend of Ely’s for more than 50 years, Terry Allen, said for many, it’s probably boredom.
“I think boredom is the mother of invention,” Allen said. “You had to make your own fun, you had to make your own good times, and your own entertainment. And I think it came out of that.”
Born in Amarillo in 1947, Ely spent his formative years in Lubbock, where he would join with Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore in 1972 to form The Flatlanders. While the group’s initial discography was short-lived, each artist went on to contribute in distinctive ways.
“I think that's why he and Jimmy and I got together and just instantly bonded,” Hancock said. “We understood where each other was coming from, and although we did different results with it, when we started blending those results, we found out, wow, these things can fit together because our concepts are relatable.”
For Ely, that contribution personified the true extent of the open road, something he attributed to the long highways and seemingly endless horizons of the South Plains and Texas Panhandle.
Starting in the honky-tonk bars of Lubbock in the early 1970s, where once-sternly divided crowds of country and rock fans were beginning to merge, Ely went from Lubbock to Austin, across the country and, eventually, around the world.
By 1975, Ely joined with future global recording artist Jesse “Guitar” Taylor, a native of Lubbock’s Arnett-Benson neighborhood who was playing with fusion styles of rock and blues, and record producer Lloyd Maines, whose classic pedal steel pushed forward the country and swing sound.
“Boy, Joe always put together the best bands imaginable,” Hancock said. “And so many people in Lubbock have been just the greatest musicians. I think Buddy Holly was one of the first to just blow the world's mind, just about, ‘Where did that come from? Out of Lubbock, Texas? You’ve got to be kidding me.’”
Terry Allen formally met Joe Ely and Jesse Taylor when Lloyd Maines was recording Allen’s record, “Lubbock (On Everything),” and a night of talking collaboration became a nonstop night at a local juke joint on the east side of Lubbock.
“The guy served pork chop sandwiches and had a pool table, and we all shot pool and ate pork chop sandwiches and drank heavily until the sun came up the next day,” Allen said. “That was my first meeting with Joe, and it set off a very long friendship.”
Ely’s band played often at the original Stubb’s Bar-B-Q on East Broadway and Avenue A in Lubbock, a favorite pilgrimage site for artists like legendary guitar players Stevie Ray Vaughan and Muddy Waters.
“That was such a great time in Lubbock, I think, because it was so fertile with places to play and great musicians,” Allen said. “It's kind of before the exit to Austin had happened, and it's one of the few times I remember being in Lubbock where musicians could actually make a living playing music.”
Country musician Tom T. Hall illustrated the nature of Ely’s relationship with the Stubb’s owner, C.B. Stubblefield, in his song, “The Great East Broadway Onion Championship of 1978,” describing a night of drinking that led the group to a game of pool, using an onion as the ball and a broomstick as the pool cue.
Ely eventually convinced Stubblefield to follow him and move Stubb’s to Austin, contributing to the design and marketing for Stubb’s world-famous barbecue sauce.
One year after Ely’s first solo self-titled album with MCA Records was released in 1977, his travels led him on a life-altering trip to London, where he crossed paths with iconic British punk rock pioneers, The Clash.
Where a country soul was evident in his face and his songwriting, Ely’s passion and talent could quickly turn the stage into a party. That complex energy connected with members of The Clash, resulting in tours together and references from the band in some song lyrics, and Ely providing backing vocals for The Clash’s hit “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Ely built popularity as the “Outlaw Country” styles of those like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and fellow West Texan Waylon Jennings were taking center stage. And while he never reached the same household-name status, Ely continually presented something wider and evolving in his work. His second album, “Honky Tonk Masquerade,” has been called “the most sure-footed country-rock collaboration” of the 1970s, while his fourth album in 1981, “Musta Notta Gotta Lotta,” explored a more focused rockabilly sound.
Terry Allen said that for people like Joe Ely and their fellow West Texas musicians in that time, it wasn’t about the terminology.
“It was about making a song be the best that it could be, whatever you wanted to call it,” Allen said. “I think all of those kinds of labels and whatever became kind of irrelevant at that time. It was really about the energy of the music that was important, and what people responded to.”
Through his travels, Ely managed to bring pieces of his success back to West Texas, including appearances from his friends with The Clash, but for many in Lubbock at the time, some of Ely’s most memorable returns came with the Tornado Jam concerts of the 1980s.
Ely planned the first Tornado Jam to take place on May 11, 1980, the tenth anniversary of Lubbock’s devastating tornado, where 26 people were killed. After pushback from a city government that hesitated to associate the disaster with a rock-and-roll concert, Ely convinced officials that the show would honor West Texas resiliency and the memories of those lost.
With three shows in as many years, tens of thousands of people attended each time. Ely brought hometown favorites like the Crickets, the Maines Brothers and Terry Allen to a stage for Lubbock fans, with world-famous artists like Linda Ronstadt, Leon Russell and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.
The Tornado Jams were not without their rowdy moments. Terry Allen and Butch Hancock, as well as many Lubbockites in Buddy Holly Park in 1982, recall the classic car that rolled and flipped into the nearby lake.
“Some kid borrowed his girlfriend's dad’s Rolls-Royce while they were out of town and put it in that little creek of water that was right behind the stage there,” Allen said. “I remember everybody standing around photographing, laughing at it, and this kid was so upset he was going to jump right in after.”
Despite the city’s stern shutdown of the Tornado Jam after heavy rain and foot traffic in 1982 trampled the native grasses in Buddy Holly Park, these concerts would still become some of the most iconic cultural events in Lubbock's history.
By the 1990s, Ely’s touring crossed paths with Bruce Springsteen. The two connected on a style of storytelling in their lyrics, and another close friendship turned into concerts and collaboration, with Springsteen contributing to Ely’s 1995 album “Letter to Laredo.”
Ely was inducted into Lubbock’s West Texas Walk of Fame in 1989. His later years featured reunions with his friends in The Flatlanders and appearances at many festivals, including South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Ely was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2022.
Ely released more than 20 albums over the course of his career, including his last in 2025, “Love and Freedom,” recorded in his home studio. The album maintained what made Ely’s music feel special for many over his entire career: no self-imposed boundaries for what a songwriter could be.
Ely was nominated for a CMA Award in 1992 for his collaboration with John Prine, John Mellencamp, James McMurtry and Dwight Yoakam called Buzzin’ Cousins. He was also part of the supergroup Los Super Seven with Texas Tornados Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender, who received the Grammy Award for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album in 1998.
Terry Allen said Lubbock’s role as a Hub City for the highways of West Texas, far from the rest of the metros, has always brought different people together and likely played a role on Joe Ely and the rest of their generation of artists. Butch Hancock agreed that they were all impacted by what it feels like to follow a straight, flat highway toward that horizon, and where it leads.
“People are so affected by their environment, and they don't realize it,” Hancock said. “The good thing about Lubbock is, man, you don't ever have to use your parking brake.” (Unless you’re driving a Rolls-Royce to Tornado Jam.)
Terry Allen noted that Ely was always a fantastic and diverse musician, and a great friend.
Terry and his wife, Jo Harvey, recalled one of their last times seeing Joe Ely, getting together in Marfa, where they parked the cars in a circle, cranked up the radio loud and turned on the headlights to create a dance floor like they did when they were younger.
“We worked on songs together, but really just kind of played music for each other,” Terry said. “Sitting in this empty room and talking to each other about all those stories and all those places and that kind of kinship that comes with being friends for a long time.”
Butch Hancock spoke about the power of language and song to move people from across beliefs and origins, but added there’s another important magic in silence.
Hancock said he’s been speaking to fellow Flatlander Jimmie Dale Gilmore, but talking about Joe Ely will be hard on the heart. He did give some advice for those who haven’t spent much time in West Texas and are asking similar questions about where the magic comes from.
“Walk out of the city five or 10 miles, lay down in a cotton patch and talk to the stars, and then get home as the dawn comes up,” Hancock said. “I've done that, Joe's done that, Jimmy's done that. You’ve got to clean your heart out time after time.”