Joe Ely

Joe Ely is a son of the South Plains, born on February 9, 1947 in Lubbock, Texas. As a teen he practiced with a small country band in (what was unknown to him at the time) had been the childhood home of rock and roll co-founder and Lubbock native Buddy Holly. He was and continues to be a member of The Flatlanders, which he co-founded with prolific songwriter Butch Hancock and musician / actor Jimmie Dale Gilmore (best known as "Smokey" in The Big Lebowski (1998) ). He is best known as the leader of the long-lived Joe Ely Band which, among others, included Lloyd Maines, Jesse Taylor and Ponty Bone. The band enjoyed a great deal of commercial success in the late seventies and eighties, primarily with the MCA label. He and guitarist Jesse Taylor were responsible for establishing the weekly Stubbs Barbeque Jam at a tiny restaurant in Lubbock, which became the regional hot spot for live blues, having such an impact that the grounds of the long-since razed restaurant is now the site of a historical monument. Much of his work is autobiographical, including one early track which told the story of his working for a traveling carnival that survived a hurricane. His long-time guitar has been a 1950s Gibson J-5 that he bought on a beach in California. It bears large circular rings on the front from sea shells that had been glued-on by the previous owner. Only having $5 of the promised $10, the seller kept the shells. In the late 1970s, when country singer Tom T. Hall was at his peak, Hall, Ely and a few others enjoyed a drunken game of billiards in the back of Stubbs Barbeque, with Ely having chalked his nose green and continuing the game using a broomstick and an onion pulled from a bag in the corner. The resulted in Hall's song, "The Great East Broadway Onion Championship of 1978". Ely is one of the vanishing breed of genuine salt-of-the-earth working musicians who has kept at it all his life, through thick and thin, enjoying both fame and famine, yet never giving in. His version of Texas music never caught as much sail as the central Texas "outlaw" genre of Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, or of the pop style of fellow Lubbock Native Mac Davis, in west Texas he is best respected musicians of his generation.