Texas roots singer-songwriter Joe Ely passed away at age 78 on Monday, Dec. 15, due to complications with Lewy body dementia, Parkinson’s, and pneumonia, according to a statement from his family.
Ely was born in Amarillo in 1947 and became a pivotal part of Austin’s progressive country and Americana scene throughout the Seventies and Eighties as a solo musician and a member of the Texas-spanning trio the Flatlanders. Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock influenced a generation of alternative country sounds with their strong, simple arrangements, incorporating elements of Western swing, blues, and honky-tonk classics. Raoul Hernandez followed the icons to their Late Show with David Letterman performance for a Chronicle cover story in 2002.
“We had the Lubbock look!” beamed Ely at the time, in a response to a compliment on the trio’s Western flash attire. “I found that stuff in a Western store in Lubbock.”
Like many proud Lone Star songsters, the Flatlanders spent time in Lubbock before moving to the capital, leaning on a strong musical friendship.
“The way we related to each other back then is exactly the way we relate to each other now,” Ely told Hernandez on that trip. When the music writer caught up with the trio 14 years later, they played with the same rapport and enthusiasm.
The Austin City Limits Hall of Famer built a musicians’ musician reputation with prolific recordings and residencies with the Flatlanders throughout the Live Music Capital. In 2021, he reunited the band to release Treasure of Love, a collection of unearthed recordings from the trio’s storied past. He recorded over two dozen solo albums throughout his career, including Driven to Drive, released in August 2024 on his own label, Rack’em Records. On that LP, as on every other project he touched, “Ely’s rangy, expressive tenor fuses the rootsy resonance of his Panhandle twang to the nervy urban restlessness of the native Amarilloan’s eternally adventurous gusto,” the Chronicle wrote in our review.
A part of the Kerrville Folk Festival’s early days, Ely shared his talents with many other local legends, including Robert Earl Keen and Kimmie Rhodes, and inspired international touring acts like the Clash, whom he played with onstage and in the studio throughout their career, and Bruce Springsteen, with whom he recorded “Odds of the Blues.” As a solo artist, his boundless creative energy colored in the Hill Country of Texas and the deserts of the Southwest with original songs like “Honky Tonk Masquerade” and “Because of the Wind.”
Ely and his wife Sharon shared his diagnosis in September, along with a determination to embrace slower days and revisit and re-release Ely’s extensive discography. “Our story is about how music continues to lift us up,” Sharon shared in a press release at the time. The couple also began compiling a memoir, a follow-up to the troubadour’s two released books: Bonfire of Roadmaps, a collection of diary entries and stories from his years spent crisscrossing highways as a traveling musician, and Reverb: An Odyssey, a novel about a young Texan rambler like himself in the early days of the hippie movement. He passed peacefully in his Taos, New Mexico, home beside Sharon and his daughter Marie.
Editor’s Note: This obituary has been updated to clarify Ely and Hancock’s songwriting credits, and to include more about Ely from the Chronicle archives.