Joe Ely, Texas-Born Troubadour of the Open Road, Dies at 78

Thanks to his eclectic style and tireless touring, he was among the most influential artists in the early days of Americana and alt-country music.

Joe Ely, a singer and songwriter from the vast flatness of West Texas whose mastery of the South’s varied musical traditions and paeans to the open road earned him the nickname Lord of the Highway and made him a leading artist in the development of the modern Americana sound, died on Monday at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 78.

His family announced the death in a statement. The cause was pneumonia. He had also been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Ely (pronounced EE-lee) came from a long tradition of Texas troubadours, influenced by country stars like Gene Autry, Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb and rock ’n’ roll luminaries like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly.

He was an early and ardent proponent of what came to be known as Americana, or alt-country, a raw, eclectic genre that emerged in the mid-1970s in response to the slick, commercial so-called Nashville Sound.

He wrote songs about lost love and endless vistas, built around stories of everyday people leading everyday lives along America’s highways and byways.

Alongside his contemporaries Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Delbert McClinton, Mr. Ely pioneered a style of genre-blending music, mixing rock, country, Tex-Mex and blues, swirled with subgenres like Western swing and honky-tonk, all of which confounded labels and DJs but drew a loyal following across the United States and Europe.

Though he recorded several albums for MCA, he was happier as an independent, releasing music through his own Rack’em Records label.

“I think just about every record I’ve ever done with a record label, they didn’t know what to do with it,” Mr. Ely told Lone Star Music Magazine in 2011. “But you know, I’ve never really done anything to please a record company, or to please a public.”

In some ways, his sound was a throwback to before the 1960s, before record labels and radio executives erected walls dividing rock, country, blues and pop, and when artists would range across styles from song to song.

Mr. Ely was one of those “if you know, you know” musicians — never a headliner but good enough, and durable enough, to attract a sizable following. He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next.

He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West.

“There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. “Between Muleshoe and Clovis” — two small towns on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border — “there’s a stretch so empty of scenery that it’s almost psychedelic. Just flat nothing.”

He drew equal inspiration from the music scene in Lubbock, Texas, where he was raised. It was a surprising hotbed of talent for a city otherwise known for its vast collection of churches. Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly both grew up around there, and Mr. Ely counted himself among the many musicians who considered Mr. Holly the true pioneer of American rock ’n’ roll.

In 1972, Mr. Ely and two of his roommates whom he had known since high school, Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Hancock, traveled to Nashville to record an album, “All American Music,” under the name Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders. Their songs were so out of sync with the standard country fare that the label released the album as only an eight-track tape cassette, sold in a few truck stops around Tennessee. The band soon split up.

But a decade later, a small label in Britain released the album on vinyl and cassette under the title “One Road More,” and it became a hit among fans of the emerging alt-country sound. It was rereleased in the United States in 1990, with the title “More a Legend Than a Band.”

The Flatlanders got back together in the late 1990s to record a song for the soundtrack to the film “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), directed by Robert Redford. Though they maintained their own solo careers, the trio thereafter kept a regular recording and touring schedule, releasing five more studio albums over the next two decades.

Mr. Ely’s eclectic tastes brought him into collaboration with musicians far afield from West Texas, including the German composer Eberhard Schoener, at a time when he was pioneering with the Moog synthesizer.

During a sound check for a 1978 show in London, Mr. Ely and his band were visited by two members of the British punk band the Clash, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. The two were fans of American rockabilly music — Mr. Strummer was particularly fond of Marty Robbins — and they had heard that Mr. Ely was its latest ambassador.

After the show, Mr. Strummer and Mr. Jones took the Ely band on a tour of London’s late-night demimonde, an eye-opening experience even for someone as well-traveled as Mr. Ely. He returned the favor when the Clash came through Texas on their first U.S. tour, in 1979. He took them around Lubbock, to sites including Buddy Holly’s grave, where they all got stoned on laughing gas and beer.

They collaborated musically as well. Mr. Ely opened for the Clash at several shows, and he sang the Spanish backup vocals on their hit song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (1982). Mr. Ely and a sound engineer, Eddie Garcia, helped with the translation.

The Clash broke up in 1986, but Mr. Ely and Mr. Strummer remained friends. They were planning to collaborate on an album, perhaps even recording it in Mexico with a Mexican band, when Mr. Strummer died of a heart attack in 2002 at 50.

For better or worse, a common question in profiles and reviews about Mr. Ely was why he never got as famous as his collaborators. It was not a question that bothered him.

“I never considered ‘success’ as a real gauge of anything,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “Just last night, backstage at this place in Davis, I guess some musician had drawn a picture of this scared musician with great big eyes looking at this signpost between ‘fame’ and ‘obscurity.’ And I thought, ‘Man, what does that have to do with music?’”

Earle Rewell Ely Jr. was born on Feb. 9, 1947, in Amarillo, Texas, to Earle and Margaret (Morgan) Ely. His father ran a used-clothing store. His parents bought him a violin when he was 8 and his first guitar when he turned 11.

He was never much for formal education. He drove a motorcycle down the halls on his first day of high school and was later expelled for singing Joe Josea’s “Cherry Pie” during an assembly.

It was just as well; by then he was spending his waking hours on music, playing local bars and dance halls, alone or with a revolving group of bandmates.

It wasn’t long before he started to travel, inspired by Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie. He hitchhiked and hopped trains around Texas, and then the Southwest, and then to California and New York, and finally to Europe. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.

He returned home to form the Flatlanders but left again after they broke up in 1972. He took odd jobs; in 1974, he worked for the Ringling Bros. circus minding llamas and what was billed as the world’s smallest horse. He left after a much larger horse kicked him in the chest, breaking ribs.

Mr. Ely married Sharon Thompson in 1983. She survives him, as does their daughter, Maria Elena Ely, who was named for Buddy Holly’s widow, María Elena Holly.

Though he continued to hold Lubbock in his heart, in the early 1980s Mr. Ely settled in Austin, where he became a fixture of the city’s vibrant music scene. For years he helped organize a New Year’s Eve concert featuring a pig named Ralph that performed a “swine dive” just before midnight.

It was, Mr. Ely liked to say, all part of the ride.

“I had teachers tell me I wouldn’t make it to 21 when I was going to high school, so I beat the odds, you know?” he told Lone Star Music magazine in 2011. “I’ve traveled millions of miles, zigging and zagging in every kind of vehicle known to man, trying to get from one place to another to create some more music.”

Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.

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