Remembering Joe Ely
Another Texas, another America
The Texas singer-songwriter Joe Ely died last week. He has rightly been the subject of many heartfelt tributes and reminiscences on social media and even an obituary in the New York Times, to whose eloquence I have nothing meaningful to add. But I did think it worth reposting this extract from a longer piece riffing on ten favorite albums that I wrote back in 2018, one of which was by Joe Ely’s Flatlander bandmate Bruce Hancock.
In the face of the abject worst that the US has to offer, incarnated in the obscenities, cruelties and vulgarities of the current MAGA administration in the White House, Joe’s passing reminds us that there has always been another Texas than Greg Abbott’s and another America than Donald Trump’s. Hopefully it will rise again.
#8 of 10 x 10 Bruce Hancock: The Wind’s Dominion
Lucinda [Williams] kickstarted a whole new—or better, perhaps, an old-new—infatuation with Americana, and the continent yet again opened itself up to my imagination. After Yoke-Sum and I moved to the UK in 2004 the music took on additional freight.
At first we were seduced by the English countryside. But before long we found ourselves missing North American landscapes—the kind of landscapes that are caught in William Eggleston and Stephen Shore’s photographs. It wasn’t England’s pornographic prettiness I wanted but faded strip malls and back lanes lined with electricity poles, the billboards on the empty highways, the vastness of the prairie skies.
I never fitted back in the UK. Not enough space. I was homesick for somewhere else.
It was our Texan friend Wesley who first introduced me to the Flatlanders, back in Edmonton. More a Legend than a Band, the 1990 reissue of their only album was called, with justice. The group was founded in 1972 by three high school friends from Buddy Holly’s home town Lubbock and disbanded a year later. (They got together again in 1998 and have performed and recorded intermittently ever since.)
Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night? asks Jimmie Dale Gilmore in that inimitable sweet high tenor of his. No I didn’t. Dixie hadn’t yet made my bucket list. But Lucinda, Guy Clark, and Townes van Zandt were on my case. So were Jimbo Mathus, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the Drive-By Truckers. I was getting there.
When an unfortunate series of events involving an Icelandic volcano and a British Airways strike conspired to prevent me from attending a conference in Quito, Ecuador in 2010, I was stuck with a ticket to Houston for which I had paid and couldn’t get reimbursed. We decided it was time to look up Wesley, who was by then working at Texas A & M University.
We took the long route from Houston to College Station via New Orleans, Bon Temps, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin. Next year we returned and drove out west to Marfa. We liked Texas so much we spent the 2013-14 academic year on sabbatical in Austin. We flew to Atlanta, Georgia, rented an SUV, and drove across country, following a musical trail through Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta, the best part of 1000 miles. We took in Nashville on the way back.
Wesley visited us in Austin bearing a bottle of Bulleit bourbon, most of which we downed during a long lazy sunny afternoon listening to the wailing sax of Ornette Coleman, a good ol’ Fort Worth boy. I played Wes the late Geri Allen’s sublime piano rendition of Lonely Woman (on her 1997 album with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, Études), which he hadn’t heard before.
Lest we forget, Beyoncé comes from Texas too. My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma. Roots music.
Butch Hancock sang The Wind’s Dominion at a celebration of Austin music hosted by Alejandro Escovedo at the Moody Theater and Jimmie Dale Gilmore did a set at Lucy’s Fried Chicken during South by South West. The voice was limpid as ever. We’d seen Joe Ely (along with Terry Allen and Ryan Bingham, billed as Texas Troubadors) at the City Winery in New York. But we never got to see the Flatlanders play together.
Later I found a secondhand vinyl of The Wind’s Dominion LP, recorded in Austin in 1979, at Reckless Records on Berwick Street in London.
Some call it the West Texas Blonde on Blonde. The lyrics are surreal enough (try Mario y Maria, subtitled Cryin’ Statues/Spittin’ Images) and Only Born, which clocks in at just under ten minutes, is eerily Dylanesque in voice, phrasing, and sentiment.
But it’s not that thin wild mercury sound. Hancock is backed by harmonica, a frenetic fiddle, banjo, accordion, autoharp, mandolin, upright bass, drums, piano, trombone and acoustic, electric, bass, pedal steel, and dobro guitars. Sounds of the heartland.
And a reminder that there have always been other Americas. You just need to listen.