October 28, 2022
Remarks for Joe Ely’s induction to the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame
Wright made these remarks at ACL Hall of Fame 2022. A full recap of the evenings events can be found on ACL’s website.
It’s always been a mystery to me how the Panhandle, which is not known for being an artistic mecca, produced Jimmy Dean, Sonny Curtis, Tanya Tucker, Mac Davis, Delbert McClinton, Gary P. Nunn, Lloyd and Natalie Maines, the Gatlin Brothers, and more to be named later.
Except for the two years Georgia O’Keefe painted watercolors in Canyon, Texas, they’re all musicians.
Joe Ely was born in Amarillo, which is where he first encountered rock and roll, in the form of Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano on a flatbed trailer in a dust storm. The audience covered their noses with bandanas and the wind blew over the microphone but young Joe Ely heard the call.
The Ely family moved to Lubbock when he was eleven.
I drove out a few years ago to meet with Joe. He was giving a concert that night at the Cactus Theater.
I asked him to show me where the music came from.
He took me to Walmart.
We walked past the shoes and appliances and ladies apparel to the baby department, where Joe stood in front of the strollers and diapers and said, “Here, right here, was Buddy Holly’s house.”
In that same house where Buddy Holly once lived Joe Ely took his first guitar lessons.
There should be a historical marker.
“Out here, you kinda have to make your own entertainment,” Joe told the audience that night at the Cactus, “My parents had friends who owned the dry-cleaning store. We’d go out to the lake for a picnic after church, and then we’d go in the back door of the dry-cleaners and they’d let us kids try on other people’s clothes. There was no greater thrill. I wish I had a song about that.”
Life in Lubbock was as flat and featureless as the landscape. As Joe’s friend Terry Allen observed, you could look so far over the horizon that eventually you see the back of your head. There wasn’t much in Lubbock for a rambunctious teenager to do.
So Joe got in trouble.
It started with riding his motorcycle down the hallway of Monterey High School on the first day of his freshman year. He didn’t succeed in getting expelled until he sang that licentious song “Cherry Pie” at a school assembly.
He began hanging out in clubs, looking for clues.
There is a roadhouse about fifteen miles out of town on Highway 84 called the Cotton Club. It’s a falling-down clapboard shack that has gone through many owners, including Joe at one point. In its heyday it was the most important music venue between Dallas and L.A. Johnny Cash played there, as did Fats Domino, Tex Ritter, and Benny Goodman.
But every Friday was reserved for Bob Wills, from Turkey, Texas.
The kindly daughter of the owner let aspiring young Texas musicians slip in the back.
Roy Orbison from Wink, Waylon Jennings from LIttlefield, and Buddy Holly all got their education in the Cotton Club.
According to legend, the night Elvis played the Club, he made an error in judgment when he autographed the wrong pair of panties. Some cowboys stuck a rag in his gas tank and burned up his Cadillac.
Another historical marker, please.
One day Joe picked up a hitchhiker whose name was Townes van Zandt. Townes had just recorded his first album and had a stack of vinyls in his backpack. He gave one to Joe who took it home. He wore that record out.
That was a clue.
Joe moved to Austin and alternated shows with Stevie Ray Vaughn at a club called One Knight. They made about fifteen bucks in tips.
Looking for steadier work, Joe joined the Ringling Bros. circus as a llama herder and the caretaker of the world’s smallest horse.
His friend, and future bandmate, Jessie “Guitar” Taylor, invited him to join his roofing crew. That lasted as long as it took Joe to take off the roof of the wrong house. “We only missed it by one,” he explained.
In 1968, he spent a week in the Lubbock jail. Another clue.
Behind bars, Joe finally started writing songs.
He and his Lubbock pals, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, began singing together. Butch came out of the folk tradition, Jimmie Dale was into country, and Joe was a straight-out rocker, but they melded together into a sound as honest and fundamental as the plains that gave them birth.
They called themselves the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River Boys.
Catchy, right?
That early incarnation of the group that on second thought became The Flatlanders recorded seventeen songs on an eight-track tape. It would become a cult classic, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, but in the longstanding tradition of the music business, the artists never received a dime in royalties.
Joe drove me around town, showing me the vacant lot where his dad’s shop, the Disabled Veterans Thrift Store, once stood.
He pointed across the street to the warehouses where the Mexican dance halls had been. The sound of accordions and bajo sextos and horn sections were always in the air.
Those melodies would find their way into Los Super Seven, another of the fabulous groups that Joe helped define.
He began playing jams in a restaurant owned by C.B. Stubblefield, called Stubbs. A few years later, Joe would lure Stubbs to Austin. The restaurant occupies the same spot where One Knight once stood. Joe and his powerhouse wife, Sharon, used to cook up Stubbs’s famous barbeque sauce in their own kitchen.
In Lubbock, we ended the tour at the graveyard. We had to ask the groundskeeper for help in locating Buddy’s grave. It’s a simple stone with his dates, the 22 years between his birth and death, and his name, spelled HOLLEY, as his family did.
The stone is covered with guitar picks left by musical pilgrims from all over the world.
Joe once brought the Clash here, and they spent the night at the gravesite, drinking beer and paying tribute to the legend.
As Joe and I stood there, he looked out at the unbroken horizon and observed, “I think all the emptiness made me want to fill it up.”
And that’s what Joe’s music does. It fills us up.
The driving beat of a Joe Ely anthem tells us right away where he’s coming from. He’s a honky-tonk poet, an outlaw country minstrel, a corrido balladeer, a rocker with a broken heart, all these traditions experienced, captured, and transformed into his own distinctive style.
The lonesome boxcars rattle, the long snake moans, the fingernails click, all just to get to you.
The traditions that shaped Joe have been shaped by him in turn. He absorbed the legends and became the legend, and because of his gifts to our culture, the emptiness is filled with understanding, with connection, with meaning. And how many young Texans have heard Joe’s tunes and played them and joined the parade of song that is forever spilling forth from our state?
That’s why we honor Joe Ely tonight into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame.