Joe Ely, a singer and songwriter from the vast flatness of western 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, and he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Ely (pronounced EE-lee) came from a long tradition of Texas troubadours, and proudly bore the influences of country legends like Gene Autry, Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb, as well as rockers like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, who was likewise raised in Lubbock.
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 slickly commercial “Nashville Sound” coming out of Music City.
He wrote songs about lost love and endless vistas, built around stories of everyday people leading everyday lives along America’s highways and byways — songs like “Boxcars” and “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me.”
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 D.J.s 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,” he 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, you know?”
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, when artists would range across styles from song to song.
Mr. Ely was one of those “if you know, you know” musicians — never headliner famous, 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,” he 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 Lubbock’s music scene, a surprising hotbed of talent for a city otherwise known for its vast collection of churches. Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly both grew up there, and Mr. Ely counted himself among the many musicians who considered Mr. Holly the true pioneer of American rock ’n’ roll.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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