Joe Ely has been playing music for over 40 years and since the late '70s the Texan's roots music mixed everything from folk ballads to square-one rock and roll. He has toured with The Clash and the Rolling Stones, and his work as a member of the Flatlanders is legendary.
Friday a night at the Northern Lights Theater, Ely and accordionist Joel Guzman may have appeared to be a stripped down duo but the songs they played were Cinemascope. Accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, Ely left plenty of room for Guzman's melodic solos and wheezing filigrees (at times recalling the great Flaco Jimenez). Guzman shone especially on "Gallo del Cielo," the epic balladry Ely depicting a tale of rooster fighting and lost honor in California.
"It feels like a Saturday night so I'll just say it -- we could never get away with this on a Friday," Ely said before launching into "Treat Me Like a Saturday Night." Veering from honky tonk stompers to Ely's stock-in-trade story songs, the duo laid out a show that begged two encores.
A vagabond by nature, titles like "Boxcars" and "The Road Goes On Forever" come naturally to a guy who really joined the circus before his music career took off. Ely paid tribute to patron saint of Texas songwriters Townes Van Zandt covering the harrowing "Tecumseh Valley," recounting the time he first met the hitchhiking Townes as he just crossed the Mojave Desert and gave Ely a copy of his first album as thanks.
Finishing up with a double encore of fellow Lubbock homeboy Buddy Holley's "Well All Right" and "Not Fade Away" Ely and Guzman celebrated the anniversary of the fateful plane crash as well as the rich legacy of Texas music.
