Joe Ely Digs Into His Archives For Songs of ‘Love And Freedom’

Joe Ely has been a prime mover in Americana music since the days before it was called Americana. From the early-’70s origins of the Flatlanders with his childhood Lubbock pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, through a run of MCA albums that earned him an opening slot on a Clash tour, to a mid-career resurgence with HighTone Records and beyond, he’s been recording memorable music for more than five decades. 

And after 50-odd years, Ely has a lot left over in his vaults. Drawing on that rich cache, he released Love And Freedom on Feb. 7, featuring 12 unreleased songs. The songs are connected by the dovetailing themes of the album’s title, which was the file-name he’d given a digital folder where he’d stashed away these particular songs.

“I found kind of a thread running through these songs that I was not really looking for but stumbled across,” Ely said by phone recently. “I was remembering what made me write certain songs, and that was the beginning of starting to dig into this.” The tunes range from anti-war numbers such as “No One Wins” and “What Kind Of War,” to Mexican immigrant stories such as “Adios Sweet Dreams” and Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” to a colorful tale about long-ago brushes with the law in his hometown of Lubbock (“Sgt. Baylock”).

The tracks began as home-studio demos, with Ely laying down most of the instrumental tracks himself. A few guests pop up here and there, including accordionist Joel Guzman, guitarist David Grissom, and fellow troubadour Ryan Bingham. Ace producer Lloyd Maines overdubbed touches of guitar and bass, fleshing out the sound but keeping the focus squarely on Ely’s powerful vocal performances.

Ely and Maines (whose daughter Natalie fronts Grammy-winning Texas trio the Chicks) began working together in the 1970s when both of them lived in Lubbock, where Ely put together a band that became known for its incendiary live shows. That led to a deal with MCA Records, which helped put Ely on the map with five acclaimed albums – plus three more after the label brought him back aboard in the 1990s. Since the turn of the century, Ely has mostly issued albums on his own label – and he’s increasingly been mining his deep archives in recent years.

In 2014, Ely put out B4 84, which featured outtakes from the sessions of his ahead-of-its-time 1984 album Hi-Res, which experimented with computers and synthesizers. (No less than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who befriended Ely way back then, wrote the liner notes to B4 84.) Then came 2018’s Full Circle: The Lubbock Tapes, a batch of mid-1970s demos that led to Ely’s game-changing tenure with MCA Records. In 2020, Ely spent the early days of the pandemic assembling Love In The Midst Of Mayhem, which now feels like an older sibling of the new Love And Freedom. And there was 2022’s Flatland Lullaby, a collection of children’s music initially conceived as a Christmas gift for his infant daughter Marie, in the mid-1980s.

The surplus of backlog material was probably inevitable for a “workaholic,” as Joe’s wife Sharon Ely lovingly described him in a recent phone interview with the couple. They were speaking from Phoenix, where Joe was undergoing medical tests to address some cognitive issues he’s had over the past year. An initial diagnosis in Austin last year seemed uncertain, and when Sharon went public about Joe’s condition on social media recently, she and Joe were overwhelmed by the offers to help.

“Boy, did we get some great responses from his fans,” Sharon says. “People from Zurich, Switzerland, put me in touch with a great doctor in Boston. And then Bruce Springsteen called and put us in touch with his doctors. Those doctors called this doctor in Phoenix, and Ed Gray, who is a great fan of Joe’s, helped us set up an appointment.” The early-February meeting made progress toward a more definitive diagnosis; they’ll return to Arizona soon for more tests and further verification.

Despite Joe’s health issues, both he and Sharon wanted to release Love And Freedom as soon as possible, because they feel its themes resonate with the traumatic state of our nation and world in the wake of November’s presidential election. Joe’s ability to communicate is limited, but Sharon helped to expand upon his thoughts during our hour-long conversation.

A clear standout among Ely’s original contributions is “Adios Sweet Dreams.” Its swaying tropical beat hides the darkness of the lyrics, which tell of a Mexican couple who try to cross into “the land of the free” but get separated as their “sweet dreams” become nightmares.

“The kind of the world that I was living in, Mexico was a big part of it, and more and more stories started putting themselves together,” Ely says. “I was attracted to the culture of Mexico, and the two worlds met during the period when I was leaving Lubbock and moving to Austin (circa 1980).”

“What’s happening now with the immigration laws and stuff also kind of guided the story,” Sharon adds. “It kind of fit with the times, is what Joe and I were thinking.”

Another song that resonated along those lines was Guthrie’s “Deportee,” which details a 1948 plane crash in California that killed dozens of migrant farmhands who were being deported back to Mexico. The 20th-century classic has been covered by many major artists, including Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and the Byrds. Ely himself was part of a 1998 recording by the Tex-Mex supergroup Los Super Seven. But this striking version, which features a guest vocal from Oscar-winning troubadour Ryan Bingham, is especially poignant. 

“Ryan was living at our house during a brief time when he was figuring out what he was trying to do in his life,” Sharon recalls, noting that their house guests often end up spending time with Joe in his home studio. “Ryan and Joe were over in the studio and decided that they needed to record that song together. After we found it in Joe’s little file of ‘Love And Freedom’ songs, I texted Ryan and asked if he would consider letting us put it on Joe’s new album. He said he would be honored.”

Mexico is also referenced in Guy Clark’s “Magdalene,” a mesmerizing song that Clark never released on his own albums. “It’s just the most beautiful song,” he says. Ely first recorded it on 2015’s Panhandle Rambler; this exquisite, stripped-down new version features just Joe’s voice and guitar with gentle accordion accents from Guzman. Sharon says she insisted on the inclusion of this alternate version, “just because of Joe’s voice. He sounds so passionate on it. When Joe did songwriter tours with Guy Clark, John Hiatt, and Lyle Lovett, Guy would sing that song, and then Joe had to follow him. Joe told me he was just like, ‘NOW what do I do?’”

Clark’s close friend Townes Van Zandt wrote two songs included on Love And Freedom. “Waitin’ Round To Die” is harrowing in its raw emotion, while “For The Sake Of The Song” is rich with both lyrical and melodic beauty. There’s a long history between Van Zandt and Ely, who famously picked up a hitchhiking Townes in the Texas Panhandle 50-odd years ago.

Shortly before Van Zandt’s death in 1997, the two Texas legends crossed paths overseas. “Joe had a great meeting with Townes in Italy,” Sharon recounts. “Joe was doing a gig, and Townes and a friend showed up. Townes was, of course, really drunk, and he got up onstage, and Joe got him to sing a song with him. That was supposed to be the end of the show, but Townes pulled Joe back onstage, and they sang another song. This went on for quite a while.”

“Townes would come back onstage and say, ‘come on, one more song!;” Joe says, laughing at the memory. “I’d try to pull myself away, because the show was already 30 minutes over.”

The album closes with mini-suite of songs that might be called political, but their tone is not didactic; rather, Ely’s words on “Here’s To The Brave,” “What Kind Of War,” “No One Wins,” and “Surrender To The West” poetically express his values in deeply-human terms.

“This is a good time to talk about all that,” Sharon says. “One thing Joe and I were both talking about: Townes used to say that there’s two kinds of songs — the blues and zippity-doo-dah. Right now is not a zippity-do-dah time, and this is not a happy-go-lucky record.”

Sure enough — but there’s a moment of comic relief that’s worth the price of admission. The subject of “Sgt. Baylock” was a real person, a policeman who had a habit of arresting Joe on overblown vagrancy charges during Joe’s younger days in Lubbock. The song recounts how the two happened to meet decades later and buried the hatchet, after the sergeant revealed a dark secret about his own life and career:“Baylock’s luck was not heaven sent/ He’d taken a life by accident/ He’d quit the force and for years wandered all alone,” Ely sings.

The later-in-life meeting actually happened. Ely had a visual-art show in Lubbock, ironically displaying works with a jailhouse theme, and the sergeant showed up at the reception. The whole song is pretty much true — except for the last part of the final verse, when Joe and the sergeant get drunk and end up getting thrown in jail together. “That part was just Joe’s magnificent imagination,” Sharon says, “but it made for a good ending.”