Joe Ely brings his magic to Summer in the Park tonight

Texas singer and songwriter Joe Ely will be playing the San Marcos Plaza Park stage today providing a rare opportunity for residents to see this Texas legend’s performance for free.

Born in Amarillo, raised in Lubbock and currently living on his ranch just outside of Austin, you’d have to go far outside the bounds of Texas – maybe even the U.S. and Europe – to meet someone that hasn’t heard the name Joe Ely.

Ely has collaborated with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt and the Clash – he sang backup on the group’s 1982 hit “Should I Stay or Should I Go” – and has earned a Grammy, a Country Music Award award and the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance. 

Ely is a part of a dying breed of Texas musicians, the working man’s singer and songwriter. Ely’s father died when he was 14 and he became the sole breadwinner of his family working as a  dishwasher, before he was able to launch his music career with the Flatlanders in 1972. 

“My daddy died when I was young, so I was the sole breadwinner for my family, I had to wash dishes after school at a restaurant and doing that I decided I was going to work more on my music so that I could live a life that had meaning to me,” Ely said.  

Ely has always been musical. He picked up a violin when he was 8 years old, followed by a steel guitar, before finally picking up the guitar which he has written his career on. He got his start with music playing in garage bands out of Lubbock. 

“I actually came to Lubbock the year Buddy Holly died and Buddy Holly was from Lubbock and all the kids in Lubbock just seemed to all of a sudden start garage bands – garage bands just exploded everywhere after Buddy died,” Ely said. “People were just trying to recreate that spirit that he brought to rock n’ roll and that was what my first bands were a Fender Telecaster and bass and drums – the simplest form of rock n roll.”

He met Butch Hancock and Jimmy Dale Gilmore, who were some of the first people Ely met that were writing their own songs instead of covering the hits and according to Ely they weren’t just writing songs, they were writing great songs. 

It was during this period in the 60s that Ely met Townes Van Zandt, not on a stage, but hitchhiking through the Mojave Desert with nothing but a backpack of his vinyls, his first album “For the Sake of the Song.”

“He was hitchhiking across the Mojave Desert and I picked him up and we talked while I drove him way out to a place that I always had good luck getting rides,” Ely said. “When he got out he thanked me for the ride and pulled a record out of his backpack – he didn’t have any clothes in there just records – and gave me his very first record and I took that over to Butch and Jimmy’s and we listened to that record day and night for months.”

And that’s how Townes Van Zandt became the “Patron Saint” of Ely’s band the Flatlanders and how Ely started his career.

Ely released his first self-titled album in 1977 and has since recorded 26 albums and published his first novel “Reverb: An Odyssey,” a semi-autobiographical rumination. Ely’s 40 year career is in the midst of an impressive stretch of milestones including his induction into the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame as well as the Texas legislature declaring him the official Texas State Musician for 2016, an honor that has previously gone to Texas music greats like  Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett and Ray Benson.

Ely has spent most of his career being a genre-bending artist, his music touching everything from honky-tonk and Texas country to rock and roll.

“That’s been my whole life is music,” Ely said. “I’m not really concerned about where it comes from as long as it’s good.” 

Ely is set to release recordings from 1974 and 1978  called “The Lubbock Tapes; Full Circle” on Aug. 17. The sessions represent two periods in Ely’s career and illustrate the evolution of the Joe Ely Band as well as why he has long been considered one of the most important artists hailing from Texas.

Ely plans on playing a show for the San Marcos crowd that touches on all of his milestone albums throughout his career, a deep-cuts show that would be a regret to miss.

Joe Ely will take the stage at 7:30 p.m. and play until 9:30 p.m. at the San Marcos Plaza Park. The show goes on rain or shine, though if it rains the show will move to the San Marcos Activity Center.