* NY Times…

Joe Ely, a singer and songwriter from the vast flatness of West 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. […]

Mr. Ely (pronounced EE-lee) came from a long tradition of Texas troubadours, influenced by country stars like Gene Autry, Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb and rock ’n’ roll luminaries like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly.

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 slick, commercial so-called Nashville Sound. […]

He wrote songs about lost love and endless vistas, built around stories of people leading everyday lives along America’s highways and byways.

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 DJs but drew a loyal following across the United States and Europe.

Man, he was the best.

* Rolling Stone…

And it took only three years of Ely releasing records for the Clash to pay tribute to him on 1980’s Sandinista!. “There ain’t no better blend,” sang Joe Strummer on “If Music Could Talk,” “than Joe Ely and his Texas men.” Ely would go on to sing backup vocals on the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and even record his own version of the song. […]

“I’ve just been lucky that the records seem to find their own audience,” Ely said in 2011. “They kind of wind around, and maybe have to go down some twists and turns and up some alleys and round some bayous and stuff, but eventually they find their audience.”

* As far as I can tell, this is Joe’s only kinda/sorta Christmas song…

* What we have here is an open thread.