“I love doing those things,” says Ely, who once opened for the Clash in the ’80s. The 60-year-old won’t have to catch any freight trains or battle rattlers to appear on “Prairie Home Companion” tonight and tomorrow at Town Hall or at Joe’s Pub on Sunday – with accordion player Joel Guzman – but you can imagine he would if he had to.Įly thrives on touring and does so relentlessly – for audiences big and small, with a band (either his own or the Flatlanders, which includes Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmour), a few other artists or by himself.Ībout four years ago, he and Guzman played at a downtown club, Tribeca Blues, to a room which Ely would likely describe as half-full – not half-empty. “But when I first moved here, I found a water moccasin, a copperhead snake, a coral snake and a rattlesnake – the four most dangerous snakes.” Today his place is mostly a snake-free zone: On the advice of a rancher, he got a half-dozen cats to help.

The title of the second disc, “Happy Songs from Rattlesnake Gulch,” which features more recently penned tunes, refers to Ely’s home in the Hill Country around Austin, Texas. Ely only recently dug up “Silver City,” written almost 40 years ago, and other nearly forgotten tunes from that time, then reworked and recorded them for the album. They jumped freight trains to get north, but upon arrival the leaves had fallen off the trees and they were starving.Īll wasn’t for naught. “The song ‘Silver City’ is about the time when I was in West Texas and I went with a friend to New England to watch the leaves change colors,” the singer/songwriter/guitarist says. The first title refers to the view of Manhattan from New Jersey when a younger Ely and a pal were hitchhiking across the George Washington Bridge in the late ’60s. TEXAS troubadour Joe Ely named his two most recent albums – “Silver City” and “Happy Songs from Rattlesnake Gulch” – after two places from two different times.

Skedaddle song