Joe Ely
Album: Panhandle Rambler
Label: Rack 'Em
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.ely.com

Recently recognised by the Texas Legislature as the Official 2016 Texas State Musician (an honour previously accorded Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett) as well it being announced he's to be inducted into the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame, Ely has had a busy few months. In addition to releasing 'B484', an album he recorded in 1983, one of the first ever made using an Apple II Computer, he also published his debut novel, 'Reverb:An Odyssey', and duetted with Linda Ronstadt on 'Where Is My Love'.

In-between all this, he also found time to put together his first studio album in four years, an audio portrait of the land where he was raised and established his musical roots. With musicians that include Glen Fukunaga on bass, Joel Guzman on accordion, Lloyd Maines on acoustic slide and Warren Hood on fiddle, it's a very personal affair in the way it expresses his connection with and love for Texas and, in particular, the dusty area around Lubbock and the people that live there.

It opens with the acoustic based 'Wounded Creek', a gothic Western fantasy that, like 'Coyotes Are Howlin'', conjures the same haunted world as 'Riders In The Sky' and the narratives of Butch Hancock before heading into 'Magdalene', Guy Clark's spare, acoustic guitar led ballad about catching that bus out of town in search of a better life.

Guzman makes his first prominent appearance on a tender cover of Hancock's 'When The Nights Are Cold' and again lends melancholic Mexicali tones to 'Burden Of Your Load', a Southern gothic story song of a moonless desert night, a deserted road, a black Chevrolet and the devil's temptation. Ely adopts the narrative form too on 'Four Ol' Brokes', a classic cowboy tale about gambling, hobos, freight trains and that one more game to play.

If that pays tribute to the characters who inhabit the work of storytellers such as William Faulker, Harry Crews and Anne Rice, then the uptempp, fiddle bouncing 'Here's To The Weary' is testament to real life figures, rambling, restless musical souls like Woody, Buddy, Bob Wills, Muddy Waters. Little Walter and Jerry Lee who travelled the roads to bring a rock n roll uplift to tired and jaded lives.

Built around a steady, midtempo guitar riff chug, the final track, 'You Saved Me', is a love song to his wife, but, above all, the album is a love song to a place, beautifully epitomised in the autobiographical 'Wonderin' Where' as he recalls childhood memories of the landscapes, of the music on the radio and the trains rumbling through, shaping the man and the musician he would become and sening him out with a suitcase full of dreams "trying to find a verse that's never been sung to hearts that need relief." Texas has done him proud, and the favour is returned in spades.

Mike Davies