A Texas Americana Legend A Texas Americana Legend A Texas Americana Legend A Texas Americana Legend A Texas Americana Legend

Joe Ely is an American music legend when it comes to the honky-tonk / Tex-Mex flavor of Americana music. Born in Amarillo, TX in 1947, and raised in Lubbock, Joe was exposed to, and fell in love with, Texas Country music at a very early age. In 1971, along with fellow musicians Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock, they formed the band, the Flatlanders. “Jimmie [Gilmore] was like a well of country music. He knew everything about it. And Butch was from the folk world. I was kinda the rock & roll guy, so we almost had a triad. We hit it off and started playing a lot together. That expperience opened up a whole new world I had never known existed,” Joe shared recently.

Joe released his first solo album in 1977 on MCA, and has issued a steady stream of albums, (over 30 and counting, most on the MCA label), along with a live album, roughly every 10 years.

In 1978, his band played in London, where he met punk rock group, The Clash. Impressed with each other’s music, the two bands later toured together, and established a musical friendship that lasted for years.

In the late 1990s, Joe was asked to write songs for the soundtrack of Robert Redford’s movie, The Horse Whisperer . This led to re-forming of his band, The Flatlanders, which produced a new album. They release

By Greg Tutwiler

another in 2002 and a third in 2004. In October 2022, Joe was inducted to the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame.

I caught up with Joe recently, right as MCA was re-releasing his first three solo albums on vinyl. I asked him to reminisce about the early days of his career and how it all started.

“When I was seven or eight years old, I saw Jerry Lee Lewis playing on a flatbed trailer in Amarillo, Texas,” he recalled. “I was hooked from that moment. The wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour and the microphone kept getting blown over. Jerry just kept beating the hell out of that piano. And I thought, ‘you know, that’s what I want to do.’ So he kind of set me on a course, and I’ve been playing and putting songs together ever since then.”

That’s been 60 years ago. Did you have any idea where life would take you, I asked?

ARTICLES BY DAN WALSH

Lance Blackwell is a lifelong Mississippian (hailing from rural Montrose and currently residing in Hattiesburg), and traces his musical roots back to gospel. “I grew up with singers all around me,” he says. “...My dad’s parents toured the gospel circuit here in the Southeast…I grew up in church singing with them. I was in the choir from a young age. That just translated into what I do now.”

Despite his deep musical background and ability as a songwriter, Lance had one major obstacle to overcome in order to find success as a performer. “I had a horrible stage fright issue, as far as singing my stuff out in public. It took me quite a few years to get over it.” find out more, visit www.ralphnix.com

By his late twenties, he started playing “out and about,” prompted in part by personal struggles that he needed to process by sharing songs.

“It was just therapy,” he says.

He released his debut, Sins I Have Sown, as Ralph Nix and the Catfish Gospel in 2015. The album turned out to be a summation at the end of the band’s seven or eight-year career. (Lance adopted “Ralph Nix” as a stage name in honor of his great grandfather, whom he credits with setting his moral compass to true north as a young boy.) Today, Lance has a newly released album with a new group of musical collaborators. Good Ingredients , by Ralph Nix and the Guilt Birds, dropped in January 2023.

The new release features songs Lance had written previously along with a few penned specifically for the album. After a sojourn in Seattle for work, a return to Mississippi and reconnection with lifelong musical friends, the record was born when “We came up with the idea to put an album together and went and locked ourselves in the studio for a week or two,” Lance says.

For the latest endeavor, they went to the Studio in the Country, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, notable since the early 1970s as the site of some iconic recordings by iconic artists such as the Neville Brothers, Stevie Wonder and Kansas.

Shayne Cook, hailing originally from Brisbane and currently based in Melbourne, Australia, is a singersongwriter whose musical influences encompass Nick Cave, Ainslie Wills, Bon Iver, City and Colour, Thom York, Emma Louise and more.

Shayne refers to himself as a “late-bloomer” in the realm of music, having gotten started in earnest as a teenager. “Although, my mother told me that the age of three I was spouting off that I wanted to be a ‘songer’—what I called a singer, I suppose—but it wasn’t until 15 that I picked up a guitar.” Shayne continues, “But I was one of those kids that sort of came home from school and played for six to eight hours…”

It would be another 10 or so years before Shayne would try singing, and another five until he caught the songwriting bug. He calls it a “slow, blossoming process” where he first discovered guitar, then, through playing with others, was introduced to singing, then from there naturally moving into writing

“I don’t usually sit down and decide I’m going to write a song about this—a particular subject…” says Shane about his process. “It kind of comes out of the ether and then sometimes I attach a meaning to it…sometimes the words or the take of the song kind of just leads towards a meaning…” He adds, “I’m a big believer that everyone sort of makes up their own meaning from art anyway.”

With his 2020 debut record, Epiphonetics, Cook came out swinging with an impressive collection of nine songs that revealed a raw and open songwriter with a direct approach, featuring vocals that were fresh yet familiar, delivered with heart and honesty. “Until that point, I’d just been chipping away at my own music,” Shayne recalls. The time had finally come to reveal his own songwriting voice, after years of lending his talents to others’ projects.

His follow-up to the album is a track co-written with Richard Grewer, the Top 25 UK iTunes chart single, “Miles Away,” which was released in February 2023. Look for more of Shayne’s collaborations to the near future.

To find out more, visit www.shaynecook.com

When Arkansas singer/songwriters Justin Patterson and Laura Lynn Danley formed the folk/Americana duo,Ten Penny Gypsy, in 2016, both were already established solo artists who had worked together since 2009 but not technically as a duet. The decision to officially unite set them on a new and exciting trajectory. They have since released two critically acclaimed fulllength albums, won five Best Video awards at independent film festivals, and been nominated for seven Arkansas Country Music Awards.

“We met at a songwriter festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas,” says Justin. “We both had our own separate solo things going on and didn’t know each other. All sorts of things happened at this festival and we ended up basically behind the same microphone singing harmony for another friend together, and it just kind of clicked from there. We started writing and performing together not long after that.”

When asked about their solo vs duet work, they speak of a melding of influences that they both see in a “whole is greater than the parts” fashion. Laura says, of Justin, “This isn’t my quote but they say if Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor had a love child that would be Justin Patterson. And then you throw in my Karen Carpenter and Joni Mitchell, as well as maybe my gospel beginnings, and…it organically became this Americana sound.”

The pair’s second album, Fugitive Heart (2020), which also features the talents of award-winning guitarist Buddy Case, is an eclectic, upbeat combination of Americana and country/blues sounds. Dropping in the midst of the pandemic, the album’s themes of uncertainty and separation resonated deeply with listeners. It ended up generating a #1 song on the iTunes Country Sales chart in South Africa (“Your True You”), and awardwinning, short form music videos for the singles

Ten Penny Gypsy’s most recent release, the single “River N’ Me,” is an “outtake” from the last album, cowritten with Buddy Case. Although it didn’t quite fit sound-wise with the record, after performing it live, the song has become a fan favorite.

To find out more, visit www.tenpennygypsy.com

“I guess if I didn’t know, I would have found out the hard way,” he laughed. “I just had a love of music, and at that time I didn’t realize the ups and downs of the music business. I just wanted to play. All through school I played every chance I got. I put a little band together when I was about 15. We played at all the late night, after hours, joints in West Texas. And I’ve been whittling away at it ever since.”

Joe says he’s tried to keep life and music interesting throughout his career. “It’s been really fun and interesting, I’d say, because of all the people I’ve met, and projects that I’ve worked on …” “ … Meeting people from other worlds, other musicians and songwriters, that is what has been very interesting to me, because, you see, you know people’s situations, and how they match their lifestyle and habits, spills over into influence in their songs, and how songs are woven into the fabric of just living. For me, just meeting people and traveling down the road, and how music guides people’s lives in a lot of ways. The stories that I’ve gathered over the years has been a real interesting part of the traveling; and I’ve been traveling most of my life.”

I asked Joe about songwriting; did it become part of his life from the beginning? “No, it didn’t come right away,” he said. “I guess I was about 17. Actually, getting thrown in jail might have had something to do with it,” he quipped. “That was a big influence on my life, because, for one thing, it showed me not to go there again.”

“It’s been very interesting to see where it all came from,” he said. “Just when you called, I was working on a set of about 35 mostly complete songs that have never been released. I’ve been going through all my old archives and finding stuff that I completely forgot about. Basically, complete songs that I didn’t remember doing.”

Joe’s had a studio handy since he was in his early 20s. “Just a real simple one, in my house, he recalled. “But it was a good way to put songs down in a kind of a sketch form, and then later come back to them. And in this case, the songs that I found the other day were recorded well over 30 years ago.”

Joe’s latest recording is called, Flatland Lullaby . They are a set of songs I recorded for my daughter when she was about five years old,” Joe said. “I would always sing her songs when she was going to sleep, and in other situations. I feel really lucky to have had a tape machine all this time,” he said.

“I first started putting things down when my Daddy worked for a moving van company. Someone gave him a record carving machine (something that actually cut vinyl). I started working on things then. So I’m glad that I’ve had access to these different ways of putting stuff down on tape and being unable to catalog my music for all these years.”

Joe has even authored a few books in his career. “Yeah, I have two books,” he said; “A novel and a book of poems that the University of Texas press has released. What inspired the novel? “I’ve kept a journal all my life and just jotted down little pieces and things that happened; not thinking it would ever be published or printed or anything, but I’m really glad that it did. Because there’s a whole heap of stuff that I didn’t remember until I started putting down the pieces for the editors. I think you should write a little bit every day just to keep your chops.”

Fans of Joe Ely will want to be on the look out for the re-release of his first three solo LPs 40 years after their first release, remastered from the original tapes, and available across all digital platforms, as well as limited vinyl reissue.

Joe Ely, Honky Tonk Masquerade, and Down On the Drag , are all available now.

ARTICLES BY DAN WALSH

Although he only picked up the guitar during college, Eric Hagen has had music pulsing through his veins since earliest childhood: “I like to say my first words were ‘ma,’ ‘ba,’ and ‘Hey Jude,’ says the artist, citing the influence of his father’s record collection.

It took a bad case of covid to propel Eric into fullon songwriting. “I got covid in 2020 and got really sick. I was waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of lyrics and song ideas, and I’d try to wake up and type them in my phone,” he remembers. “A friend of mine had covid around the same time, and we kind of got together at the beginning of 2021, and I recorded an EP, and then we decided we should put a band together and travel around.” A tour throughout the midwest and over to Nashville ensued.

Despite the long hours of preparation, the schlepping of gear, the cheap accommodations and so much more that goes into indie touring (and is rarely revealed in social media), Eric says the performance is what keeps musicians like himself committed. “There’s something about that hour or two hours, whatever you’re playing,” he says. “...you don’t think about anything else…There’s something about that experience that makes people keep doing it.”

Eric’s Americana style is firmly rooted in rock, country and blues, which he feels best suits his voice. “I’ve always tried to sing pretty, but I just don’t,” he laughs. “I’ve tried different styles throughout the years and this one just seems to be the most comfortable.”

For his upcoming release, Revival (due out in April 2023), he made a conscious effort to move from more personal songs to telling stories about others. “When I was on the road in 2021 I started jotting down places and people I met, and things I experienced and saw and I tried to write about things other than myself…But when you listen back to it all, your think, ‘that was kinda about me too…”

To find out more, visit www.erichagenmusic.com

Lovers of Celtic music know that some of the best expressions of the style come indirectly across the pond, via the musically vibrant filter of Atlantic coastal Canada, specifically the province of Nova Scotia.

Accordionist, guitarist, and player of multiple pocketsized instruments, Mary Beth Carty possesses a magical voice that earned her a nomination for Traditional Singer of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2009.

A natural singer and musician, of her musical beginnings, Mary Beth says, “My mother loves to sing, so I think even while I was in the womb I was really bathed in music, because my mother is literally always singing.” As a child, Mary Beth enjoyed singing for whatever audience arose: “I kind of liked to ham it up, and sing when we had visitors over.”

As a teen she taught herself guitar, mandolin and bass. At around age 19, she picked up the accordion, which is her now main instrument, when she’d not playing guitar.

Her second solo album, Crossing the Causeway, features traditional songs and instrumental tunes, along with three original songs. The combination reflects the diverse yet unified roots of her region. The album could be categorized as Canadian Celtic, folk, and world music. It takes listeners on a multicultural journey seeking to connect the cultural traditions of eastern Nova Scotia that inspired it, and features songs in English, Gaelic and French, along with tributes to Mi’kmaq culture and Black Loyalist traditions.

Carty’s first solo album, Les biens-nommés, was nominated at the 2018 East Coast Music Awards in the Roots and Traditional category, and led to invitations to perform across Canada, on cruise ships, and around the world (Rwanda, Austria, Italy, and more). Her previous duet band, Bette & Wallet, released two albums, toured France on five occasions, and played the Canadian folk festival circuit.

To find out more, visit www.marybethcarty.com

Based in Stallings, North Carolina, Province of Thieves is an all-acoustic modern folk outfit that has been making music since 2012. They have made an impact with their powerful harmonies, reminiscent of the Eagles and Crosby, Stills & Nash. With a dash of humor and cleverly constructed original tunes, the band has gained a wide following and won a number of awards, including the 2018 Carolina Music Award for folk/bluegrass. Underlying their music is a drive to keep expanding their sound by regularly blending old and new elements to keep the songs fresh yet familiar.

Founding member Greg Moore (vocals, mandolin, guitar) explains the complicated origin of the band. He had tapped fellow parishioner Brad Davidson (vocals, guitar, ukulele, harmonica) for a worship band he was leading. Meanwhile Brad’s daughter, Amanda, attended a dance class taught by Greg’s wife at the church. When Amanda was graduating high school and thus the dance class, she wanted her dad to perform a song for her final recital solo. Greg continues the story: “Brad said, ‘Well, I’ll do you one better. I’m gonna write a song…’ And he tapped me and said, ‘Hey Greg, will you join me on this?’ That summer (2012) we spent a lot of time in my garage, putting sets together, and Province of Thieves was born as a duet,” Greg says.

By their second album, they had expanded to a five-piece band and added a third voice (Steve Allen, vocals, banjo) to create some rich harmonies. Fast forward to today, and the band just released its fourth album, Whitecaps In The Cornfield, in January 2023. It features the band’s songwriting and studio work across the pandemic era. Tracks like “Life Stuck In Pause,” “Walking With The Devil” and “In Between” give voice to the personal frustrations and social disruptions of that time.

“The goal is to play in front of the right audiences,” Greg says, when asked about the band’s plans going forward.

To find out more, visit www.provinceofthieves.com