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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels June 12, 2004 Famous friends to join Ely at Britt Joe Ely's life can pretty well be summed up from the beginning verse from the first song he recorded in 1976, "I had My Hopes Up High." "Well, I left my home out on the great High Plains / Headed for some new terrain / Standin' on the highway with my coffee cup / Wonderin' who's gonna pick me up / I had my hopes up high. . ." Asked whether the Lubbock, Texas, native and full-time Austin resident had met those hopes, Ely said he had. "My life was always kind of goin' down the road from place to place and writin' about my experiences, who I ran into and what I did," he said. "I have had a very blessed time of it. This year I realized it is my 50th year of playing music. I started playing violin when I was 7 years old. I have had a very rich life and would not change anything." Ely, Guy Clark, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett will take the stage at Britt Festival for an acoustic guitar pull Tuesday night, just four amigos from Texas meeting up onstage for a reunion with their guitars. The interesting thing is that this is the only time the four see each other. They never travel together, they arrive from different locations, drive in different rental cars and show up on stage and play. Then the four go in different directions again after the show. "It is so great to sit on that stage and hear all these great stories until it is your time to tell your story," Ely said. "That is about as close to heaven that you can get here on earth. "We have no conceived order or anything. We always play alphabetically and Guy Clark always plays before me. He will play the most drop-dead gorgeous ballad I have ever heard. So sometimes, I just want to pass because it is so good. But then I will think of something that is almost the complete opposite to play because I know I can't top it. The magic of it is watching the order of the night and watching the way the stories are told." Ely said that playing music in his hometown of Lubbock early in his career was not helping his career, so he moved on to the more mellow city of Austin. "I had to get out of Lubbock," he said. "Lubbock was getting dangerous for me. The more well-known I became in Lubbock, it became more dangerous. It is a real Wild West town and not a real civilized entertainment center. I'd be playing some honky-tonk and another honky-tonk would come up and realize I was filling their place. They would make demands that I come play their place and when I wouldn't do it, I would wake up in the morning with the whole front of my house riddled with bullet holes." Ely said he always is surprised when people want to hear his music and buy his records. "I think that is what surprises me the most - that I am still able to go out and play - because so many of the people I have crossed paths with over the years are not playing anymore," he said. "I have played with a lot of great players that just got fed up with it, I guess, or things didn't turn out the way they wanted them to. "Things never turned out the way I wanted them to but, at the same time, I have been lucky to be able to keep making records. I have more songs recorded on tape that are finished that have not been released. So I have more records that nobody has ever heard and that have never been released. I think my best work is the stuff I have never found a home for." Tickets for the Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett acoustic show are on sale now at the Britt. Tickets are priced from $24 to $59. For more information, call the Britt Festival Ticket Office at 773-6077. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams