Artist Spotlight - Joe Ely on Todd Snider

Joe Ely’s Number One album Driven to Drive punches (“Drivin’ Man”) and pulsates (“Odds of the Blues”) with welterweight fury. We recently spoke with the Lubbock-born songwriter about his former labelmate Todd Snider for the forthcoming East Nashville Skyline: The Songwriting Legacy of Todd Snider (TAMU Press, 2025).

“Todd and I were on MCA Records in the mid-nineties,” Ely says. “He’s a hell of a guy who likes to rock it out. I feel like I have always known him. We had the same booking agent in Nashville for a while.”

Alt-Country Specialty Radio Chart: Did you ever play live with Todd? 

Joe Ely: We played some shows together when we were on MCA Records in the mid-nineties. We played one at the art center where the old Austin City Limits was filmed on the University of Texas campus. Our band and Todd’s played together for that. I think Kris Kristofferson was the emcee. John Fogerty played.

We also did some Buddy Holly anniversary shows when they released a boxed set. Todd played a few songs for the party. We ended up playing the Ed Sullivan Theater, which had been turned into Late Night with David Letterman. We both have a big love for Buddy Holly and were glad to do those things. We also did some traveling together. I remember that we were both on the road and recorded Buddy’s “Oh Boy!”

‘Oh Boy’ was a highlight on the Not Fade Away tribute album.

Thank you. A Crickets bandmate of Buddy Holly’s was at the Letterman show. He told us a story he learned talking with one of the Crickets about playing there around 1958. He said right before they went onto play their big show on national television. The three bandmates got into a disagreement that turned into a shoving match. One of Buddy Holly’s front two teeth was broken. He was going on in fifteen minutes. Someone ran down the alley and to the drug store out on 42nd Street in New York City. He brought back a bunch of white gum that they fashioned into a tooth. They put gum all over the broken tooth and went out and sang “That’ll Be the Day.” Struck me as being really hard to sing on national television missing half a tooth.

Crazy. Any other Todd stories?

Yeah, we played in Tyler, Texas another time. I hadn’t seen a better show than Todd’s, but the evening was strange. The show was outside but it was promoted by the television and the posters for the wrong date. Todd and Jack Ingram played. This was a big show with a great big PA, and maybe seven people showed up. We were fifty miles from another town. We decided that since we came from different directions to play this show we might as well play our set.

How do you play when only seven people show?

Well, we had some old friends and girlfriends who came to the show, and we played for ourselves. Things could have gotten really nasty with people pissed off, but we said, “Hey, this is what we do. We don’t need to get all bent out of shape. Let’s all play. This is what we like to do.” Everything we did was like that.

- Brian T. Atkinson