“Like Bruce Springsteen, Texas songwriter Joe Ely crafts brawny, epic song-stories about good-hearted crooks, blue-collar heroes and enduring lovers. In fact, the primary difference between Springsteen and Ely comes down to accent’” –Chicago Tribune, November 30, 2001
We lost the late, great Joe Ely last year, not long after Bruce Springsteen inducted him in absentia into the American Music Honors honor roll.
Fortunately, we were able to enjoy one last collaboration between the two artists before Joe’s passing.
The two singer-songwriters first appeared on record together in 1995, on Ely’s landmark album Letter to Laredo. Almost twenty years later, they reunited for Joe’s slow groove, “Odds of the Blues.”
Inspiration struck Ely one evening at “an all-night after-hours joint on the edge of east Lubbock called TV’s,” he wrote in a press release. “There was always a dice game in the back room, the pool table had a bad lean, and the jukebox mainly played old blues songs.”
Ely wrote “Odds of the Blues” to capture that TV’s vibe and asked Springsteen to join him on the track. Bruce readily accepted, and his vocals are evident throughout the track.
“We’ve been long lost friends for a long time,” recalled Ely in 2024, although his memory may have been just a little bit spotty. “One of my memories of us singing together was in Dublin, Ireland when we both got on stage with Jerry Lee Lewis and Shane MacGowan and sang ‘Great Balls of Fire.’”
Joe and Jerry Lee did join Bruce on stage in Dublin one night in 1993, but there’s no record of MacGowan having been there.
Still, who can quibble? Joe Ely was one of the all-time great Texas singer-songwriters, and he’ll be missed by anyone fortunate enough to have heard him on disc or on stage.
Odds of the Blues Recorded: 2024 Released: Driven to Drive (2024)
Never performed
© July 8, 2026