A dog fight breaks out halfway through an interview with Joe Ely. Quite a heated canine exchange can be heard over the phone from his rural home, which is near the town of Dripping Springs, Texas, which is near Austin - city of cosmic cowboys.

"When dogs runs free," Ely explains, "every once in a while they tread on each other's territory."

Aside from being an apt metaphor for America, this would barely be worth mentioning except to note that Joe Ely has actually been in one place long enough to own four dogs, that he's content to live out his days on his "piece of land" (Texas talk for any ranch that's smaller than the province of Alberta), and that from being the Huck Finn of West Texas country-blues, his wandering days are over. Ely now wanders professionally, his travels carefully planned by booking agents. He plays Sunday night at the Jubilee Auditorium with Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt and Guy Clark - no backing band, just four guys, four guitars and a whole bunch of stories.

For a good deal of his life, Ely was a wandering minstrel, no fixed address, no dogs to tie him down. His adventures included touring Europe with Stomp, joining the circus to care for the world's smallest horse (insert your own joke about the world's smallest shovel), having a movie career thwarted in Hollywood, busking on the streets of Rome and hanging out with the Clash in London. His guitar was always with him.

His wanderings, while unplanned, did have a path of sorts. It came from books and music. Henry Miller made him want to go to Paris, Woody Guthrie made him want to explore California, and so on.

"If I hadn't read certain books or listened to certain music I would've never left home," Ely says.

Yet he doesn't miss the life of a vagabond.

"You look at things like hitchhiking across Europe as romantic, but when you're really there it's pretty miserable.

"You're sleeping under a bridge in a foreign country. A lot of times I literally lived the life of a homeless guy. I didn't have any money, I didn't have a place to live. In this day and age you would've called me homeless. At that time, I thought of it as just an incredible journey to find out where songs came from. I never thought of it as being unusual. It was just a quest I was on."

To find out where songs come from? It's interesting how some songwriters need to wander the world for inspiration while others can look at their own shoes.

"That's kind of what I found out. Tom T. Hall said to me, 'Well, some people have to go around the world to find what they're looking for and other people can look around the block and see the whole world.' "

(There's a country song in itself.)

"You don't have to go out there. Everything is inside of you anyway. So a lot of that rambling in the outer world was kind of unnecessary. I didn't really have to go there to find what I was looking for."

Ely always kept a running log of everyone he met, some of which went into his first novel - which no one but his wife has ever read - and some into his music, including one album no one but his daughter has ever heard. It was a Christmas gift when she was five years old.

"I'd been working on these songs since she was born, so I got the musicians together, recorded 10, 11 songs and stayed up all night mixing it on Christmas Eve. And that was her present," he recalls. "Someday I'll get around to releasing it, but I do things sometimes just to see if I can do them."

Ely's upcoming album, Streets of Sin - two syllables in the world "sin," y'all - can be seen as a continuation of his fascination with everyday people. Writing about monumental events is fine, he says, but "usually it's the collection of small events that makes up people's lives, the everyday things that sometimes you don't even pay any attention to, almost like dreams, which are as much a part of your life as anything else. Some of my favourite country songs have to do with everyday things."

Ely's also working on a second novel. He doesn't care if it ever gets published. He's too busy with music, for one thing. Besides, the very act of creation can be satisfying in itself, even if you don't know what you're doing - especially if you don't know what you're doing.

"I think that's what I've always liked to do - tackle things I'm not always sure how to do," Ely laughs. "It keeps me out of jail."

Yes, he's been in jail. There was this sheriff in home-town Lubbock, Texas, who used to invoke an obscure vagrancy law: anyone who couldn't produce a five-dollar bill could be thrown in the hoosegow.

Says Ely: "I was a musician and I was kind of broke; he used to throw me in all the time."

He obviously doesn't miss that either - but he's sure got some good stories. (More on Joe Ely)