The Story Behind The Song: ”El Paso”

(written by Marty Robbins) 

Marty Robbins (#1 country, 1959; #1 pop, 1960)

 

Marty Robbins observed many times that if he had just been born a little earlier, he would have spent his life as a cowboy. He loved horses and guns, camping out and driving cattle. He was an outdoorsman who loved to challenge himself and nature. Yet, by and large, the Arizona native had not revealed his love for the open range during his first seven years on the national music scene. Marty’s hits and his songwriting reflected more modern concerns, an example being his 1957 chart-topper “A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation).” It was only when he sang the theme to a 1959 Gary Cooper movie “The Hanging Tree” that he first delved into a western sound.

 

Later that same year, as a result of riding down the road listening to the car radio, Robbins began to consider writing lyrics and music to a western story. His inspiration had come from Johnny Horton’s runaway smash “The Battle of New Orleans.” This Jimmy Driftwood-penned composition seemed to prove to Marty that the public had a craving for finely-crafted historical odes. If this formula could work for a song about a war that few people even remembered studying in history class, then maybe it could be used to tell a tale of the Old West. After all, most people knew a lot more about Billy the Kid’s escapades than Andrew Jackson’s military service.

 

In a sense, Marty’s timing couldn’t have been better. More westerns were a part of network prime-time than at any period in television history. “Gunsmoke” was the nation’s favorite program, with a dozen other horse operas galloping not far behind. Even the kids tuned into cowboy shows each day after school, as well as on Saturday morning. Willie Nelson would later write that “his heroes had always been cowboys,” and this generation of baby boomers was echoing his thoughts each day by the toys they bought, the shows they watched and the games they played. The kids of the late fifties were completely caught up in Annie Oakley, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and many other cowboy stars. To Marty Robbins, it seemed only logical that every generation would love a song about the Old West.

 

Robbins had driven through El Paso, Texas several times during his tours. He often stopped in the community, getting to know its people and its history. While visiting, Marty had fallen in love with the mix of American and Mexican cultures which gave the area such a unique atmosphere. So it was not surprising that, as he began to write his western answer to “The Battle of New Orleans,” he placed the Texas border city and its musical sound at the center of his tale. For the story line inspiration, Robbins reached back to his youth. His grandfather had been a cowboy. He had lived the life of a rover and cowpuncher. As a child, Marty had heard the stories of range wars and cantina fights firsthand. Sorting through his memories, the songwriter began to work out a tale of a cowboy, a beautiful Mexican maiden, and a mean gunslinger. By the time he finished, Robbins had composed a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. As he was soon to find out, he had also written a song that few people wanted to touch.

 

In both country and pop music, there had long been an unwritten law which said: “No record company will release a single that is any longer than three minutes.” Record label executives and producers had always felt that a long song simply would not gather an audience. They were convinced that the public wouldn’t sit still and listen to anything that ran over the three-minute limit. Furthermore, if a release had too many lyrics, the audience couldn’t and wouldn’t care to follow the story line. The rule for both ballad and up-tempo releases was to keep it short, keep it uncomplicated, and make it repetitious enough that the tune and words could be learned in a matter of a few quick plays. Marty’s latest composition broke all the established rules. The singer probably wouldn’t have fought to have the song recorded and released at all if Johnny Horton hadn’t done so well with “The Battle of New Orleans.” That song, complete with banjo (courtesy of noted “A-Team” member Harold Bradley, who normally played guitar on sessions), was tearing up the country and pop charts (eventually landing at #1 on both). Fans of every age were buying it. Using the success that Horton had garnered as his springboard, Robbins finally convinced his label, Columbia, to give “El Paso” a try (Horton’s record had also been issued on Columbia). With this hurdle cleared, Robbins was faced with an even larger stumbling block.

Marty’s cut sounded like nothing he had ever recorded before. Recorded April 7, 1959 at Nashville’s “Quonset Hut” (which Columbia leased from studio owner Owen Bradley for their sessions until the company purchased it outright in 1961), “El Paso” was accompanied by very simple Spanish-flavored guitar instrumentation (provided by another famed “A-Teamer,” Grady Martin) with backup harmonies by Tompall and the Glaser Brothers. The song defiantly flew in the face of two things which were driving country music hits at the time: rockabilly and shuffle-beat honky-tonk music. Besides that, “El Paso” was four minutes and thirty-eight seconds in length. To many disc jockeys, this was an eternity. It was simply too long to program. And lastly, the story was depressing (the cowboy dies at the end). Robbins argued that his live crowds loved it, and that the story line was tragic, but not depressing. He believed that audiences would strongly identify with the cowboy and his undying love for his sweetheart. Marty pleaded with country radio programmers to just give it a chance. He believed that if they aired the song, it would draw in new listeners to country stations.

Columbia shipped “El Paso” in the fall of 1959. It reached stations just as “The Battle of New Orleans” was losing its grip on the #1 positions of both Billboard’s pop and country charts. In country, the Johnny Horton single was being replaced at the top by another historical ode called “Waterloo” by Stonewall Jackson. Robbins again felt this worked to his advantage. If Jackson could score with a song that traded off a European war, then Marty knew that the market was ripe for his cowboy ballad.

 

Just after Christmas, “El Paso,” the song which Marty Robbins had been told would never find a home on radio, reached the top of Billboard’s country singles chart. It would hold the summit for seven weeks, well into the first couple of months of 1960. Even more remarkably, the record was also soaring up Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart. It soon made the #1 position on that playlist as well (as “The Battle of New Orleans” had done), and proved to be one of only four records to top both the Billboard country and pop charts during the 1960s (the others were Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” in 1961 and Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” and Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” both in 1968).

Back in the studio, Robbins recorded another cowboy ballad, “Big Iron.” It too would enter the top ten later in the year, but the new single couldn’t match “El Paso’s” numbers. Over the course of his long and remarkable career, Marty would have three records which would have more successful rides on the country chart than this western classic, but none would be so identified with the singer as “El Paso.”

 

In 1976, Robbins wrote a follow-up to his most famous hit. After viewing El Paso from the air, he scribbled the words to “El Paso City,” in which the twist was that the narrator of the new song could possibly be a reincarnated version of the cowboy who dies in the original. Reuniting with his old friend Grady Martin, who had played guitar so memorably on the 1959 record, Marty recorded “El Paso City,” and on June 19, 1976 notched his first number one hit in six years. He had re-joined the Columbia label after a five-year absence and upon his return, found himself working for the first time with legendary producer Billy Sherrill, who had helmed dozens of the classic hits of George Jones, Charlie Rich, Tammy Wynette, David Houston, Tanya Tucker, Johnny Paycheck and many others. For “El Paso City,” Sherrill brought in a special horn section, which gave the production more “depth.

 

The original 1959 release of “El Paso” has grown into more than a song. It is now a part of history. Like Bob Nolan’s western classic “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” Marty Robbins’ ballad has come to represent the West itself. The fact that the song’s events were fictitious is no more important than the fact that the tumbleweed was a Russian thistle that didn’t even arrive in the American West until the final decade of the nineteenth century. Robbins’ epic captured the romance of the range like no other song ever had or probably ever will. With its unique story line, “El Paso” conjured up images of how people wanted their West to be, and continued the solid connection that has always existed between cowboys and country music.