Memories from the Homestead: Marty Robbins at 100
- John Fullerton
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
It's without question that Marty Robbins saved Western music. At a time in the late 1950s when rock and roll, Elvis and other pop artists were dominating radio airplay, Marty saw huge success by introducing his own compositions, and introducing to a new generation of listeners many of the 1930s and 1940s’ era Western standards.
It just so happens that today would have been Marty's 100th birthday, born on September 26, 1925.
Martin David Robinson and his twin sister Mamie Ellen Robinson were born in a two-room house north of Glendale, Arizona. Their parents Jack and Emma (Heckle) Robinson divorced when the children were twelve. Young Martin spent much of his time attending Gene Autry movies and hanging around cowboys. He and his brother later ran their own horse operation as they would catch wild horses in the Arizona mountains and broke them to ride and sell.
Another huge influence in Martin's life was his maternal grandfather, Texas Bob Heckle, a former frontier scout, who was also remembered as a great source of cowboy music and stories. Texas Bob was also the inspiration for Marty's Western ballad "Big Iron" in 1959, as he had been a Texas Ranger.
Martin joined the U.S. Navy at age seventeen in 1942. It was while he was stationed in the Solomon Islands that he learned to play guitar. Discharged in 1945 and returning to the Phoenix area, he turned to a career in music.
Starting his own group, the K Bar Boys at radio station KTYL in Mesa, he would take part in several broadcasts daily, and a year later he joined KPHO in Phoenix. It was there that he took on the stage name of Marty Robbins.
Marty married Marizona Baldwin in 1948 and they would have two children, Ronnie and Janet.
Little Jimmie Dickens saw Marty singing in a Phoenix nightclub in 1951, and he was soon signed to Columbia Records. On January 19, 1953 he became a member of the Grand Ole Opry, which forced him to move to Nashville.
Marty's first number one hit at Columbia was the 1955 recording of "Singing the Blues." It was while driving through El Paso, Texas, to a family Christmas gathering in Phoenix that he got the idea for a song. Marty felt El Paso was the typical Western town. A year later in 1956 he made the same trip and once again gave some serious thought to writing a song about El Paso. It was his third consecutive Phoenix Christmas trip in 1957 when the song took a greater form, with the words flowing faster than he could write them down. He felt it was like watching a favorite Western movie.
Ten hours later in Phoenix, Marty had the song completed. Unknown to him at the time, Rosa's Cantina had really existed in the early 1900s in El Paso.
In 1958, Marty recorded "El Paso" at Columbia's New York studio, and the record executives turned it down as they felt it was too long at four and a half minutes. Radio stations wouldn't touch it due to its length.
A year later, on April 7, 1959, Marty recorded "El Paso" again, this time at the studio's Nashville location. It was selected to be the lead song on his new "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs” LP. Released on September 1, 1959, "El Paso" quickly climbed to number one and remained there until December 29, a total of 120 days. A year later Marty won a Grammy as it sold over one million copies.
Eight years later, Marty wrote the sequel, "Feleena (From El Paso)" which lasted over eight minutes. In 1976, the trilogy was complete with the release of "El Paso City."
Marty had planned to write and record two more songs in the El Paso series but they never came to be.
The success of "El Paso" along with "Big Iron" and others from the "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs" album caused Columbia to think about the direction for Marty's future recordings. It was decided he would do mostly Western and cowboy classics plus original material that celebrated the Great American West. Over 100 songs in the Western genre would be recorded by Marty through 1982. His other recorded material contained Country, Pop and Gospel.
With such a love for Western movies, Marty starred in several films from 1957 through 1982. One of his best is the 1973 release "Guns of a Stranger."
Marty was a true Sons of the Pioneers fan and knew many of the members over the years. He was close friends with Bob Nolan and Lloyd Perryman. Bob was the inspiration for Marty's composition "Red Hills of Utah," when Bob was simply giving him some song writing advice, telling Marty to go off into the red hills of Utah and not come back until he had a quality song completed. Marty did just that!
Marty had a deep love for racing when not performing. He was involved in three high speed crashes in race car competition, had two heart attacks in later years, and was one of the early patients to have a triple-bypass heart operation in 1969. Since this was such a new procedure, doctors believed that the recovery time in the hospital would be at least three weeks. Marty went home nine days after the surgery. Part of this rapid recovery was because he requested that his record player plus all of his Sons of the Pioneers albums be brought to his hospital room while recovering. Apparently, the nurses and doctors had about all they could handle of that, so they sent him home!
On October 11, 1982, Marty was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Less than two months later, he underwent a quadruple-bypass heart operation and died of cardiac arrest six days later on December 8, 1982, at the young age of 57. The world mourned his passing. Marty was laid to rest in Nashville at the Woodlawn Memorial Park.
Several years ago while in Nashville with the Sons of the Pioneers, Luanna and I went to the Woodlawn property, a beautiful cemetery with many of Country music's greats and paid our respects to Marty, along with many others, from George Jones to Jerry Reed.
Luanna's mother Patsy had a crush on Marty for years, owning many of his albums. Patsy had the great opportunity to see Marty in concert in Amarillo, Texas, in 1982, one of his last performances. Besides Elvis Presley, Marty is definitely Luanna's other favorite vocalist!
It's quite safe to say that Marty will always be remembered as one of the great Western singers, the true "last Singing Cowboy" of Western music's golden era. His music has influenced many and continues to do so today.
In 2017, I released a CD collection of Marty's Western material, including the "El Paso" trilogy. It's a fan favorite and can be ordered by sending me an email to:
Happy 100th birthday, Marty Robbins!