Songs from my oldest memories:Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

When my parents’ friends came to visit for the weekend in 1982, an album eventually emerged from the record collection. The record player moved to the concrete patio, where my Dad and his friend Dave acted out songs from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

We kids played while the men acted out the actions of Big Iron and sang along to other tracks. We hopped from action figures to plastic pools to swing-sets in the long days of August 1982, but attention didn’t drift far from the record player and two men who knew it so well. Marty Robbins would not survive 1982; he died following heart surgery that December.

Thirty-four years after his death and nearly 60 years after its release, the album’s strength has not diminished. Robbins pulled off a western record so perfect that no one could come close today. El Paso easily ranks among the greatest songs ever named after a city, even if the city is just the setting for the unnamed narrator and his love of Felina.

Nothing in 21st century El Paso ties to Robbins’ song, although the border and frontier spirit still lives in the city. Spend anytime in this city and it’s impossible to avoid that song running through your brain.

The album starts with Big Iron and never really lets up. Dave and Dad jumped into their reenactment on that track, fake pistols whipping into action, the Ohio summer a poor substitute for the town of Agua Fria. To youthful eyes, they impressed nonetheless.

 Even in years (and decades) when I strayed as far as possible from the record, its songs reappeared. For years a punk cover by Social Distortion’s Mike Ness was in my regular rotation. Johnny Cash’s latter-day revival produced a spy acoustic take on the Big Iron.

The album pops back into popular consciousness frequently. Breaking Bad named its final episode for the women in Robbins’ El Paso (Felina, an anagram for finale) and the song figured into the episode. One could imagine Walter White singing along to the Marty Robbins' greatest hits album  the whole trip back to Albuquerque (it was in a tape deck of a car he stole).

The song takes new form as the outlaw Heisenberg returns to the Southwest to face his enemies. How do we know he listened to it the whole way? He hums the song while assembling his surprise weapon for assaulting the white supremacist compound.

The day after the last episode aired, I found myself in a record store, shocked that a pristine used copy of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs cost $4. Outside of The Red-Headed Stranger or American Recordings, it remains among the most inscrutable county & western records I own (emphasis on the western). It’s a sparse record, the likely source of my love for country music built on as few instruments as possible.

As for my own reenactments, I couldn’t come close to Dad and Dave on the porch. So I settle for spinning the record whenever I want to evoke the fictional West Texas nurtured since my earliest years.