Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs was cut in a single eight-hour session, from 1 to 9 p.m. on 7 April 1959, at the Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville. Don Law produced. Marty Robbins sang and played guitar, with Grady Martin and Jack Pruett on guitar, Bob Moore on bass, Louis Dunn on drums, and the Glaser Brothers singing the chorus parts. Columbia issued it as CL 1349 in September 1959, Robbins’s fifth studio album, and it peaked at number six on the pop albums chart.
The album is built around “El Paso,” which Robbins wrote. Released as a single in October 1959, it reached number one on both the country chart and the Billboard Hot 100, holding the top of the Hot 100 for two weeks in January 1960, and it won the Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording in 1961. Robbins also wrote “Big Iron” and “The Master’s Call.” The Western Writers of America later named those two and “El Paso,” along with the album’s “Cool Water,” “Billy the Kid” and “The Strawberry Roan,” among their Top 100 Western songs. The rest of the program is a mix of Robbins’s own songs and older cowboy numbers such as “Utah Carol” and “Little Green Valley.”
The RIAA certified the album gold in 1965 and platinum in 1986, and in 2017 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry. AllMusic’s review calls it “the single most influential album of Western songs in post-World War II American music.” “Big Iron” found a new audience in the 2010s after it was played on the in-game radio of the video game Fallout: New Vegas.
Tracklist
- 1 Big Iron alt version 3:55
- 2 A Hundred And Sixty Acres 1:40
- 3 They're Hanging Me Tonight 3:05
- 4 Cool Water 3:09
- 5 Billy The Kid 2:19
- 6 Utah Carol 3:13
- 7 The Strawberry Roan 3:24
- 8 The Master's Call 3:05
- 9 Running Gun 2:10
- 10 El Paso 4:19
- 11 In The Valley 1:48
- 12 The Little Green Valley 2:26
- 13 The Hanging Tree 2:50
- 14 Saddle Tramp 2:03
- 15 El Paso 4:38
