Marty Robbins

He was born Martin David Robinson on September 26, 1925, near Glendale, Arizona. His grandfather “Texas Bob” Heckle told him stories of the Old West, and his musical hero was Gene Autry. He left school in his teens and served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1945, in the Pacific, where he learned to play the guitar and began writing songs.

Robbins started performing in 1947 and was soon hosting his own radio and television shows in Phoenix, among them Western Caravan on KPHO. When Little Jimmy Dickens guested on his television show in 1951, he urged his own label, Columbia, to sign Robbins, and Columbia did so that year. His first session, produced by Art Satherley at Radio Recorders in Hollywood on November 14, 1951, had Johnny Bond among the guitarists. Most of the sessions that followed, produced by Don Law, took place at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas with Johnny Gimble on fiddle, and the first of them, on June 3, 1952, produced “I’ll Go On Alone,” his first No. 1 country record. In 1952 he also signed a songwriting contract with Acuff-Rose Publications.

He joined the Grand Ole Opry on January 19, 1953, and moved to Nashville. He first recorded there at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in March 1953, and from late 1954 nearly all his country sessions were made in Nashville, at Castle and then at Bradley Studios on 16th Avenue South, with players such as Grady Martin, Ray Edenton, Chet Atkins and Bob Moore. On May 23, 1954, he and Edenton cut a vocal duet as Ray and Roy. His 1953 singles included the gospel songs “Kneel and Let the Lord Take Your Load” and “Blessed Jesus Should I Fall, Don’t Let Me Lay,” and in 1955 he began charting with rockabilly songs; that August he recorded “Maybellene.” His recording of Melvin Endsley’s “Singing the Blues,” cut on November 3, 1955, went to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in 1956 and into the pop Top Twenty.

Columbia then paired him with the arranger Ray Conniff in New York for records aimed at the teenage pop market. “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” a song of his own recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street studio on January 25, 1957, became his biggest hit, “The Story of My Life” followed from a session that July, and “The Hanging Tree” came from a Conniff session in Hollywood in October 1958. Alongside the pop records he made albums of other kinds: The Song of Robbins (1957), older country songs such as “Lovesick Blues” and “Bouquet of Roses,” and Song of the Islands, recorded in Nashville in October 1957 and released at the end of that year, the first of several albums of Hawaiian music.

On April 7, 1959, in a single eight-hour session at the Bradley Film and Recording Studio in Nashville, produced by Law, he recorded the album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, with Grady Martin and Jack Pruett on guitars, Bob Moore on bass, Louis Dunn on drums and the Glaser Brothers singing behind him. Among its songs were two of his own, “El Paso” and “Big Iron.” “El Paso,” with Martin’s Spanish guitar, came out as a single in October 1959 and went to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts, the first No. 1 of the 1960s on each. The album reached No. 6 on the pop album chart, his highest album placing, and eventually sold more than a million copies. More Western records followed, among them More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1960) and “Feleena (From El Paso),” a prequel recorded in 1966, and he wrote a Western novel, The Small Man.

Martin, Pruett and Dunn played on most of his sessions in the first half of the 1960s, and from 1962 Law shared the producing with Frank Jones. During a session on July 12, 1960, a faulty channel in the mixing board distorted Martin’s six-string bass on “Don’t Worry,” and Robbins kept the fuzzy sound on the record, which reached No. 1 country and No. 3 pop in 1961. “Devil Woman” and “Ruby Ann” came from one session in April 1962, and in 1965 he took Gordon Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness” to No. 1 on the country chart. Beginning in the 1950s he made more than a dozen films with Western or country themes, among them the racing picture Hell on Wheels (1967), and he starred in the television series The Drifter (1965) and The Marty Robbins Show (1969). In 1970 the Academy of Country Music named him its Man of the Decade.

“My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” another of his own songs, recorded in Nashville on January 2, 1970, with Bob Johnston producing, won him a second Grammy, for Best Country Song, in 1971. In 1972 he moved to Decca, soon renamed MCA, and recorded for it at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, from June 1972, producing some of the sessions himself, among them the one for “Twentieth Century Drifter,” released at the end of 1973. Back at Columbia by January 1976, he recorded “El Paso City” with Billy Sherrill producing, a new song of his own that topped the country chart and gave its name to the album El Paso City (1976). He hosted the television series Marty Robbins Spotlight in 1977 and 1978.

Stock-car racing ran alongside the music. He raced micro-midgets in the 1950s and modified stock cars at the Nashville Speedway in the 1960s, and from 1965 he took the last segment of the Opry so that he could race first. That arrangement started an Opry custom: one night in 1968, arriving from the track to find the show running late, he stayed on past his time slot, and from then on he would signal for one more song again and again, sometimes for more than an hour, cutting into Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree. He entered his first NASCAR Grand National race, the Nashville 400, in 1966 and started 35 races at that level, with six top-ten finishes, in cars built and maintained by Cotton Owens. After three wrecks in 1974 and 1975 he stopped for a time, came back in 1977, and drove his last race, the Atlanta Journal 500, on November 7, 1982. He also drove the pace car at the 1976 Indianapolis 500.

His last year brought a revival. “Some Memories Just Won’t Die,” produced by Bob Montgomery, was a Top Ten country hit in May 1982, and he played a session singer named Smoky in the film Honkytonk Man, whose title song became his last Top Ten single. In October Billboard gave him its Artist Resurgence Award, and that same month he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He died in Nashville on December 8, 1982, at the age of fifty-seven. Over his career he placed ninety-four records on the country charts, sixteen of them at No. 1. In 1983 NASCAR renamed the annual race at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway the Marty Robbins 420.

• 1961: Grammy Award, Best Country & Western Performance, “El Paso”
• 1970: Academy of Country Music, Man of the Decade
• 1971: Grammy Award, Best Country Song, “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife”
• 1975: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1982: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1998: Grammy Hall of Fame, “El Paso”
• 2017: Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs named to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry