“Folks were watching from the windows, everybody held their breath.
They knew this handsome ranger was about to meet his death.”
I, for one, don’t really care that Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who surfed. And so I can’t get too huffy about the fact that Marty Robbins tried on teen pop, honky tonk, and rockabilly styles before settling on Western music, especially because he was exceedingly good at it. He was actually pretty decent at the other stuff, too, but that’s beside the point.
On Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, Robbins adopts a cowboy persona, delivering a cheerful album full of story-songs, one original for every two covers, highlighted by his self-penned hits ‘Big Iron’ and ‘El Paso’ (the latter of which, according to this Grateful Dead fan site, was performed by the jam band 389 times over the years). I also quite enjoy ‘Billy the Kid’, ‘They’re Hanging Me Tonight’, ‘The Strawberry Roan’, ‘The Master’s Call’, ‘Running Gun’, and ‘Utah Carol’.
The kitschy cover art and the single, eight-hour recording session suggest that the entire enterprise was something of a novelty pursuit for the musician (who later became a NASCAR driver), but this strangely enhances the album’s appeal. At least for me. No, this isn’t some dyed-in-the-wool outlaw riding into town on his horse to regale us common folk with his stories of the lawless frontier, but a talented bard with a knack for conjuring up mythic visions of the Old West.
Just as one feels compelled to simply “hang out” with the characters of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo even though it feels quite stagey, so one eagerly listens to this campfire troubadour as he waxes eloquent about rangers and desperados and bronco busters and mercenaries and bounty hunters, murders and hangings and stampedes, homesickness and unrequited love, farmland and mountains and valleys.
In between the classics are a small number of low-key songs that don’t stack up, and because the music here is mostly just supporting Robbins’ singing and storytelling (although the mellifluous backing vocals from Tompall & the Glaser Brothers are a sublime touch) these songs tend to drag a little bit. Still, even if the campfire you’re gathered around is in the backlot of a luxurious showbiz studio instead of on the outskirts of a ramshackle one horse town, you can’t help but enjoy yourself as the showman whisks you along on a journey into a Roy Rogers–styled version of the American frontier.
Relatively recent soundtrack inclusions in Fallout: New Vegas (‘Big Iron’) and Breaking Bad (‘El Paso’) have given new life to this dusty old record.
Favorite Tracks: Big Iron; El Paso; Running Gun.