Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

I’ve long been a fan of Marty Robbins’s hit story-song “El Paso” whenever it comes up on oldies radio, but I did not know there was a whole album of such fare. Then I ran across this strange gem in that fat tome The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time, where it is part of the relatively skimpy offering for the 1950s. Mojo calls it “the first successful C&W concept album.” It’s 12 songs (or more now, depending on the edition), all of them virtual narratives about shooting big guns, roping wild horses, getting hanged in the town square, so on so forth, all recorded in one night. Robbins wrote a third of them, two are traditional (“Billy the Kid” and “Utah Carol”), and a motley of songwriters provide the rest. There’s nothing that feels particularly authentic about any of these songs—they are a kind of Brill Building project, overproduced and shining with studio gloss—but they are peculiarly listenable and even affecting, if “El Paso” has ever reached you. I tend to like the hanging and/or jail songs best (“They’re Hanging Me Tonight,” “The Hanging Tree,” the latter from a 1999 reissue) but they’re all pretty good if you’re in the mood. “Big Iron” and a cover of “Cool Water,” which open the original album, are reasonably effective for putting you in the mood. It occurred to me recently, getting to know it, that Gunfighter Ballads came out the same year as the movie Rio Bravo. It was perhaps a moment, in 1959, when movies and TV and pop music were colliding at will and why not get the western genre into it as well? Therefore, clap Marty Robbins—whose biggest hit to that point was “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation”)—into a Lash LaRue outfit for the album cover, wearing a funny flattop cowboy hat and a big iron on his hip, and meanwhile stick Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin into your shoot-‘em-up. The results, by acclamation, are one of the greatest albums ever made and one of the greatest movies ever made. Robbins sings tunefully, like a deep-throated songbird with a tender warble in his voice, while Nelson, as the Colorado kid, lets his trembling chin provide the visual counterpart. A handful of songs in the vein would follow in the ‘60s, such as “Big Bad John” (1961, by Jimmy Dean, not that Jimmy Dean) and “Ringo” (1964, by Lorne Green, then star of the TV western Bonanza), not to mention more authentic business from Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Tammy Wynette, etc. Truth be told, Robbins is much closer to the Lorne Green end of that spectrum (and Ricky Nelson if we must, but there’s more musically to Nelson or his taste). But “El Paso,” as always, is the benchmark here. If you can get into that one, you can get into this whole album. But you may want to take it slow as these songs can produce unruly sugar highs taken in such massive doses as a whole album.