Robbins’ ballads, writer’s life follow same trail
The first record I recall is Marty Robbins’ “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.” We lived in a trailer my family dragged to road construction sites. What drew me was the thumping strum that opened “Big Iron” and the cover itself, a luminous red, aside from Marty, coiled, hand on holster. Mornings my dad sung the songs to our cats and the dog while he assembled a sandwich for lunchpail, and, like many boys that age, I aspired to be like my dad; I still do, to tell the truth.
Winters, when the roadwork went south, we returned to country my father’s family had pioneered. I could recall nursing orphaned calves with nippled bottles, but my grandmother sold the ranch when I was in elementary school, so at best I was second cousin to that history and its music.
At 14, I attended a KISS concert. Everybody enjoyed themselves so I decided that must be what fun looked like. I drank beer and listened to Aerosmith and Styx and Foreigner (who never met a cliché they could not embrace) then, in college, all the staples that would soon be termed classic rock. I became a high school teacher and my students kept me abreast of alternative and grunge and rap and metal, and later, my own children delivered their lives’ soundtracks, as well.
But under this shifting current was always my dad, with Marty Robbins, singing to the animals. In my late 20s, I found “Gunfighter Ballads” used on CD in Dutch’s Pawn. It was about that time I began writing with some purpose, and the event was no coincidence. I had became old enough, and maybe self-aware enough, to recognize the music and I both came from a particular place with particular kinds of stories that, for better or for worse, formed much of the thread from which I was stitched. The songs told stories: good men facing down bad (“Big Iron”) or Arthurian-like expressions of love (“El Paso”), that most would dismiss as sentimental nowadays, except they were delivered from the portion of a person’s soul where irony and the maudlin had yet to be conceived.
Two of my favorites, “The Strawberry Roan” and “Utah Carol,” are public domain and part of a catalog of 40 or 50 songs about the same characters. When I inquired if my father knew this, he told me of the travelling cowhands who worked the ranch when he was young, strumming guitars and singing these same tunes. I did not ask if coyotes yelped or cattle lowed. But I am sure they did.
Marty Robbins has been dead many years, but not so long ago George Jones passed, too. In the elegiac “Whose Gonna Fill Their Shoes?” he claims, “Old Marty, Hank and Lefty, Why I can feel them right here with me rolling through the night.” My father called that very day. We mourned like George was our kin, and I’m not yet willing to concede he wasn’t.