el paso - marty robbins - cover

"El Paso" was, at some four minutes and forty-five seconds in duration, far longer than most contemporary singles. Robbins' record company was unsure if radio stations would play such a long song, and so released two versions of the song: the full-length version on one side, and an edited version on the other which was nearer to the three-minute mark. The full-length version was overwhelmingly preferred. "Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl..."

The song is a first-person narrative told by a cowboy who is in El Paso, Texas, in the days of the Wild West. He falls in love with Feleena[1], at Rose's Mexican cantina dancing. When another man makes advances on "wicked Feleena", the narrator guns down the challenger, then flees El Paso for fear of being hanged for murder or killed in revenge by his victim's friends. He hides out in the "badlands of New Mexico".

The narrator switches from the past tense to the present tense for the remainder of the song, describing the yearning that drives him to return to El Paso in the face of almost certain death: "It's been so long since I've seen the young maiden / My love is stronger than my fear of death". Upon entering the town, he is attacked and fatally wounded by a posse, but the cowboy is found by Feleena, and he dies in her arms.

Plotting the hints from Marty Robbins El Paso trilogy, one can determine approximately where to find Rosas Cantina, and at a juncture near where Texas, Chihuahua, and New Mexico converge, at the bottom of a hill, with a back door from which the narrator can run, there is an actual neighborhood bar called Rosas Cantina whose ambience lends itself to the lyrics of

Category:

Music

Tags:

• el
• paso
• marty
• robbins
• cover

[marycockburn1]

can you not sing it in the correct octive?

[DMTeaTime]

nice.

you seem to have pin pointed the chords.

would you mind sharing them?

[rhart1964]

pretty good. Just wish I could see the cords a little better. Great song!

[jeremygarobinson]

sorry but this isnt 2 good