Marty Robbins
photo: amd inc.-management · public domain ↗Martin David Robinson grew up in Glendale, Arizona, raised on his grandfather's tales of the Old West and on Saturday matinees starring the singing cowboy Gene Autry, whom he idolized enough to pick cotton before school just to afford a ticket. After a stint in the Navy he became one of the Grand Ole Opry's most versatile stars, moving between honky-tonk, Hawaiian-tinged pop, and the narrative "gunfighter ballads" that produced his signature hit, "El Paso" — a chart-topping Old West murder story sung in the first person.
Robbins idolized Autry as a kid — biographers say he picked cotton before school to save up for Autry's Saturday matinees — and modeled his early repertoire on Autry's singing-cowboy persona before channeling that same heroic Old West narrative sensibility into his own gunfighter ballads.
listen forThe same plainspoken, story-first vocal delivery and frontier settings — cowboys, outlaws, showdowns — that Autry popularized on screen, without the incidental film-score orchestration.