Out in the west Texas town of El Paso

Of all the songs I’ve explored so far in this blog, none has proven quite as elusive as “El Paso” to find the proverbial handles to grab on to it and open up what I find to be most interesting. There are plenty of other resources out there taking a look at the song, and giving some of its history.  My intent is not so much to reprise what they’ve done in providing some of the background of the song, but to do my best to relate “El Paso” to the conversation we’ve had going on here since the start of the year.

Part of my challenge in finding those “handles” is that I had no long association with “El Paso” as a song.  I was most familiar with the song as performed as a cover.  I had really only connected with the poetry of the opening lines, and hadn’t connected much, frankly, with the rest of the story.  In diving into the Marty Robbins original, there were lots of tempting paths to go down, but none of them seemed to take me where I wanted to go–most especially to the point of real emotional resonance in the song. 

Here’s the classic Western ballad “El Paso” as performed by Robbins. 

“El Paso” by Marty Robbins (Spotify) (Lyrics)

Go west, young man

Another part of the challenge in getting a grip on “El Paso” is that it is much more a Western and a love song than it is a murder ballad. We know from other discussions that some of the Appalachian or Piedmont-based murder ballads were often referred to by their singers as “love songs.” The tie between love and death is very close in much of the material we’ve discussed, but here with “El Paso” some of the dynamics are a little different. 

In a way, as with “William Taylor,” which was a Female Warrior ballad, where the murder narrative takes a backseat to the success narrative, “El Paso” gives us a song where the murder (in this case of the rival for Felina’s affections) takes a backseat to the protagonist’s utter fixation on Felina.  In the context of the song, the killing of the rival is a distant second, at best, in emotional importance to the desire (or death wish) that ultimately draws our hero forward to his doom at the end of the song.

It’s probably helpful to think of the song in cinematic categories. “El Paso” is a Western if there ever was one, and involves the Western’s rather starkly drawn moral universe (where the threats and challenges are ones that remind you of schoolyard bullies and neighborhood fights) and its rather clear and uncomplicated sense of justice. “El Paso’s” end is set from almost from the beginning, and is certainly set once our protagonist kills the rival for Felina’s affections. Can you really imagine it ending any other way? 

As a love song and a Western, “El Paso” is highly stylized, and it’s probably fair to say that one of the reasons that I had trouble digging into it at first was that it was a love song I didn’t “buy,” at least at first.  It made sense in its own, Western world, but didn’t connect so immediately with mine.

I fell in love with a Mexican girl

I sometimes think that we could re-brand this blog as “Musical Adventures in Gender Theory.”  (Not exactly an attention-grabber, I guess. Not very pithy.)  So many songs we’ve discussed have led us to questions such as: Who sings which songs and why? With which characters do singers and listeners empathize? What does the violence in this ballad say about our understandings of gender and human agency, then and now? 

 Most commonly, although sometimes unspoken, we have the question of whether the entire murder ballad tradition is misogynistic to begin with–a musical expression of an underlying gender dynamic that doesn’t always tell us nice things about ourselves, and where the body count falls disproportionately to one side.  With “El Paso” and the somewhat exotically-depicted Felina, we have a number of complicated things transpiring on this front. (Read here for more about this.)

In conversation with Rorey Carroll earlier this year, we talked about the conundrum of how the logic of murder ballads usually entails something along the lines of “I love you so much, I have to kill you.” This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Somehow, there can seem to be a bit of a disconnect between the emotional logic of the song and whatever logic exists in the mechanics in the real world.   Sometimes these logics bear a family resemblance of greater or lesser closeness.   Ultimately, though, themes of love and death are the ones we find most compelling because they take us closest to what we find to be most meaningful. Whether or not songs actually get either love or death emotionally right relative to our experience of them, they at least provide us with metaphors with which to explore them. Perhaps a bit of caricature is helpful.  Perhaps it is essential.  

My love is stronger than my fear of death

In trying to find the core emotional resonance of this song, I was reminded of a Facebook exchange I had with a friend of mine about Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” and some of its sequels.  I remembered that my friend, Maureen, said that the song was a family favorite.  In preparing this post, I went back and asked her about it.  This is her reply, which I’m including here with her permission.

“Growing up, my father was a Chicago cop and not home very often – and when he was home he was often pretty grumpy. Music and football were the things that made (make!) him happiest. As all children do, I idolized my father, and I think from a very early age I was aware of how dangerous his job was, that he carried a gun, and that guns could kill. “El Paso” is definitely one of his favorite songs, and my family always used to sing it together. Looking back, I think I loved it so much because it romanticized – and somehow made sense of – the danger I sensed that my dad was in. He had to risk his life daily for what? Answer: for the things he loved.”

We’ve talked a bit before about the role that songs of violence and death play in the emotional lives of children, and we talked above about how a stylized or romanticized approach can have its advantages in connecting us with a song.  I think Maureen just captured a lot of that in one short paragraph.  Whether or not we have ourselves faced danger or had loved ones whose jobs involved facing danger daily, we can understand that.  In “El Paso,” we again can find that place that we often find in murder ballads, where meaning or emotional truth come from within the story, despite its grimness or apparent distance from our day-to-day lives.  And, importantly, we hear in the hero’s statement “my love is stronger than my fear of death,” the truth implicit in murder ballads, that what makes them important and meaningful is not what they say about death, but what they say about life and how we live it.

Next up

Later this week, we’ll put “El Paso” in the context of Robbins’s other Western murder ballads, including some direct sequels.  Importantly, we’ll find out what becomes of Felina.  We’ll go to the movies with “El Paso,” and we’ll give a listen to some of the artists that have covered the song in the years since Robbins made it a hit.