Laurette Luez

[This is the second post on the song “El Paso.”  Read the first one here.]

Crossing Borders

In his essay on “El Paso” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad,” music critic and political scientist James Miller describes the origin of “El Paso.”  It emerged from time spent playing music while traveling town to town between gigs.  First Robbins played others’ cowboy songs, then starting to develop his own.  Initially inspired by a family trip through El Paso, Robbins refined “El Paso” while continuing to tour, bouncing new verses off of his back-up singers, the Glaser Brothers.

As Miller notes, what’s distinctive about “El Paso” as a Western ballad is that it is arranged as a ranchera, Mexican ranch music made popular in Mexico’s cowboy film industry in the decades preceding Robbins writing the song.  The ranchera style is ably abetted by Grady Martin‘s incredible guitar work throughout the song.

Grady Martin

Miller writes, “The music itself proves how porous cultural borders can be.  Robbins’s cowboy is trapped by a passion that bursts forth in a song-form that belongs to another world.  Virtue and vice blur along this borderline.  In the badlands the song evokes, power grows out of the barrel of a gun–and death seems almost a form of deliverance.” (p. 268)  I touched on this issue of border crossing in the previous post, specifically as it related to how our hero describes and relates to Felina.  There’s a tension between overwhelming attraction and a pushing away at a somewhat demonized “other.”  Felina’s hold over our hero has a supernatural aspect.

“El Paso” has two direct descendants, musically speaking, and we’ll listen to those today.  In the next post, I want to contrast “El Paso” with some other related Robbins songs, and think about how the song matches up to that material both as Western and as murder ballad.  My main goal today is to give Felina her due, and tell–or let Robbins tell–the rest of the story.  

“Faleena (from El Paso)”

In some respects you might call “Faleena” a sequel, but it’s probably more appropriate to characterize it as a different telling of the same song, or a love (and death) song from a different point of view.  (Spellings of her name vary, as you’ve seen.  “Faleena (from El Paso)” is how the song is listed on Robbins’s The Drifter.)

You can listen to the song in this mesmerizing clip on YouTube.  I’m not sure what show this is from, why Robbins appears to be playing in a bar after a fight, or who the other guy is, but the whole thing works together rather magically.  I prefer this arrangement to the more ornate studio version.

  

[Update 20 April 2013, I had to find a new copy of this clip, which indicates that it appeared first on the show “Nashville Red Carpet.”]

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

As others have noted, there were significant doubts about the commercial viability of “El Paso” when it was first released, for coming in at almost four and a half minutes.  “Faleena” at nearly eight minutes clearly trades on the credibility the first song established.  A few of the narrative details differ, but essentially the story is the same.  Perhaps neither narrator is wholly reliable.  This song is more complete than the original in giving us both Felina’s origins and an account of her end–as it turns out, at her own hand.

The studio version of “Faleena” retains the ranchera-style arrangement of the original “El Paso.”  What we get lyrically, however is even more interesting for my money–particularly in light of the of the dance the song does not only between love and death, but between gender and culture.  The exotic Felina of “El Paso” is portrayed with a good deal more sympathy in her own song, but certainly an equal amount of romance, and an extra dose of seemingly supernatural powers.  This, perhaps, sets the context for the cowboy’s irrational and all-consuming attraction to her in the original song.  The birth of Felina in the opening of the song quiets the desert storms around her.  With what ensues in “Faleena,” we get the full story of how this Mexican maiden found herself in such a tragic situation.

That Felina ends her own life at the end of this song is a different turn in some respects.  With “El Paso,” the hero’s rash crime of killing the rival pretty much sets the stage for his also meeting a violent end, or at least some kind of justice.  That Felina would die by her own hand in mourning the loss of her lover seems less predestined.  As we’ll see in this post and the next, Robbins and others appear to have mixed feelings about what the fate of the Mexican maiden should be.

A song about a song

“Faleena” was released about seven years after “El Paso.”  In the 70s, Robbins added one more explicit follow up to the original hit with “El Paso City.”  The blog Carnival Saloon describes the song as rather post-modern, and I have to agree. This third song is more about the original and itself, and less about the themes we’re normally concerned about.  The narrator flows in and out of identifying with the protagonist of “El Paso.”  It’s rather mind-bending.  (Try to look past the attire.  There was another more promising clip on YouTube, but the audio was corrupted.)

“El Paso City” by Marty Robbins (Spotify)

We’ve talked before in this blog about how the experiences of singing a song and listening to a song can be fundamentally similar.  We’ve also noted with “Mack the Knife” how songs or performances of songs can become rather strangely self-referential.  Something different is going on here, I think.  

What’s interesting about “El Paso City” is that Robbins seems to be confessing what many listeners and writers have attested about the original song’s power–that it is at root mysterious.  It speaks to parts of us we can’t quite put words to.  With Maureen in the previous post, commenting that somehow “El Paso” made sense of the danger that her father faced in his daily work, Robbins here seems also to acknowledge that the “El Paso” has a musical manner of making sense of things we may not fully and consciously understand.

Next up

With the next post, we’ll take a look at some of the music and movies Robbins produced before, during, and after the time he was developing “El Paso,” paying attention to some of the themes of death, love, and sacrifice that we have been discussing on and off all along in this blog, and continuing to look at how dynamics of culture and gender play out in these songs.  In the final post of the week, I’ll look into the covers of “El Paso,” and some other signs of the song’s enduring popularity.