2 Marty Robbins Sequels to “El Paso” That Deserve Another Spin (And One That Never Came To Be)

In terms of well-done, beautifully written Western ballads, one would be hard-pressed to find a better collection than Marty Robbins’ iconic 1959 album, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

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The mix of traditional folk tunes and Robbins’ own compositions has become the gold standard for Western and Tex-Mex music, and the first single from that album, “El Paso”, is one of the finest musical offerings of the collection.

The Original: “El Paso”

“El Paso” recounts the first-person story of a cowboy who falls in love with a dark-eyed dancer named Feleena. In a fit of jealousy, the cowboy kills a man he sees talking to Feleena and has to flee El Paso, Texas, so as not to face the vengeance of the slain man’s posse.

The song suggests a significant amount of time has passed when the cowboy finally returns to El Paso, overwhelmed by his love for Feleena that is “stronger than my fear of death.” When the cowboy arrives, he’s shot just outside of the cantina where he first met Feleena. She runs out to him, and he dies with his head cradled in Feleena’s arms.

It’s a heartbreaking, goosebump-inducing story—but there’s more to the narrative you might have missed in some of Robbins’ later works.

Her Backstory: “Faleena”

Seven years after releasing “El Paso”, Marty Robbins added a new layer to the story with “Faleena”. Starting with the beautiful dancer’s birth on a stormy night in the desert, Robbins’ narrative ballad follows Faleena through different towns before settling on El Paso. The song introduces the same cowboy who offers his first-person narrative in “El Paso”, including the jealous murder that led to his departure and subsequent death.

While “El Paso” ends with the death of the cowboy, “Faleena” takes the story one step further. After cradling the dying cowboy, Faleena takes his gun and kills herself, too. “Screamin’ in anger and placin’ the gun to her breast, bury us both deep and maybe we’ll find peace.”

The story ends with a folk legend of Faleena and the cowboy that describes the wind whipping through El Paso as “the young cowboy, showin’ Faleena the town.”

A New Perspective: “El Paso City”

Ten years after “Faleena”, Marty Robbins came up with a new perspective for the entire “El Paso” saga. In “El Paso City”, the narrator is flying over the Texas town, looking down on the browns and rusty oranges below and thinking of an old story with an unknown origin. The narrator muses that perhaps he was the cowboy in the old Western he was thinking of.

“Somewhere in my deepest thoughts, familiar scenes and memories unfold / These wild and unexplained emotions that I’ve had so long, but I have never told / Like every time I fly up through the heavens, and I see you there below / I get the feeling sometime in another world, I lived in El Paso.”

Robbins had plans for another follow-up track, “The Mystery Of Old El Paso”, but his death in 1982 cut these plans short.

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