The Classic 1980s Country Track That Should Have Gone to Marty Robbins, if He Were Alive (And the Surprising Artist It Went to Instead)

No one did heart-wrenching Western music quite like Marty Robbins. From the star-crossed lovers of “El Paso” to the tragic arrogance of Texas Red in “Big Iron” to the somber resolution of “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”, Robbins’ lilting voice imbued these melancholy songs with emotion and compassion without feeling saccharine. When Eddie Setser and Troy Seals first came up with the idea for “Seven Spanish Angels”, there seemed to be no better artist for the job than Robbins.

Videos by American Songwriter

“We started writing, hoping we could emulate Marty Robbins and ‘El Paso’,” Seals said, per The Billboard Book of No. 1 Country Hits. “We didn’t think we had a song like that. But that whole flavor of the Southwest and cowboys. Of course, the chorus is kind of an old wives’ tale, an old story that’s been handed down.”

As appropriate a candidate as Robbins might have been for this Western tragedy, the Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs singer died while undergoing quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery in December 1982, long before Setser and Seals would have a solid framework for “Seven Spanish Angels”. So, the song ended up going to two different artists instead—one of whom might not be too surprising and one whom you might not readily associate with Country-Western music.

The Two Artists Who Ended Up Singing “Seven Spanish Angels” Together

Around the same time that Eddie Setser and Troy Seals finished their collaborative song, “Seven Spanish Angels”, their colleague, Billy Sherrill, was producing the third country album that Ray Charles was recording under Columbia. The album, Friendship, was a ten-track collection of duets with country stars like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams, Jr. While Sherrill was busy collecting songs for the record, he received a copy of “Seven Spanish Angels” from Setser and Seals. Sherrill thought the song would work well as a duet between Charles and Ronnie Milsap. However, Milsap declined, leaving Sherrill back at square one.

Sherrill heard through the grapevine that Willie Nelson had heard the song and enjoyed it, so the producer proposed that the Red-Headed Stranger get together with Charles to record a duet. Nelson obliged, and the song was put together across multiple sessions in Nashville and Texas. The version Nelson and Charles put out on Friendship peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, despite Sherrill making the choice to cut a third part of the song that explained why the “seven Spanish angels” were related to a man and woman losing their fight against the law.

In the Billboard Book of No. 1 Country Hits, Sherrill recounted calling Seals to tell him he was cutting the explanatory portion of the song. “I called Troy and said, ‘Hey, man. This is like a book, not a song. It’s like you gotta sit down and take notes.’ We just wiped out the whole other end of it, and ended up leavin’ you in the dark about what it meant—which I think contributed to the beauty of the song.”

Photo by Columbia Records/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images