Marty Robbins - Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs [Red & Silver]

Marty Robbins rode into 1959 with Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, a dusty, cinematic set of cowboy storytelling, here on red and silver colored vinyl that suits all that gunsmoke.

By the late fifties Robbins was already a country star with pop crossover hits behind him, but this album gave him a new identity as the great narrator of the Old West. Television and cinema were saturated with westerns, and Robbins answered with songs that played like short films, full of outlaws, lawmen, lonely trails and doomed romance.

The record opens with Big Iron, the tale of an Arizona ranger facing a feared gunslinger, told with a loping rhythm and a lawman's calm. El Paso is the centrepiece, a sweeping border ballad of jealousy and fatal love that topped the pop charts and won a Grammy, its Spanish guitar lines curling around Robbins' warm, unhurried tenor.

Elsewhere, Cool Water brings an old campfire standard to life with ghostly harmonies, while The Master's Call turns the genre toward something spiritual. The arrangements stay lean and acoustic, with close harmony backing vocals giving every chorus a wide-open feel.

Decades on, these songs turn up in games, films and late-night singalongs, proof of how sturdy Robbins' storytelling was. On red and silver wax, it makes a handsome centrepiece for any country shelf.