“BECAUSE, MAN, I WAS GENE AUTRY.” He was ten or eleven, outside Glendale, Arizona, and he had earned the money to see the Saturday picture. The walk home came after, in the dark, across ground he later described as full of rattlesnakes and scorpions and sidewinders. It never bothered him. He had just spent two hours being a singing cowboy, and the snakes, he figured, would not dare. That is the first fact about Marty Robbins. The rest run out of it. In 1959 he talked Columbia into letting him cut an album of western songs, and said afterward he’d had no idea there was a market for them. It gave him “El Paso” — a cowboy who kills a man over a girl in a cantina, runs for the badlands, then turns his horse around and rides back into the town where he knows the guns are waiting. Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Radio said nobody would play something that long. It went to number one on the country chart and the pop chart and became the first country record to win a Grammy. A heart attack nearly killed him in 1970, at forty-four. The wrecks came after. At Talladega in 1972 he ran with the restrictor knocked out of his carburetor, passed Richard Petty, waved — then drove to the impound area and told the officials to check his car. Last place, and a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. At Charlotte in 1974 he came down the front stretch at a hundred and sixty into four cars stopped sideways, and put himself into the wall rather than into the door of Richard Childress. Broken ribs, broken tailbone, thirty-seven stitches in his face. He ran his last race at Atlanta in the fall of 1982 and died in Nashville on December 8, thirty-one days later, at fifty-seven. Nothing ever came out of the bushes after him. He never stopped giving it the chance.

Because, Man, I Was Gene Autry.

When Marty Robbins was a boy outside Glendale, Arizona, he learned something that would follow him for the rest of his life: a movie cowboy could feel bigger than the desert itself. He saved his money, went to the Saturday picture, and walked home in the dark through country he imagined was full of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and sidewinders. He said it never bothered him. He had just spent two hours being a singing cowboy, and in that moment the world felt safely divided: heroes on one side, danger on the other.

That early hunger for the Western dream never really left Marty Robbins. He grew up with the look, the voice, and the instinct for a story that moved like a horse at a gallop. By the late 1950s, he had already made his name as a country singer, but in 1959 he pushed Columbia to let him record an album of Western songs. He later said he had no idea there was a market for them. The album became Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, and from it came the song that would define him: “El Paso.”

“El Paso” was not just a hit. It was a miniature movie, a sung tragedy about love, jealousy, and a last ride back into danger. At four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it was longer than radio preferred, and plenty of people doubted it would get airplay. It did more than that. It reached No. 1 on the country chart, crossed over to the pop chart, and became the first country record to win a Grammy. For Marty Robbins, the boy who once walked home imagining desert monsters in the brush, the old Western fantasy had turned into national memory.

But Marty Robbins was never only a singer. He was also a racer, a man who seemed determined to meet risk head-on. A heart attack nearly killed him in 1970, when he was still only in his forties. Even after that, he kept coming back to the track. At Talladega in 1972, he ran with the restrictor knocked out of his carburetor, passed Richard Petty, waved, and then drove to the impound area and asked officials to inspect his car. He finished last and was fined. At Charlotte in 1974, he came fast into a crash scene and chose the wall over another driver’s door, taking the impact himself.

His final race came at Atlanta in the fall of 1982. He died in Nashville on December 8, 1982, at age 57. The story that began with a boy walking home from a Saturday movie ended with a man who never stopped testing the edge of danger. Marty Robbins had spent his life chasing the same feeling he found in the dark desert as a child: the belief that a singing cowboy could ride straight through fear and keep going.

Because, man, I was Gene Autry.

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SHE RECORDED IT TWICE, FIFTY YEARS APART. THE SECOND TIME, SHE DIDN’T SING. She wrote it herself. A song about her father, the mine, the hollow in Kentucky she came out of — the kind of thing nobody else could have written for her. She cut it in 1970, in her thirties, at the height of what her voice could do. She cut it again in 2020. By then she had recorded it in several arrangements over the years, but never like this: no singing at all. She spoke the words. The instruments behind her were kept to almost nothing. Look at who was in the room. Her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, was producing. So was John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son. They made it in Cash Cabin, the studio his father built. Legacy released the recitation as a single on January 4, 2021, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the album that made her. Still Woman Enough followed on March 19. It was the last solo record she ever put out. She died on October 4, 2022, in her sleep, at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was ninety. Fifty years between the two takes. The first one is a young woman telling you where she’s from. The second is the same woman, in a room run by her own daughter, saying the words instead of singing them — and not needing the melody to make them land.

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THE GRAND OLE OPRY SPENT THREE HOURS DECIDING WHETHER LORETTA LYNN COULD SING A SONG SHE HAD ALREADY SUNG THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT. In 1975, Loretta Lynn sang “The Pill” three times in one night at the Grand Ole Opry. A week later she learned that the Opry had held a three-hour meeting about whether to let her do it. Told about it afterward, she said that if they hadn’t let her sing it, she would have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry. Sixty radio stations refused to play it. A preacher in her home state of Kentucky gave a whole sermon against it. Male country singers were putting out records about sex and strangers that year, and nobody scheduled anything about those. The ban worked backwards. Kept off country radio, the record crossed to pop stations instead and reached number seventy — the highest a solo Loretta Lynn single ever went on that chart. In the counties she came from, doctors thanked her, because the song was getting to women no clinic had reached. The meeting was the third try. MCA had recorded the song in December 1972 and held it in a drawer for over two years, afraid of it. Radio was afraid of it. Then a woman who had been an Opry member since 1962 — married at fifteen, four children by twenty — walked out and sang it three times before anyone thought to convene. Three hours was not how long it took them to understand the song. It was how long it took them to work out what to do about someone who had stopped asking.

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ON DECEMBER 8, 1982, A 57-YEAR-OLD MAN DIED IN A NASHVILLE HOSPITAL — EIGHT WEEKS AFTER COUNTRY MUSIC PUT HIM IN ITS HALL OF FAME, AND FOUR WEEKS AFTER HE LAST DROVE A STOCK CAR AT SPEED. Marizona had been his wife since 1945. Ronny and Janet were at the hospital. He was born near Glendale, Arizona, in 1925, a twin, into a house with nothing in it. He quit school in his teens, went into the Navy, and learned guitar in the Pacific. In 1959 he wrote a song about a cowboy who runs, gets clear, and then turns his horse around and rides back into the town where he knows he will be shot, because the woman is there. “El Paso” won the first Grammy ever given to a country record. His first heart attack came in August 1969. In January 1970 he took a coronary bypass while the operation was still experimental. Before he would sign for it, he made his doctors promise he could go back to racing. They promised. He was back on the track that October. He kept going through three bad wrecks in the mid-seventies, quit, and returned again. His last NASCAR start was November 7, 1982. He was admitted on December 2 with chest pain. He died six days later. He had written the ending twenty-three years earlier.

Because, Man, I Was Gene Autry.

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