“THE NIGHT MARTY ROBBINS FINALLY SAID IT OUT LOUD: ‘I THINK I WAS THAT COWBOY.’”
— The Lost Backstage Confession That Changed How We Hear “El Paso City” Forever
Most fans remember Marty Robbins’ 1978 performance of “El Paso City” for its warmth, its flawless delivery, and that unmistakable glow in his voice.
But there was something the cameras never caught — a moment backstage that shifted the way those who witnessed it would understand the song for the rest of their lives.
Minutes before walking onstage, a young reporter nervously asked Marty the simplest question:
“Why does this song feel different from the others?”
Marty didn’t answer right away.
He stood still, turning his wedding ring with his thumb, eyes lowered as if he was searching for a memory he couldn’t quite reach. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, he said:
“Because it feels like I lived it…
like I WAS that cowboy once.”
The reporter thought he misheard. But Marty wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t trying to be poetic. He was confessing something that had been sitting inside him for years — the sense that the story of “El Paso” wasn’t just a song he wrote, but something that somehow felt like a memory buried deep in his bones.
He continued softly, “Every time I sing it, it’s like walking back into a place I knew long before I was born. That’s why it scares me a little… and why I have to sing it.”
When he finally stepped onto the stage, the crew could feel it.
Something in him had shifted.
The first chord rang out softer than usual, his voice wrapped in a strange mixture of longing and déjà vu. When he reached the line “Somehow I know I’ve been here before,” the room went completely silent — not out of politeness, but because everyone sensed he meant every word.
A camera operator later said, “It was like he wasn’t singing TO us. He was singing BACK to something.”
Even the band noticed the difference. His phrasing was slower, more deliberate. The way he stretched the word “before” sounded like someone returning to a place he’d been trying to remember his whole life.
By the time the final note faded, Marty looked drained — not tired, but emptied, as if he had opened a door only he could see.
No magic. No superstition.
Just a man so deeply connected to the story he created that he wondered, even for a moment, whether it might have once been his own.
And that night, “El Paso City” didn’t feel like a performance.
It felt like a confession.