For “El Paso City,” a special horn section was brought in to augment the sound. It paid off, as “El Paso City” landed Marty Robbins back in the #1 spot on Billboard’s country singles chart on June 19, 1976, becoming Marty’s 15th of his 16 chart-toppers.
Interestingly enough, “El Paso City” wasn’t “El Paso’s” first sequel. Just seven years after the original hit, Robbins penned “Feleena (From El Paso)” and included it on his album “The Drifter” released by Columbia in July, 1966.
Over eight minutes in length, the song tells the complete backstory of the character “Feleena,” based on a real-life 5th grade classmate of Marty’s named Fidelina Martinez. In the song, Feleena is born in a shack in New Mexico during a thunderstorm, lives her formative years in Santa Fe before moving to El Paso to become a paid dancer and meeting and falling in love with the cowboy in the original song.
There’s an interesting twist at the conclusion of “Feleena (From El Paso).” After her lover is shot by the posse and Feleena receives a kiss from him as he dies, she picks up his gun and fatally shoots herself. From that moment on (so the story goes), their ghosts are heard in the wind blowing around El Paso with people explaining that “it’s only the young cowboy showing Feleena the town.”
After “El Paso City’s” chart-topping success in 1976, Robbins wrote yet another sequel called “The Mystery Of El Paso City,” although he never got around to recording it. Long-term heart disease had plagued him since the late ‘60s and during surgery after his third heart attack, he died at age 57 on December 8, 1982, just two months after being inducted into the Country Music Hall Of Fame.
