Marty Robbins placed 94 songs on Billboard’s Country Singles charts in a thirty-year career, four of them after his death. Beginning with the autobiographical “I’ll Go On Alone” in 1953, 16 songs topped the charts. They included “Singing the Blues,” which held the number one spot for 13 weeks in 1956, and the pop-sounding “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” in 1957. Marty’s Hawaiian songs, rockabilly hits, teen ballads, gunfighter ballads, pop standards, and dozens of songs of various tempos showcased his versatility.

He starred in western, country music, and racing movies and hosted television shows, including The Marty Robbins Spotlight. The Academy of Country Music honored him with its Man of the Decade Award in 1970, and he received two Grammy awards, the first in 1960 for “El Paso” and another in 1970 for “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.”

Born in the heat of the Arizona desert on September 26, 1925, Martin David Robinson spent a nomadic childhood moving around the desert from shack to tent to shack, as his light-fingered alcoholic father escaped from the law or searched for a new job. The awareness that the family relied on county welfare for medicine and school clothes fed Martin’s insecurities. Throughout his life, he was torn between extreme shyness and a craving for attention and appreciation. He coped with introversion by becoming the class clown in school, and he enjoyed entertaining people with his singing and harmonica playing. Being a daredevil and fun to be around made him popular.

Martin enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17 and participated in the Bougainville landing in the Solomon Islands in 1943. He was a crewmember on a landing craft that delivered U.S. Marines to the beach. Seeing a buddy blown up in front of him kept him from becoming emotionally close to friends later in life, some acquaintances believe.

When he returned home to Glendale, Arizona, after the war, Martin held eight different jobs in six months–always searching for a way to earn a paycheck without hard work. An enjoyable and lucrative method came his way when he was hired to play guitar and sing on radio and in nightclubs.

He began calling himself Marty Robbins to keep his relatives from knowing he was singing for a living instead of doing physical labor. He adopted the name permanently after he married Marizona Baldwin and before he signed a Columbia Records recording contract. Marty took his wife and young son to Nashville in December 1952, and for the next thirty years he was an active member of the Grand Ole Opry. When the Opry moved from the Ryman auditorium to Nashville’s newly opened Opryland in 1974, he was the last performer on the famous old stage and one of the first at the new Opry House.

Marty normally held the 11:30-midnight Opry time slot, after which WSM Radio still switches its programming to the Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree. He chose this time in the mid-1960s so he could drive his stock car at the Fairgrounds speedway earlier in the evening. One Saturday night he was winning the race but had to drop out in order to get to the Opry on time. But the Opry schedule ran late that evening. Marty insisted on doing his full half hour, and so began the beloved tradition of his running the show past midnight.

His skill at driving a race car moved him from the local speedway into the NASCAR circuit, where the professional drivers welcomed him. “He started out being a singer driving a race car, but he became a race car driver who could sing,” NASCAR’s Bobby Allison says. “I thought he did a nice job in a car.” Marty was proud of his racing achievements, pointing out that the other drivers “practice more than I run.” His best finish was number five at Michigan’s Motorstate 400 in 1974.

Marty raced in spite of a heart condition. He suffered his first major heart attack while on tour in 1969, and his triple bypass surgery in January 1970 was one of the earliest in the world. Following another decade of singing and NASCAR racing, he had a second major heart attack in 1981. He was 57 years old when the third took his life on December 8, 1982, two months after his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

His life will be commemorated in Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins, a biography scheduled for publication in 2012. Check this page for updates.

Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins

Chapter 1: In the Hall of Fame

Chapter 2: Child of the Arizona Desert

Chapter 3: A Drifter

Chapter 4: Music and Marizona

Chapter 5: Columbia Records

Chapter 6: Mr. Teardrop

Chapter 7: Singing the Blues in a White Sport Coat

Chapter 8: Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

Chapter 9: Early 1960s

Chapter 10: Cowboy in a Continental Suit

Chapter 11: Still More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

Chapter 12: From Dirt Track to NASCAR

Chapter 13: A Hot Dog Ready to Pop

Chapter 14: “I Want To Race Again”

Chapter 15: Back in the Groove

Chapter 16: NASCAR 42

Chapter 17: Twentieth Century Drifter

Chapter 18: Return To the Road

Chapter 19: Back on Columbia Records and in the Spotlight

Chapter 20: The Marty Robbins Band on Tour

Chapter 21: Into the Eighties

Chapter 22: NASCAR–Phase Two

Chapter 23: Super Legend

Chapter 24: No Plans of Quitting Any Time Soon

Chapter 25: “I’ll Be Drifting Home”

Chapter 26: Some Memories Just Won’t Die

[revised 4/27/10]