MARTY ROBBINS, WEBB PIERCE, AND CARL SMITH IN BUFFALO GUN
Marty narrates this 1956 movie, beginning with, “That there’s Webb Pierce, and that’s Carl Smith, and that’s me, Marty Robbins. Sure can’t figure out why but we’re all in–” and the Jordanaires start singing “Buffalo Gun.” At the end of the song, narrator Marty says, “This story begins in 1875.  Me and Smith and Webb Pierce are on this cattle drive . . . .”  Webb is a government agent who deputizes Carl and Marty to help him find stolen buffalo guns. To show the level of authenticity, I’ll just give one example. Carl fights an Indian who runs off with his horse. Webb rides up, dismounts, and says, “Things like this just don’t happen in Nashville.” (more…)

MARTY ROBBINS AND RICHARD CHILDRESS
I sometimes describe biography writing as fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For me, it’s pure excitement whenever a piece snaps into place. I experienced the feeling recently when working on the chapter about Marty’s 1974 NASCAR races. I had just described his career-high fifth place finish at Michigan and was writing about Charlotte, where he slammed into a concrete retaining wall to avoid broadsiding the driver’s side of Richard Childress’s car. Imagine my thrill when I came across a magazine article that quoted Childress, who finished sixth at Michigan, as saying there, “Marty Robbins is one man I don’t mind trusting my life to at one hundred eighty mph.” I dropped the quote into my manuscript and started the Charlotte paragraph by saying, “And that’s exactly what happened four months later.” Richard told me in an interview, “Marty turns right and goes into the wall instead of hitting me.” Who knows–if Marty hadn’t chosen to take the wall, there might not have been a NASCAR champion named Dale Earnhardt. (more…)