This periodic newsletter commemorates the lives of Faron Young and Marty Robbins. Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press, and the publication goal for Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is 2012. Today I completed the first draft of Marty’s biography–30 chapters. I’ll take […]
By Rosanne Cash Rosanne Cash is the eldest of four daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was born to the impoverished young couple in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955, one month before the release of her father’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” They moved to Los Angeles several years later, after […]
By Dara Horn It is Passover 1862 and Jacob Rappaport is in New Orleans to murder his uncle. Once unable to rebel against his father’s orders, he is now helpless to refuse the orders of his Army superiors. A 19-year-old who escaped from an arranged marriage and joined the Union Army, Jacob has been sent […]
By Jane Borodale When seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel discovers she’s pregnant, she steals a neighbor’s gold coins and runs away to London. Her impoverished rural Sussex family can’t support another child, and she would be forced to marry the neighbor who raped her. With her possessions tied inside a piece of oilcloth, she sneaks away before […]
By James Guilford Kendry detests her prestigious high school and its bullies, her middle-class neighborhood in which her mother hides a drug addiction, and her “toilet bowl of a social life.” The 15-year-old white girl wants to live adventurously, like the black girls she admires from a distance when she rides the train to her […]
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, […]
MARTY ROBBINS AND RICHARD CHILDRESSI 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 […]
THE CHRISTMAS ALBUMS OF FARON YOUNG AND MARTY ROBBINS Faron Young recorded an album of Christmas songs in 1979 for television sales. I couldn’t find a photo of the cover of A Christmas Card From Faron, perhaps because it was recorded for a private label and is rare. The album was reissued twice, as Silver […]
This week marks the anniversary of when we lost Faron Young and Marty Robbins. Marty died of a heart attack on December 8, 1982, at age 57, and Faron died of a self-inflicted bullet wound on December 10, 1996, at age 64. Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story was published in 2007 by the University […]
“EL PASO” IS FIFTY YEARS OLD For the past two months I’ve been working on Marty Robbins chapters that talk about “El Paso” and the gunfighter ballads. Then one day I was shocked to realize this was FIFTY years go. I’m always a decade behind, and I’d thought it was forty years. Ranger Doug Green […]