Hit songs have a knack for going global, traveling from star to star to superstar. But at their best, important songs are less about loud volumes of gold records. It’s those quieter stories behind the spotlight, rich with unknowable meaning, that are truly timeless.
Glendale’s favorite musical son, Marty Robbins, made a career of finding those moments in life, and then making moments for others. And while music fans will delight in the new biopic “Elvis,” which hits theaters June 24 to chronicle the life of singer Elvis Presley, lost in the luster of an otherwise legendary career may be The King of Rock and Roll’s connection to a classic song written by Robbins, the Country Music Hall of Famer who was born in Glendale in 1925.
And Elvis wasn’t the only one touched by the song “You Gave Me a Mountain.” Storied singer Frankie Laine, 24 years after turning his own cover version into a major hit, which made him include it nightly in his live shows, said the song “remains a difficult number for me to get through today. It’s ironic that my career got a second wind from a song that fills me with sadness.”
The song “You Gave Me a Mountain” still strikes an emotional chord today for a guy for whom it was partially written — and referenced in it.
Robbins’ son Ronny, who turns 73 next month and makes his home these days in Tennessee, vividly recalls the song’s inspiration — a song that Marty never even released as a single during a career he piled up 16 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country charts.
It all started when Marty and the love of his life, wife Marizona, had an argument. Ronny, just a young kid at the time, remembers his folks having some marital issues in the 1950s.
“She left and took me to Arizona, because all of our family was in Arizona even though we were in Tennessee,” Ronny said of his mom during a phone interview in mid-June. “They made up after a couple days. We weren’t gone very long. He didn’t write the song until later on, but he used that as part of his inspiration.”
Including the refrain about Ronny himself:
“She took my one ray of sunshine
She took my pride and my joy
She took my reason for living
She took my small baby boy.”
Marty didn’t even record the song for years. It sat aside as he burned up the charts with the likes of “Singing The Blues,” “White Sport Coat,” and his signature tune, “El Paso.” Also in the meantime, Marty and Marizona patched things up, and their romance lasted through 34 years of marriage until his death from a heart attack in 1982.
By the time Robbins did finally record “You Gave Me a Mountain,” it went somewhat overlooked as an album cut on 1969’s “It’s a Sin.” That album spawned two Top 10 singles, including the title track, which got all the attention.
For Laine, though, he was immediately drawn to “You Gave Me a Mountain,” especially when Robbins pitched him the song himself.
Laine’s own run of hits dated back to the ’40s when “That’s My Desire” reached No. 4 on the charts. That kicked off a string of more than 30 Top 20 hits for Laine.
And the hits were still coming for Laine well into the late ’60s, but he was disillusioned with the approach by his record label, ABC, which demanded he stick with the proven formula of his successful singles. Laine was evolving and wanting to grow and say more. It was exactly at this time when “You Gave Me a Mountain” landed in his life.
“I wasn’t going to let some narrow-minded executive rob me of the chance to do it justice. The song was just too right,” Laine wrote in his 1993 autobiography “That Lucky Old Son,” which contained an entire chapter under the heading “You Gave Me a Mountain.” He called the song “pure magic.”
But there was one line Laine wouldn’t sing, and it was among the most personal lyrics Robbins would ever write.
The song opens with “Born in the heat of the desert / My mother died giving me life / Despised and disliked from my father / Blamed for the loss of his wife,” and referenced Robbins’ own birth in Glendale and his fraught relationship with his father.
“That part was true,” Ronny said. “When daddy wrote that it very much was part of his life; was his father. One of the last things that his father ever did was throw a hammer at him. It missed him, and he picked it up and threw it back at him and hit him in the chest. And he never bothered daddy again. He left the family when daddy was 12.”
Laine, however, had a strong relationship with his own dad, who had died just a couple months before Robbins brought him the song. Laine asked Marty if he could change the line to “Deprived of the love of a father,” and Robbins gave his blessing.
“I just couldn’t sing a line about a ‘despising father’ with conviction, so Marty let me alter it to ‘Deprived of the love of my father,’” Laine wrote. “Still, every time I reached that line it brought back mental images of Pa in his casket, and they broke me up inside.”
The result was Laine’s first and only No. 1 on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart. Country singer Johnny Bush, who would later co-write Willie Nelson’s signature tune “Whiskey River,” saw his cover of “You Gave Me a Mountain” also hit the country chart’s Top 10 in 1969.
All that, in turn, caught the attention of Elvis.
Robbins and Presley had known each other since the ’50s, and even shared live concert bills back when Marty was the intermediate act and Elvis the up-and-comer who opened the show. Country superstar Hank Snow was the big name at the time, and he and Colonel Tom Parker would soon team up as a management company and sign Presley.
With Laine’s cover version of “You Gave Me a Mountain” becoming a staple of radio, Elvis first introduced it into his live show in 1972 as The King was launching the second half of his career that was about to include more than 600 concerts before his death in 1977.
According to the online archive setlist.fm, which painstakingly chronicles more than 6 million setlists from almost 280,000 artists throughout music history, Elvis eventually sang “You Gave Me a Mountain” 368 times, making it the 16th most played song he ever did live, ahead even of “Jailhouse Rock” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Elvis sang Robbins’ song three times in Arizona, including on his final tour when he performed at the ASU Activity Center in Tempe five months before he died. The song got a boost even wider than Laine’s hit when Elvis included it on his famed “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite” concert in January 1973, which became NBC’s highest-rated program that year, and whose soundtrack became Presley’s last No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart.
“A nice blessing for us,” Ronny recalled.
The attention from “You Gave Me a Mountain” only added to Marty Robbins’ legacy, which is stronger than ever today.
In 2013, his song “El Paso” played a major role in the series finale of “Breaking Bad,” one of the most acclaimed television episodes of all time. The 2019 blockbuster film “Rocketman,” an Elton John biopic, features a pivotal scene depicting when Elton and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin first met and bonded over a love of Marty Robbins that sees both characters sing his original song “Streets of Laredo.”
“Once I heard Marty Robbins, I knew I wanted to be a songwriter,” the real Taupin told the Tennessean in 2018. “When I heard ‘El Paso,’ I was like, ‘You can tell stories? This can be cinematic? You can make songs out of stories?’ It’s what these guys were doing. I didn’t know what you did to write songs. I knew nothing about bridges and choruses, but I gave it a shot and it worked out.”
In 2006, rock legends The Who released a new album, “Endless Wire,” which featured a song written by Pete Townshend called “God Speaks of Marty Robbins.”
“It’s about God waking up one day and deciding to invent the universe,” Townshend said as he introduced the song at a 2005 acoustic show. “And he doesn’t start with fire or light. He starts with a country and western singer called Marty Robbins. And he works on from there.”
And as recently as June 13 of this year, Dead & Company, the current incarnation of The Grateful Dead featuring its original living members, covered “El Paso” during a concert in California.
“He had a knack of taking true to life things and maybe clarifying them,” Ronny said. “He had such a gift for songwriting and putting words together that just amazes me to this day when I listen back to some of the things he wrote.”
That truth was on its best display with “You Gave Me a Mountain,” the lyrics of which, said Laine, “touched people with their message of faith in a higher power.”
Later this year will mark 40 years since Robbins died from a heart attack at the age of 57.
By the time he was still performing into the ’70s, he knew “You Gave Me a Mountain” was well known more for its treatment by other singers, especially Presley and Laine, who both helped make it a standard.
Marty himself gave it a go when he performed it live at the Grand Ole Opry, a dozen years after he’d written it.
“I know that I can’t sing this song as well as they do. But...,” he said, smiling to the crowd who laughed along, “it’s my song and if I want to I’m gonna sing it.”
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MORE:
Elvis Presley - You Gave Me A Mountain (Aloha From Hawaii, Live in Honolulu, 1973)
Marty Robbins - You Gave Me A Mountain
Frankie Laine - You Gave Me A Mountain
Scene from "Rocketman" referencing Marty Robbins
Pete Townshend performing "God Speaks of Marty Robbins
Steve Stockmar
News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment
YourValley.net
@stevestockmar
sstockmar@iniusa.org
Meet Steve
Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.
Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.
Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.
Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.
Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.
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