Down in the West Texas town of El Paso

[gemfyre]

I recently discovered that Marty Robbins wrote two sequels to El Paso.  In them he tells Rosita’s side of the story – that she met a dashing cowboy who made a mistake and got shot and then in the end she kills HERSELF over it all and it made me throw up in my mouth a bit.

The original song tells the tale of a cowboy who goes to a remote cantina, falls in love with the dancing girl (Rosita), one night sees the dancing girl drinking with another guy so he shoots him in a jealous rage, runs away, steals a horse (a hanging offence in the old west) and goes to ground briefly.  Then he is so overcome by his need (‘love’) to see the dancing girl again that he rides back into town and is promptly shot by the local posse.  In the last verse the dancing girl is by his side, and she kisses him before he dies.

These days I have a different personal interpretation.  Nowhere in the song does it state that his love for Rosita is reciprocated.  As the dancing girl, it stands to reason that she might be sitting and drinking with whichever customer pays the highest price, but for the narrator, how dare another man make moves on the woman he’s obsessed with, even if she doesn’t know who he is.  So, for an obsession, this guy commits murder and grand theft and then is STILL so obsessed that he gets himself killed returning to the scene of the crime.  The last verse to me is obviously a hallucination.