Marty Robbins topped the US charts and had a UK Top 20 hit with this classic country and western tune, El Paso, back in 1959.

When this Western ballad popped up – very unexpectedly – in an Indian film, Sister Midnight, I was reminded how much I’ve always loved it, with its Mexican twang and gripping storyline.

It’s initially the Tex-Mex twang of Grady Martin’s Spanish guitar and then it’s Marty Robbins, spinning his mini-movie of a tale about his obsession with Feleena, a Mexican girl he finds dancing in an El Paso bar called Rosa’s Cantina.

I’ve never been to Rosa’s, which may or may not exist, but I have been to and through El Paso which is a busy border town in south west Texas, and across to Juarez, the teeming drug capital on the other side of the Rio Grande, and I can well imagine all of this happening.

I’ve always loved a story song and this one has a strongly cinematic quality, cleverly switching from past to present tense in order to accommodate its tragic ending.

The narrator, having fallen for Feleena, challenges a fellow cowboy to a gunfight for her heart, shoots him dead and steals a horse – a hanging offence – and hides away in exile. But, still lovelorn for Feleena, he returns to Rosa’s to get his girl but is shot by a chasing posse as he arrives there and, as she runs to his side, he (spoiler alert!) dies in her arms after “one little kiss.”

I’m not sure when I first heard it but it must have been long after it was recorded and released in 1959, followed by the album Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs. And I don’t think I realised for years afterwards that this is the sort of song that gives Country music its old-fashioned appellation “… and Western.”

It’s a genre that’s more or less disappeared, along with the description C&W, but began life among lonely cowboys on the range, singing to themselves and their cattle.