Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins

[3] A Drifter

[3] A Drifter One summer Saturday afternoon in 1937, Martin walked into the Glendale movie theater and saw Gene Autry in the middle of the Yodelin’ Kid from Pine Ridge. The singing cowboy climbed into a wagon, a guitar mysteriously appeared , and Autry said, “Well, I’m not much at making speeches. I guess I’ll just have to sing for you.”1 Eleven-year-old Martin found a hero. He wanted to be a singing cowboy like Gene Autry. Every Saturday from then on, he was at the theater when it opened. “I was down there sitting in front,” he recalled. “I would sit so close to the screen that I would get powder burns when them guns would go off. I tell you, I’d get sand kicked in my face; tumbleweeds rolled across me.”2 16 He worked to earn money for movies. “[Mr. Harris] would let me pick cotton for him in the evenings after school, in the late spring,” Marty reminisced. “Then he would let me clean ditch, which was a man’s job and there I was, only elevenyearsold.Iwouldn’tgetbutabouttwenty-fivecentsaday.Butitonlycost ten cents to get in the movie, and the biggest bottle of pop you could get was a nickel, and you could get a big sack of popcorn for five cents also. So I would haveanickelleft.”Hestayeduntilthetheaterclosedat10:00pmandthenwalked home from Glendale to Peoria. “But I wasn’t afraid,” he stated. “Because I had justseenGeneAutry,andIwasGeneAutrythatnight.”Thefirstfivemileswere alongadarkcountryroadandtheremaininghalfwasdesert.“Thedesert’sfullof rattlesnakes, centipedes, scorpions, sidewinders,” he said, “but it didn’t bother me. I was Gene Autry. They didn’t dare come out of the bushes after me.”3 Yearslater,hisautobiographicalsong“GeneAutry,MyHero”stated,“When as a kid from our shack on the desert I’d roam, my daddy would whip me cuz I’d never be around home. But Mom understood . . . when I’d say Gene Autry and I had been rounding up outlaws all day.”4 Again, without explanation, Jack Robinson uprooted his family. Although still in the Peoria school district, their new home consisted of a pair of tents connected by a tarp-covered breezeway. Emma and the two sets of twins slept in one, and the other contained the kitchen. Johnny and George slept on cots outside, and Jack built himself a small shed nearby.5 “When it gets down in the twenties in Arizona,” Marty said years later, “it’s very cold. And we didn’t have nothing to put over us but a big piece of canvas. A lot of people had it tough, but I don’t think anybody had it any tougher than I did.” “Mydaddidn’tcaretoomuchaboutme,”Martyexplainedtoaninterviewer. “He had his favorites, and I wasn’t one of them. I was kind of a mean kid. I was likehim.”OneoftheyoungertwinswasJack’sfavoriteson.Martinandthelittle boy were fighting one day, and the younger twin called for their father. “My dad had a bad temper,” Marty stated. “I ran away and I wouldn’t come back. He chasedmeandthrewahammeratmelikeatomahawk.Ipickeditupandthrew it back as hard as I could and hit him in the chest with it. He never bothered me after that.”6 FortwosummersMartinwentwithhisolderbrotherJohnnytoherdangora goats in the Bradshaw Mountains north of Phoenix. The pair lived in a little rock house in the bottom of a big canyon. “I could outrun the fastest goat and out-climbanyofthemwhenIwaslittle,”hereminisced.“Iwasonlyelevenyears 17 [ CH 3 ] A Drifter old. I could throw a sailing rock maybe one hundred twenty yards and I could hit within ten feet of what I was throwing at. So I could turn that lead goat—I wouldn’t even have to run; I could throw that rock up there and get him.” The goat corral was a natural fence of ocotillo, a thorny desert plant with wicked barbs,closedbyagateplacedattheopenend.Theylockedthreehundredgoats insideatnight,andtheyalsoluredwildmustangsintothecorralwithhay.After filling his pants with sacks of oats to cushion his fall, Martin would climb atop a chute the boys had built. “He’d run them through that chute and I’d just dive down on them,” he said. “I’d get a handful of mane and I’d lock on as tight as I could and stay as long as I could. We’d break them enough so they could be sold from three to fifteen dollars apiece.”7 In January 1938 Emma Robinson finally divorced her abusive husband. She moved her children into town to a house that had belonged to her mother. Marty described...