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Licensed Song Sheet 2 pages
Follow along with my print-friendly guide for this song! It’s available for purchase at Musicnotes.com, the web’s leading provider of licensed sheet music.
On the fence? Here's a guide I made showing the purchase & print process, including answers to common questions about my song sheets.
Buy at Musicnotes.comAbout this lesson
After many requests, I’m proud to share this lesson teaching you how to play El Paso, Marty Robbins’ classic cowboy song from 1959. This one has a delicious intro riff (which I’ll teach in depth), as well as standard cowboy chords that make up the verse & chorus. I’ll teach all this, including 3 different ways to approach the strumming. Enjoy!
- 0:00 Lesson overview
- 0:59 Chord shapes needed
- 1:42 Chord progressions (verse & chorus)
- 5:55 Strumming patterns (3 options)
- 9:45 Playthrough (1st verse & chorus)
- 11:51 Alternating bass note strumming
- 13:01 Intro riff breakdown (with tab)
- 21:44 Farewell
Video of Marty Robbins version of this song
Original studio version:
Live version:
Breaking Bad and El Paso
If you’ve watched the amazing TV series Breaking Bad, you may know the final episode of the entire show is titled “Felina” — which named after the love interest in the song El Paso. In the episode, you see Walter White find a Marty Robbins casette tape in his snowed-in car, which he plays — and sure enough, we hear a few seconds of El Paso in the show.
But what really takes the cake is the video below, which takes scenes from all five seasons of Breaking Bad — and maps them to the El Paso audio, so the scenes match what Robbins is singing about. Walter White is the song narrator, Hank is the cowboy after him, and Felina is the crystal meth, etc. Really well done video… give it a watch below!
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