Marty Robbins – Cool Water

“Cool Water” is a classic western ballad written by Bob Nolan and long associated with The Sons of the Pioneers; Marty Robbins recorded a notable cover of the song for his landmark album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, which was released in 1959. Robbins’s version was captured during the same single-day sessions that produced the rest of the album, and it sits naturally alongside his original narrative pieces as a preserved piece of older western repertoire interpreted through his warm baritone and restrained delivery.

The song’s origins lie in Nolan’s 1930s work with The Sons of the Pioneers, and its imagery—desert heat, thirst, the search for water, and the moral weathering of life on the trail—made it a durable standard for performers of western music. Robbins’s decision to include “Cool Water” on the 1959 album reflects his interest in assembling a coherent set of short, cinematic songs that drawn from both new compositions and established cowboy lore, creating an LP that reads like a series of compact frontier scenes.

Robbins’s arrangement of “Cool Water” follows the album’s aesthetic of spare, atmospheric support rather than ornate orchestration. Acoustic guitar and subtle rhythmic backing provide the sonic foundation, while restrained instrumental fills and close harmony backing reinforce the song’s sense of loneliness and landscape. The overall sound is designed to foreground Robbins’s vocal and the song’s narrative, helping the listener imagine the open, thirsty spaces the lyric evokes.

Lyrically, “Cool Water” works through brief, image-driven lines to build mood and ethical implication rather than through a long-form plot. The narrator’s longing—literal for water and figurative for relief—becomes a way to explore endurance, companionship and the moral dimensions of survival in a harsh environment. Robbins’s measured vocal approach emphasizes the plainspoken quality of the lyric, making the emotional gravity feel earned rather than sentimental.

Although “Cool Water” was not issued as a major pop single in Robbins’s recording, its inclusion on Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs helped shape the album’s overall narrative arc and contributed to the record’s commercial and critical success. The LP sold strongly, reached high positions on the charts, and has since been widely reissued; Robbins’s reading of “Cool Water” is therefore heard alongside his best-known western numbers and has traveled on compilation releases and reissues that document his gunfighter-era work.

Today Robbins’s version of “Cool Water” is preserved on reissues of the album and on anthology collections that gather his western material. It remains a useful example of how mid-20th-century country artists reinterpreted earlier cowboy songs for new audiences: respectful to the source, economical in arrangement, and committed to narrative clarity. For listeners exploring Robbins’s western catalog, “Cool Water” offers a quiet, atmospheric counterpoint to the dramatic gunfighter epics that surround it.