Shortly after returning from World War II, Marty Robbins walked into an Arizona ice cream parlor and told his friend he was going to marry the girl behind the counter.

When the 1950 United States Census recorded 24-year-old Martin David Robinson and his 19-year-old wife, Marizona, in a small rear apartment at 704 North Third Street in Glendale, Arizona, they were raising an infant son on manual labor wages. Thirty-two years later, that marriage remained the anchor of Marty Robbins’s life in Brentwood, Tennessee, through 94 charted country singles, NASCAR stock car seasons, and three heart surgeries.

Born September 26, 1925, in Glendale, Robbins grew up in the Arizona desert and left home at age 17 to serve in the United States Navy during World War II. After piloting landing craft in the Solomon Islands and teaching himself guitar in the Pacific, he returned to Glendale following his discharge in early 1946.

Shortly after coming home, he walked into Upton’s Ice Cream Parlor at the northeast corner of Glendale and 58th Avenues, where 15-year-old Marizona Baldwin was working behind the counter. Before he even learned her name, Robbins turned to his friend and announced he was going to marry her, while Marizona later recalled feeling that same certainty the moment she saw him smile at the door.

Born in Phoenix on September 11, 1930, to Louis and Jeannette Baldwin, Marizona was five years younger than the former sailor. Robbins courted her with her parents’ blessing and waited until two weeks after her 18th birthday before they married on September 27, 1948.

During their early married life in Glendale and Phoenix, Robbins took whatever work he could find to support Marizona and their son, Ronald Canson Robinson, born in 1949. He dug ditches, delivered milk, drove trucks, and worked as a mechanic by day while playing nightclubs around the Salt River Valley under the stage name Jack Robinson to keep his churchgoing mother from finding out.

Marizona pushed her husband to leave day labor behind and pursue music full-time. Within a few years, he landed a regular radio slot on KTYL in Mesa and hosted his own local television program, Western Caravan, on KPHO-TV in Phoenix.

When Grand Ole Opry star Little Jimmy Dickens visited Phoenix in 1951 and appeared on Robbins’s television show, Marizona helped encourage the meeting that led Columbia Records executives to sign him that autumn. His first Top 10 hit, “I’ll Go Alone,” arrived in 1952, prompting the young family to relocate to Tennessee when he joined the Grand Ole Opry in January 1953.

Even after settling in the Nashville area, the couple drove back across West Texas every December so Marizona and Ronny could spend Christmas with their relatives in Arizona. During their December 1956 holiday drive home through El Paso, Robbins began piecing together the melody and border-town narrative that became his signature 1959 crossover hit, “El Paso”.

That same year, 1959, the couple welcomed their second child, daughter Janet, completing their household south of Nashville in Brentwood in Williamson County. While Robbins kept a late-night schedule of cross-country concerts, studio sessions, and NASCAR Grand National races at tracks like Daytona and Talladega, Marizona stayed out of the industry spotlight to run their home and raise Ronny and Janet.

Her husband’s health brought a permanent weight into their Tennessee house in August 1969, when Robbins suffered a severe heart attack at age 43 and became one of the early Americans to undergo triple coronary artery bypass surgery in January 1970. Looking at how much time he had spent on highways and racetracks while Marizona held the family together, Robbins wrote “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” in praise of her hands and quiet loyalty.

Released in February 1970, the ballad reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, crossed into the pop Top 50, and won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song in March 1971. When fans and reporters praised the tenderness of the record, Robbins openly credited the woman waiting for him at home in Brentwood.

On October 11, 1982, Marizona watched her husband enter the Country Music Hall of Fame just seven weeks before he suffered a third major heart attack on December 2. She remained beside his bed at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville until he died on December 8, 1982, at age 57, ending their 34-year marriage.

Only 52 when she was widowed, Marizona stayed in Brentwood for the next 19 years, looking after his catalog and memory until she passed away on July 10, 2001, at age 70. She was buried beside her husband at Nashville’s Woodlawn Memorial Park, resting next to the Navy veteran who had chosen her across an ice cream counter in Glendale more than half a century earlier.