Marty Robbins: “Making Believe”—The Quiet Agony of a Love Lived Only in the Mind’s Eye
There’s a beautiful tragedy in certain country songs, a kind of deep, resigned melancholy that speaks volumes to those who have loved deeply and lost completely. Marty Robbins’s recording of “Making Believe” is one of those timeless tracks. While the song is indelibly linked to its original artist, the great Kitty Wells, who turned it into a monumental, career-defining smash hit in 1955, Robbins’s cover, which appeared on his 1958 album, “Marty Robbins’ Greatest Hits,” brought his signature smooth, yet subtly aching delivery to the sorrowful material.
It’s vital to place this song in its historical context. “Making Believe” was written by Jimmy Work and recorded first by him in 1955, but it was Kitty Wells‘s version that truly broke the mold, soaring to No. 2 on the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart and holding strong there for many weeks. When Marty Robbins took it on a few years later, he wasn’t just covering a popular tune; he was interpreting a modern classic that was already woven into the fabric of country music heartbreak. While Robbins’s version didn’t challenge Wells’s chart dominance, his rendition is a masterful performance, showing his ability to infuse established material with his own distinctive, velvety sorrow.
For those of us who appreciate the architecture of a perfectly crafted sad song, the story behind “Making Believe” is rooted in the most painful kind of heartbreak: the one you endure in silence. The lyrics describe a person trapped in the wake of a lost relationship, forced to conjure up the illusion of their lover’s presence just to get through the day. The core message is in the title itself: “I’m making believe that you still love me / It’s foolish, I know, but it keeps me from crying.”
This is the meaning that cuts so deep, especially as we age and recognize the intricate ways the heart copes with absence. It’s the solitary, private ritual of grief—the imaginary conversations, the habit of reaching for an empty spot in the bed, the pretense maintained for the sake of survival. Robbins delivers this quiet desperation with a remarkable restraint. Unlike the more forceful honky-tonk delivery of Wells, his voice is warm, almost tender, suggesting a gentle soul utterly undone by love. The heartache isn’t shouted; it’s confided.
Listen to the production—the simple, elegant steel guitar weeps softly beneath his vocal, underscoring the melancholy without ever overpowering the narrative. This stripped-down approach was a hallmark of the Nashville sound he often employed, letting the sincerity of the performance be the primary emotional vehicle. His performance transforms the song from a sharp cry of pain into a long, quiet sigh of surrender.
For the older listener, “Making Believe” evokes a powerful wave of nostalgia, not just for the musical era itself, but for those universal moments in our own lives when the memory of someone felt more real and more comforting than the reality of their absence. It reminds us that love, even when gone, leaves an echo so strong that sometimes, the only way to feel whole is to step back into the beautiful, fragile lie of what used to be. It is a testament to Marty Robbins‘s artistry that he could take a song already owned by the “Queen of Country” and make its heartbreak feel so intimately his own.