It is widely considered a genre classic for its gripping narrative which ends in the death of its protagonist, its shift from past to present tense, haunting harmonies by vocalists Bobby Sykes and Jim Glaser (of the Glaser Brothers) and the eloquent and varied Spanish guitar accompaniment by Grady Martin that lends the recording a distinctive Tex-Mex feel.

[5] The song is a first-person narrative told by a cowboy in El Paso, Texas, in the days of the Wild West.

The singer recalls how he frequented "Rosa's Cantina", where he became smitten with a young Mexican dancer named Feleena.

The song then fast-forwards to an undisclosed time later – the lyrics at this point change from past to present tense – when the singer describes the yearning for Feleena that drives him to return, without regard for his own life, to El Paso.

This version omitted a verse describing the cowboy's remorse over the "foul evil deed [he] had done" before his flight from El Paso.

Country music singer Keith Urban covered the song on the television special George Strait: ACM Artist of the Decade All Star Concert.

He spends six weeks romancing her and then, in a retelling of the key moment in the original song, beset by "insane jealousy", he shoots another man with whom she was flirting.

Their ghosts are heard to this day in the wind blowing around El Paso: "It's only the young cowboy showing Feleena the town".

"I don't recall who sang the song," he sings, but he feels a supernatural connection to the story: "Could it be that I could be the cowboy in this mystery...," he asks, suggesting a past life.

Robbins wrote it while flying over El Paso in, he reported, the same amount of time it takes to sing—four minutes and 14 seconds.

Robbins intended to do one more sequel, “The Mystery of Old El Paso", but he died in late 1982 before he could finish the final song.