"El Paso" pops up in country music quite often, since it's one of a few border towns where western US and Mexican cultures mix - as it's imagined they did in the good ol' cowboy days; it's small enough that practically nobody's ever been there, so you don't have to be too fussy about getting the street intersections all just right; and it's easy to rhyme with at least a few words.

In other words, facts don't matter - everybody knows and recognizes that it's the classical generic "cowboy town." If you're into "country," you don't have to have been born there, or ever have lived there, to "be from El Paso."

This isn't meant to argue about Marty Robbins' background. He's country, he can be from El Paso if he wants to. It's a tradition.

The El Malpais National Monument cited above is possibly the area most often intended by references to "The Badlands," but there are quite a number of other areas that are known, at least locally, by the same name. Usually, the reference is to any area with virtually no vegetation, no water, and irregular land - canyons/arroyos - making travel difficult. In other words, where only desparate humans would go. In the context of the Robbins songs, it's probably the "generic meaning" intended, rather than a reference to a specific monument.

For those who haven't been there, it's probably impossible to conceive of how much/many "badlands" are in the US Southwest. (In the opinion of some, most of western Texas and Oklahoma, New Mexico, southern Arizona, all of Nevada, and a fair bit of California and eastern Washington and Oregon are "bad," in much of the last sense. but there may be some sarcasm in that suggestion.)

John