“The Greatest Country Songwriter I’ve Ever Heard:” The Story of Cindy Walker (Jul 30, 2023)

Harlan Howard is acknowledged as one of the most iconic—and successful—country songwriters of all time, but when an interviewer asked him who his favorite songwriter of all time was he didn’t hesitate and said, “Cindy Walker. She’s the greatest country songwriter I’ve ever heard.” That is high praise from the man who coined the phrase “three chords and the truth” as being the secret to a successful country song. Texan Cindy Walker embodied that tradition, but she was also much more. She penned some of the most successful country songs of her era, but she also wrote songs that were hits for people as diverse as Dean Martin, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, and Bing Crosby. Even Willie Nelson, in the late 1980s, once said, “About the only person I am in awe of is Cindy Walker. There is no one quite like her.”

Walker was born in 1918 on her grandparent’s farm near Mart. Her family—her father was a successful cotton broker and her mother an accomplished pianist who wrote church hymns—was fairly well off and she frequently accompanied her parents on business trips, which exposed her to a life beyond rural Texas. She made her “professional” debut in the music business when she was but seven when she sang and danced in a community Christmas pageant. She wrote her first song “Dusty Skies,” inspired by the harsh accounts of the Dust Bowl, when she was just twelve years old. During the summer when she was sixteen, her mother accompanied her to New York City where she spent those months dancing full-time in theater and nightclub empresario Billy Rose’s famed “Billy Rose Musical Hall.” Rose had a soft spot for the young Texan, and he encouraged her to expand her writing. Inspired by the showman, Walker wrote “Casa Mañana” that became a hit song for orchestra leader Paul Whiteman. Rose also gave the theater he built in Fort Worth for the Texas Centennial in 1936 the name of “Casa Mañana.

Walker’s father took her to Hollywood in 1941 when he was in California to sell cotton. While driving down famed Sunset Boulevard, Walker saw the “Crosby Building.” She implored her father to stop so she could go in and pitch Crosby some of her songs. Her father tried to explain that the famous crooner was surely not in the building, but she could not be deterred. Bing Crosby was not in the building, but Larry Crosby, Bing’s older brother was. She sang her song “Lone Star Trail” for him and, impressed, he took Cindy to Paramount Studios to perform for his brother. Bing Crosby was equally captivated and he would end up recording the song in 1942. The song’s success led Walker to live in California and while she continued to write her real dream was to become a recording artist. While she did have a minor hit with “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold,” which ironically she did not write (Wiley Walker—not related—and Gene Sullivan did). However, the timing was not right for Walker to make it as a solo artist. So, with her career as a singing artist somewhat stymied, Cindy Walker settled down to a life as a full-time songwriter.

Walker wrote mostly country songs—often referred to then in California as “western” music—and many of those became hits. Gene Autry recorded “Blue Canadian Rockies,” Ernest Tubb had a hit with Walker’s “Warm Red Wine,” and Bob Wills charted with “Cherokee Maiden.” But country acts were not the only ones who had hits with Cindy Walker songs of the 1940s and early 1950s. The Ames Brothers had a huge smash with her “China Doll,” and Mary Ford made a splash with “This is It.” Cindy Walker was certainly successful in California, but she was also homesick. Her father had passed away and so Walker moved back in with her mother in Mexia, where the family had moved when she was a young girl. While she would maintain a house in Nashville because her career took her there quite often. Cindy Walker would live in Mexia for the rest of her life (her mother would die in 1991).

Walker’s songwriting career would cater mostly to country acts for the rest of her career, although Dean Martin would score a hit with her “In The Misty Moonlight,” which was originally recorded by Jim Reeves. She wrote such hits as “Take Me in Your Arms and Hold Me,” “The Next Voice You Hear,” and “Dream Baby,” which became a monster hit for Roy Orbison. Walker noted that “Dream Baby,” which Orbison released in 1962, was a “simple song, repetitive, and not one I thought would do what it did.” But, she went on to offer that “Orbison did such a great job that I fainted the first time I heard him sing it.” Perhaps Walker’s most heralded and biggest selling song was “You Don’t Know Me,” a heart wrenching song of unrequited love that Eddy Arnold first recorded and made it into a hit, and one that Elvis Presley later included in his movie with Mary Tyler Moore, “Change of Habit.” Elvis’ version, of course, soared to the top of the charts, and Walker gave the “King of Rock-and-Roll” much of the credit. Such humility was also a Walker trait; despite her fame as a songwriter and the monetary rewards that came with it, she never moved from the three-bedroom house she had shared with her mother in Mexia, and visitors noted that the house was devoid of the numerous awards she had accumulated for her music. She rose every morning at 5:30, had a cup of coffee, and then ascended the stairs to the small studio she kept in a bedroom. She would spend the morning “tinkering,” as she once said, with songs until she found one that she thought “sounded right.”

Cindy Walker released her only solo album in 1964, titled “Words and Music.” It sold mildly, but musical artists praised her voice and songs and lamented that she had never really been able to mount a solo singing career. Ernest Tubb, a close friend until his death in 1984 remarked that “Cindy didn’t realize how good a singer she was—and a lot of other people didn’t either.” While the album’s sales disappointed her, she went right back to writing. Through the 1980s, she wrote songs recorded by the likes of Glenn Campbell, Ricky, Skaggs, and Ray Charles, who once called Walker, “the greatest talent too few people know about.”

The Country Music Hall of Fame (CMHOF) finally got around to inducting Cindy Walker in 1997, an award that fan Willie Nelson said was “at least a decade too late.” When interviewed about the honor the day afterward, Walker coyly remarked that “I actually belong to eight or nine halls of fame.” Perhaps it was her humble way of letting the CMHOF people that they were late to the party. Cindy’s health had begun to falter in the late 1980s and that slowed her some. By the time her mother died in 1991, Cindy Walker had settled into a life of quite retirement. She said in an interview in 2004 that she “missed Mama every day.” Cindy Walker, hailed as one of the greatest songwriters ever by the people who knew her best—artists that recorded her songs—passed away quietly at the age of 87 in Mexia in March 2006.    

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.