From KUTX:
On July 20, 1918, songwriter Cindy Walker was born near Mart, east of Waco. She was always an entertainer and joined a touring vaudeville troupe by age ten. In 1936, at 18, she took part in the Texas Centennial celebrations in Fort Worth with Billy Rose’s Casa Mañana Revue.
While on a family trip to Los Angeles in 1940, Walker spied a building on Sunset Boulevard bearing the name “Crosby.” Assuming, correctly, that this was the site of Bing Crosby’s offices, Cindy convinced her dubious parents to stop, talked her way into a meeting, and ended up with a publishing and recording deal. Bing Crosby charted with “Lone Star Trail,” the song Walker presented that afternoon.
The next year Walker had a similar stroke of luck when she saw the Texas Playboys’ bus parked in Hollywood. She had been hoping to pitch some tunes to Bob Wills, and here he was. She met him, launching a songwriting collaboration for the ages that yielded Western swing standards “Bluebonnet Lane,” “Cherokee Maiden,” and “Bubbles in My Beer.”
Once established in country music, Walker placed songs with Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, and, perhaps most significantly, the 1955 song Eddy Arnold made a country classic, “You Don’t Know Me.”
Her decades-long string of successes included Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby” as well as “Blue Canadian Rockies,” first recorded by Gene Autry and later on the Byrds’ country-rock masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Though she was much in demand in the offices of LA and Nashville, she chose to live in a modest home back in the Central Texas town of Mexia. In recent years, the Cindy Walker Foundation has taken efforts to preserve the home as a historic site, a fitting remembrance of this prolific, essential songwriter.
