The fall air was crisp and so much about my hometown was exactly as I’d left it after graduation in 1999. The city limit sign, still the same: Mexia, Texas. Population: a few thousand less people than when it was an oil boomtown in the roaring 1920s.
I loved to return as often as I could from where I now lived in the Austin area. On this particular day, I was making a bold, ambitious announcement as the invited speaker at the Rotary Club luncheon that meets every Thursday. The Rotarians gather at noon in a historic building downtown. I remember fondly the buzzing streets of commerce as we’d buy a new pair of Sunday shoes or the ladies dress shop where I worked as a teen. It was an idyllic childhood in small town Texas. Now, those businesses are gone. The love and nostalgia remain.
After a very hearty meal and a heaping helping of hospitality, I stepped to the podium. “Good afternoon, friends. As many of you know, I’m Lindsay Liepman. I grew up here in Mexia, Texas, and have spent more than two decades as a television news anchor and reporter.” I paused. There was no putting this jack back in the box. “But the greatest story never told is that of our hometown treasure Cindy Walker.”
I could feel the support in the room as heads were nodding. People who knew Country Music Hall of Fame Songwriter Cindy Walker during her lifetime were present. The former Chamber President Linda Archibald, who invited me to speak that day, had been working for years to honor Cindy’s legacy, even organizing a posthumous 100th birthday party at the Mexia Civic Center and a mural commissioned in her honor.
I took a deep breath and continued. “I have signed on to write, direct and produce a documentary on Cindy Walker.” A few eyebrows raised.
I had never met Cindy Walker during my childhood growing up in Mexia. I lived a few blocks away and would peck at my own typewriter as a budding journalist. Like so many others who “knew of her,” we didn’t disturb Miss Walker’s crepe myrtle-lined home with introductions or questions. She was able to live a quiet life far from the glitz of Hollywood or glamorous Nashville nights.
My singular goal with the Rotary announcement was to be able to find the Walker family. I knew Cindy didn’t have any children, but I wasn’t sure where her nieces lived and even though I proclaimed that I had “signed on” to tell her story, the truth was there wasn’t any signing needed. I soon learned, much like Cindy, sometimes boldly declaring what you intend to do, is all the permission you need.
A few years earlier, as a local news anchor in the Waco television market, I was interviewing Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson. When I told him I was from Mexia, he said, “The home of Cindy Walker,” in his deep baritone delivery. “It’s refreshing you didn’t mention our other famous blonde [Anna Nicole Smith],” I replied. We both had a chuckle.
“I wish someone would do a documentary on Cindy’s life. She was the first female songwriter inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The first female on the Country Music Association Board. She had an incredible career and people need to know who she was.”
Ray replied, “Why don’t you?”
I let that question burn inside of me for several years.
Immediately after my Rotary speech, a gentleman approached. He was a former classmate of Cindy’s niece Jerry and offered to contact her. News travels fast in a small town. I wasted no time pitching the documentary idea to Jerry who looped in her sister Molly, named after Cindy’s famous Bob Wills’ hit “Miss Molly.” The nieces contemplated my credentials and Mexia ties and said, “Yes!”
Cindy moved to Mexia in 1954 to a beautiful but modest white pier and beam home which favors traditional Mennonite craftsmanship, on what was the edge of town at the time. She bought the house sight unseen after her only brother, Aubrey Jr., phoned Cindy and their mother Oree in Hollywood. He wanted his three daughters to grow up knowing their grandmother and aunt. Cindy had enjoyed a meteoric rise to success as a songwriter in Hollywood for thirteen years prior. Her first cut, “Lone Star Trail,” went to Bing Crosby who was at the height of his fame at the time.
Driving down Sunset Boulevard, Cindy shouted for her daddy to, “Stop the car!” “I’m going to go pitch a song to Bing,” she declared. “You are squirrely girl if you think Bing Crosby is in that building,” Aubrey Sr. replied.
Cindy didn’t skip a beat. After all, the building did have the name “Crosby” etched on its facade. She ran up three flights of stairs and asked the receptionist to see Mr. Crosby who replied, “Which one?” Cindy landed on meeting with Larry Crosby because that is who the receptionist rattled off first when listing who was in the office that day. “Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist inquired. “Just tell him someone from Texas is here to see him,” said Cindy.
By Cindy’s retelling of the story in a 1990 Baylor Oral History interview, Larry seemed amused by the young songwriter but was hooked when she convinced Mama to accompany her on the piano while she sang “Lonestar Trail.”
She was invited to sing it for Bing the following day on the Paramount lot. Bing loved it too and it sparked a recording career, a stint in acting, and Cindy began a lifelong creative partnership with Bob Wills that produced more than 50 songs including “Cherokee Maiden,” “Bubbles in My Beer,” “Miss Molly,” “Going Away Party” and many more western swing classics.
The trip to Hollywood was originally a business trip for Aubrey Sr., who was a cotton broker. When Cindy’s parents asked if she wanted to go, she told the Music City News in 1976, “I was so busy stuffing songs into my bulging briefcase I almost forgot about packing my clothes.”
Cindy always knew someday, somebody would sing her songs. Somebody is right…including Bob Wills, Elvis Presley, Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Eddy Arnold, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and even pop artists like Cher.
Cindy wrote her first song at the age of twelve while growing up outside of Mart. She had a talent recognized by her mother early on and was in the Toyland Revue. She auditioned as a dancer in the famous Billy Rose Production at Casa Manana in Fort Worth. Cindy wrote the theme song for the radio broadcast of the show which was Amon G. Carter’s response to the Texas Centennial Celebration being held in Dallas in 1936. Carter’s plans to rival Dallas’ celebration birthed Casa Manana, “The House of Tomorrow,” and gave Cindy a taste of having her songs heard.
Once she and Mama moved to Mexia, it is where she spent the rest of her days until her passing in 2006. She wrote her biggest hits inside her upstairs writing studio including, “You Don’t Know Me,” a song originally cut by Eddy Arnold and re-recorded by Ray Charles in 1962. Each day Cindy would rise at 5:30 in the morning, make a cup of black coffee, and begin writing on a pink Royal typewriter she hand painted with flowers. The typewriter is now in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I wanted to take a good look at the house now. When we pulled up to 114 South brooks Street, my jaw dropped. The once beautiful grounds and garden were overgrown. The front porch facade was sagging and to my surprise the front door was wide open. I gasped. Has time and circumstance forgotten Cindy Walker? Why did her home look like this?
I couldn’t bear the thought that the hallowed grounds where a woman had made history would be abandoned like it never existed or hosted the likes of Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, Gene Autry and other stars who would get a square meal and a song at Cindy’s home.
I knew I couldn’t tell Cindy’s story and leave her home to rot. My journalistic instincts kicked in. First order of business, track down the owner.
My pecking around town revealed that when Cindy passed away, she left the home to her beloved caretaker Willie Mae Adkinson. Willie Mae died in 2019, and her only heir was her brother W.D. Adkinson. I found him at a Mexia apartment complex and asked why the home was in its current shape and if he’d consider selling it.
W.D. explained his wife’s cancer diagnosis, and his own financial priorities. He couldn’t maintain it but was waiting for a moment like this. Although, he thought a “big wig” from Nashville would be the likely buyer. No. I was from Mexia and felt a sense of duty.
In 2022, the Walker family and I formed the Cindy Walker Foundation to preserve and protect the legacy of Cindy Walker. After a successful fundraising campaign, the foundation purchased the property exactly one year after the Rotary lunch.
At closing, a relative of Willie Mae’s drew me to the side and whispered, “The music is in the file cabinet drawers. That’s a gift from Miss Cindy.” Immediately it gave me chills and tears to my eyes.
We weren’t just saving Cindy’s house. There was music inside that had never been recorded or published, possibly making it the greatest historic discovery of a songwriters’ catalog in modern history.
After several extensive community clean-ups, hundreds of Cindy’s original demos were saved from reel-to-reels, estimated to be from the late 1950s to early 1970s, Cindy’s songwriting prime. Among them, approximately 75 never recorded songs.
As Cindy was often called an “accidental feminist,” I considered myself an “accidental preservationist.”
The home’s critical repairs have been funded through multiple grants from the Summerlee Foundation, the Texas Historical Foundation and the City of Mexia. The home’s high priority repairs are now being fundraised largely through the annual Cindy Walker Days, a music festival in Mexia every summer in July surrounding Cindy’s birthday weekend.
In 2022, Preservation Texas named the Cindy Walker home to its most endangered list. In 2024, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it to America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
Not only was music discovered in the home, but a new archive of historic documents, clothing, furniture and items that tell Cindy’s story. Her Country Music Hall of Fame medallion was discovered in a trunk from the 1930s. Her Texas Country Music Hall of Fame plaque and other awards were underneath her mattress. The CWF also advocated for her induction into the national Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2024, she became the first posthumous inductee, even before Prince.
In her own words, Cindy had “no greater love” than writing songs which she did for more than five decades in Mexia, Texas.
During Cindy Walker Days, I enjoy taking busloads of out-of-towners down the familiar streets, to show them her house, her beloved Presbyterian church where her piano was restored by the CWF, the mural in her honor painted by Artist Calina Mishay in celebration of her 100th birthday and finally her resting place in the City of Mexia Cemetery.
Cindy’s headstone is a huge granite guitar where musicians leave guitar picks, yellow roses and thank you notes for all the music and joy she brought to the world.
I know someday it is the same soil where I will be buried too. I’ll be able to answer the question, did I do enough for our shared small town and the legacy of Cindy Walker. Because in giving back, there is no greater love.
