Cindy Walker was born on July 20, 1917, on her grandparents' farm near Mart, Texas (near Mexia, east of Waco), the daughter of a cotton-broker.

As a teenager, inspired by newspaper accounts of the dust storms on the American prairies in the mid-1930s, Walker wrote the song, "Dusty Skies" (later recorded by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys).

[3] In 1936, her "Casa de Mañana" was performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (as part of the Texas Centennial celebrations).

As they were driving down Sunset Boulevard she asked her father to stop the car near the Bing Crosby Enterprises building.

Walker later recalled: "I had decided that if I ever got to Hollywood, I was going to try to show Bing Crosby a song I had written for him called 'Lone Star Trail'".

[5] Walker went inside the building to pitch her song and emerged shortly afterward to ask her mother to play the piano for her.

The next day Cindy played guitar and sang “Lone Star Trail” for Bing Crosby at Paramount Studios (where he was making a movie).

[8] Among her other 1940s hits were "Triflin' Gal" (top-10 records for both Al Dexter and Walter Shrum, 1945);[9]: 104, 314  "Warm Red Wine" (Ernest Tubb, 1949),[9]: 355  and "Take Me in Your Arms and Hold Me" (Eddy Arnold, 1950).

[9]: 30  Some sources have erroneously attributed Johnny Bond's 1948 "Oklahoma Waltz" to her;[10] probably confusing it with her own 1947 composition of that name, co-written with and recorded by Spade Cooley.

In 1955 Eddy Arnold pitched Walker the theme and the song-title for "You Don't Know Me" when they met during a WSM deejay convention in Nashville.

[1] "You Don't Know Me" has been recorded by numerous artists over the years, most successfully by Jerry Vale (1956); Lenny Welch (1960); Ray Charles (1962); and Elvis Presley (1967).

[citation needed] In 1961 Eddy Arnold had a minor hit with Walker's "Jim, I Wore a Tie Today", a moving song about the death of a cowboy.

[14] Walker's song "In the Misty Moonlight" was a hit for both Jerry Wallace (1964) and Dean Martin (1967) as well as being recorded by Jim Reeves.

The women were selected for their contribution to the genre by a survey of hundreds of American artists and music historians and Walker was ranked No.

It was often reported that she never married, though in an interview with The New York Times shortly before her death, Walker stated she once had “a very short-lived marriage”.

After her stint in Los Angeles she returned to Texas in 1954, living in Mexia in a modest three-bedroom house with her widowed mother, Oree.

She typed her lyrics on a pink-trimmed manual typewriter and Oree helped work out melodies for her daughter's words.