Billy Walker, originating from western Texas, built his profile through regular Grand Ole Opry appearances after rising amid the fertile Dallas music community of the late 1940s and early 1950s. A brief Capitol association preceded his 1951 Columbia contract, signed at nearly the identical moment as Ray Price. Walker, Price, and Lefty Frizzell all worked at Dallas’s storied Jim Beck studio, a room whose influence on 1950s honky tonk matched what Sun Studio in Memphis later achieved for rockabilly. Even so, virtually all of his dozen-plus Top Ten entries materialized in Nashville beginning in the 1960s, a setting that aligned more closely with his smooth tenor.
Born on a farm, Walker entered an orphanage after his mother’s death and rejoined his remarried father at age eleven. Guitar lessons from his father, followed by a Gene Autry film, fixed his goal of becoming a singer. At fifteen he broadcast from Clovis radio; two years later he performed as the “Traveling Texan” on KRLD’s Big D Jamboree in Dallas. Capitol held his contract from 1949 to 1951, yet his first U.S. country chart appearance arrived only with Columbia’s 1954 release “Thank You for Calling.” He dropped the “Traveling Texan” identity, joined both the Louisiana Hayride and the Ozark Jubilee, and from 1960 onward maintained a regular Grand Ole Opry slot.
Walker became the first artist to record Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” and steered another Nelson song, “Crazy,” to Patsy Cline. His initial country number one came in 1962 with “Charlie’s Shoes.” Later successes comprised “Cross the Brazos at Waco,” “A Million to One,” “Sundown Mary,” “She Goes Walking Through My Mind,” and “Sing Me a Love Song to Baby,” followed by a string of modest placements on assorted labels, including his own Tall Texan imprint. By the close of 1988 he had amassed sixty-five U.S. country chart entries, among them duets with Barbara Fairchild on “The Answer Game” and “Let Me Be the One.” His own catalog included the Marty Robbins tribute “He Sang the Songs About El Paso.” A born-again Christian, Walker observed, “Current crossover trends are like mixing chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla in the same bowl. Not only is it an ugly color but it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.” In May 2006 an automobile accident on an Alabama interstate south of Montgomery ended his life; his wife and two bandmembers also died, while his twenty-one-year-old grandson sustained serious injuries.
