Country Music Hall Of Fame Bequethed Legacy Of Cindy Walker

At a donation ceremony wreathed with her songs, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum yesterday paid tribute to 1997 Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Cindy Walker for an SRO audience of invited guests and Museum visitors.

Museum Director Kyle Young announced that when Walker died on March 23, 2006, she bequeathed the writer’s share of her 500-song catalog to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The largest percentage of our holdings has been donated,” Young said. “We are accustomed to gifts documenting or recalling the work of country music luminaries, but this is the first time we have ever received the actual work.”

Walker’s bequest included files and notebooks related to the songs, sheet music, photographs and business documents. Young explained that Walker, who was once married briefly and had no children, thought of her songs as her “babies.” In one of her files, Museum curators found Walker’s farewell note to her songs.

“Goodbye my darling,” she wrote. “You have been so good to me. You have made me rich and famous. I love you, you are the reason I am, and you are in the Hall of Fame. I will miss you. Goodbye, your girl, Cindy Walker.”

“Few things have served as a more emotional reminder of our responsibilities here than Cindy Walker’s note to her ‘babies,’” Young said.

Museum trustee David Conrad described the Museum’s plans for the Walker songs. Crediting the idea to Sony/ATV Music Publishing President-CEO Troy Tomlinson, also a member of the Museum’s Board of Officers and Trustees, Conrad announced plans for a 12-song Walker demo to be directed to film and television music supervisors. With Conrad as executive producer, volunteer producers Tony Brown, Fred Foster and Vince Gill will each produce four songs for the project.

“Each producer will choose artists from different music genres, who will be invited to create new arrangements of both Cindy’s immortal songs and some that are not so well known,” Conrad said. To pitch the songs, the Museum will take a list of 450 film and television supervisors, provided by Sony/ATV, and lead them to the demo recordings on a MySpace page. Conrad said that publishers of the selected songs will be invited to contribute to the recording budget. “Publishers will also be asked to either allow the Museum to negotiate sync rights, or to commit to making themselves readily accessible should the prospect of a deal arise,” he said.

Accompanied by images of Walker at various stages of her career, Young recounted her life from her youth in Waco, Texas, to her arrival and early professional career in Hollywood, and from her return to Texas and concomitant and fruitful embrace of the Nashville music scene to her death in 2003. He screened two of her Soundies, Election Day and Seven Beers with the Wrong Man. These were three-minute song-and-dance dramas that were screened between western movie double-features and played on video jukeboxes in the early 1940s. Walker helped pioneer these precursors of today’s music videos.

The celebration concluded with a musical salute to Walker presented by Nashville’s premier western swing unit, the Time Jumpers, who have kept a 10-year Monday night residency at the Station Inn that has fans lined up around the block before show time each week. Crowded close together in an intimate bluegrass style, the big swing band presented four songs from their standard repertoire including “Sugar Moon” with Kenny Sears on vocals, “You Don’t Know Me” with vocals by Carolyn Martin, “Miss Molly” with vocals by Ranger Doug, and “I Don’t Care” featuring the voice of Dawn Sears. Museum President Vince Gill joined the Time Jumpers to sing “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream).”