Mexia: Cindy Walker Gravesite

At Mexia City Cemetery, near the entrance on Section 4, a pink granite guitar headstone rises from the flat Central Texas ground. This is the Cindy Walker gravesite Mexia locals have been visiting since April 2006, when the Texas Songbird died at 87. The stone, crafted by Riley-Gardner Monument of Hamilton, Texas, is unmistakable. Fans leave guitar picks at the base, yellow roses, folded thank-you notes for the songs.

Walker wrote more than 500 songs over six decades — “You Don’t Know Me,” “Distant Drums,” “Dreaming My Dreams,” “Dream Baby,” and hundreds more recorded by Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Bob Wills, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley. The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted her in 1997. The Songwriters Hall of Fame followed in 1995.

She died in Mexia, the same town where she’d lived and worked for more than 50 years, writing songs from the upright McPhail piano in the house on Brooks Street she shared with her mother. She never married. The music was the life.

The cemetery is at 1001 N. Kaufman Street in Mexia. Walker’s grave is to the right of the main entrance, four roads in — you’ll see the pink guitar before you need to check the section map. There is no admission charge.

Somewhere right now, “You Don’t Know Me” is playing on a radio, a streaming service, a piano in a bar. The woman who wrote it rests four roads in from the front gate, under a pink guitar, in a town most people have never heard of. That’s exactly how she would have wanted it.