One songwriter to another

THE first question country music fans, especially young ones, will have about Willie Nelson’s new album, “You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker” (in stores March 14), is likely to be “Cindy who?”

Walker hasn’t received as much recognition as other revered Texas songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Nelson himself. But she was there before all of them, writing hits for Gene Autry (“Blue Canadian Rockies”), Bob Wills (“Cherokee Maiden,” “Bubbles in My Beer”), Roy Orbison (“Dream Baby [How Long Must I Dream]”) and, with Eddy Arnold, the Nelson album’s title song, which was also a haunting hit for Ray Charles in 1962.

“Cindy and I are old friends,” Nelson says. “I had always wanted to do an album of her songs, I just never did it. She was inducted into the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame [in 1998], and I saw her again there, which reminded me that I needed to do it.”

Nelson sounds more inspired than he has in years on the collection, which he says was easy to assemble from the hundreds of songs written by Walker, who at 87 is hospitalized. “Looking at the titles was all I had to do, because I know them all so well.... I just picked my favorites.”

-- Randy Lewis