When Billy Walker was building his early career as the “Traveling Texan, the Masked Singer of Country Songs,” he probably wondered if anyone would ever take him seriously. By the time he joined the Louisiana Hayride and shared the stage with Elvis Presley, he knew just how far he’d come.

Billy’s childhood story reads like a Woody Guthrie song. Born in the dusty West Texas town of Ralls, Billy lived through the Great Depression, drifting with his family from one town to the next. At the age of 13, his father gave him a dime to see a Gene Autry film, and thereafter he dreamed of becoming a singing cowboy. He plucked turkeys to earn enough money to buy his first guitar; after only two years of practice, he found a steady but unpaid singing job at a New Mexico radio station, hitchhiking 80 miles every week just to get to Clovis.

In 1949 he joined the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, where he was befriended by Hank Thompson who helped secure Billy’s first recording contract for Capitol Records. By 1952, Billy had become a mainstay on the Louisiana Hayride, even assisting in bringing Elvis Presley to the Shreveport program.

Although Billy charted intermittently throughout the ’50s, he had to wait until 1962 for his first No. 1 song. “Charlie’s Shoes” stayed on the charts for five months and led to a parade of hits including “Willie the Weeper,” “Heart, Be Careful,” “The Morning Paper” and the Western-tinged “Cross the Brazos at Waco.”

After a benefit concert in Kansas City in 1963, the Tall Texan narrowly avoided an encounter with the darker side of fame. After Billy received an urgent call to return home, Hawkshaw Hawkins, who also was performing that day, handed him his plane ticket and took a separate flight. That small private plane crashed 30 minutes from its final destination, killing Hawkins, Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes. For years, Billy carried a wound so deep that he couldn’t speak about the loss of his friends. One day, he realized the greatest tribute he could give was to continue singing.

A deeply devout man and a charismatic entertainer, Billy joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1960, introduced by Ernest Tubb. “It was electric,” Billy remembers. “It’s not every day that you get to be a part of history.”