Cindy Walker's house: Texas music fans, Mexia boosters work to preserve famed songwriter's home

If songs were written for neglected houses, this would be a sad one. Leaking roof with missing shingles. Rotting floorboards under aged carpet. Floors littered with stained ceiling tiles. Rooms filled with decades-old furniture, tapes and CDs, trash and faded memories. Air heavy with the smell of mold, mildew and shut-up spaces.

If anyone could write such a song, though, the late Texas songwriter Cindy Walker could and it would be a personal one: The neglected house is hers, a two-story, faded white house on a quiet street in Mexia, her home for 52 years before her death at the age of 88 in 2006.

It's the place where Walker, a prolific songwriter, wrote some of her most famous songs, including "You Don't Know Me" recorded by Eddy Arnold and some 200 others and "Dream Baby," a smash hit for Roy Orbison, tapping out lyrics on her pink Remington manual typewriter in her second-floor work study.

And it's a place that fans hope to preserve for future generations as a tribute to her legacy and a point of pride for her adopted hometown.

Current efforts to save the house, believed built in the 1940s, spun out of a documentary-in-progress "You Don't Know Me: The Story of Cindy Walker," led by Central Texas broadcaster and Texas music advocate Lindsay Liepman.

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