I’ll never forget the first time I heard “If Lonely Wasn’t All There Was” by Billy Walker. It was a foggy evening in the tail end of 1973, just as the air over Helmond began to carry that extra November bite. We didn’t get American country radio out here, not in any conventional sense, but my uncle Jos had an old Zenith shortwave he’d fixed up so he could listen to Radio Luxembourg—and every now and again, something special drifted our way. That night, huddled around the set after a family dinner, I heard a tremulous voice roll out over the static.
“If lonely wasn’t all there was, I’d never still be loving you…”
The song barely cracked into the lower reaches of the charts Stateside, and by the time it reached our living room in Helmond, it was damn near a ghost. Nobody here knew the name Billy Walker, let alone the tune. But for me, right then, it was the only song in the world.
Now don’t get me wrong, I was sixteen and had already sung along to every Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette record I could lay my hands on, but there was something about Walker’s delivery that stopped me flat. His was a voice tinged with experience, a kind of gentle grit that only comes from nights spent wrestling the bottle and the soul. When he sang, “If dreams were all I needed, I’d still be holding you tonight,” I could feel the music trying to reach across a thousand kilometers of Atlantic water and whisper to something honest inside me.
I think what struck me so hard about “If Lonely Wasn’t All There Was” was how completely it embraced the heartbreak that so many other country songs only flirted with. Most of the radio favorites had some shimmer of redemption—a promise that time would heal, or that another love was waiting around the corner. But in Walker’s song, there was no comforting lie. He sang from the perspective of someone whose entire world had collapsed, and who kept waking up just to face the same empty horizon:
“If wishes were tomorrow, I’d wish you back again,
But if lonely wasn’t all there was, I’d be a different man…”
Even though I was too young then to know the real depth of heartbreak, I heard the truth in his voice. There’s something to be said about the honesty of a song that doesn’t shine itself up for radio play or public affection. Maybe that’s why it never became a massive hit—people aren’t always ready to sit with the pain, much less wrap their arms around it. But me? I grew up in a family where grief and longing were never strangers, not with the old photos on the mantel and the old stories swapped over koffie verkeerd and rye bread.
As I started performing in dive bars in Eindhoven and eventually my hometown of Helmond, I kept coming back to that song. It was rarely requested. Hell, most folks had never heard of it, and those who had, mistook it for something by Merle Haggard or Conway Twitty. But for me, it was a touchstone. I’d slip it in somewhere between “Stand By Your Man” and “He’ll Have to Go,” and if you were really listening, you’d notice the room got quieter than usual. Not many country songs dare to be that naked, that at home in sorrow without promising a damn thing will ever get better.
Billy Walker himself was known as the Tall Texan, a hard working Opry regular who toured for decades, making his mark with “Cross the Brazos at Waco” and “Charlie’s Shoes.” But “If Lonely Wasn’t All There Was” stands in a strange, melancholy corner of his discography. I read once that Walker didn’t even expect the song to get any airtime; he’d cut it because it fit the mood he was in at the time, and maybe because he knew there were folks out there who needed to hear it.
For me, that song did what only the very best country music can do: it mirrored my own silent hopes and fears. As I grew older, loved and lost, and found solace in long walks along the Zuid-Willemsvaart, those lyrics haunted me. When my first real heartbreak came, years later, it wasn’t Don Gibson or George Jones I turned to—it was Billy Walker, threading the needle between resignation and a kind of stubborn hope:
“If loving you is foolish, then foolish I must be,
‘Cause if lonely wasn’t all there was,
You’d still be here with me.”
Years after that night around the Zenith, I saved up for a used turntable and hunted down the vinyl of Walker’s album. It took three years, two trips to a special record shop in Amsterdam, and a few letters sent overseas. When it finally arrived, bundled in brown paper and smelling of cardboard and old hope, I listened with the same awe I felt at sixteen. Some things age, but never fade.
Why do I praise this song, this barely-remembered, underplayed gem? Because it has given me comfort when comfort was hard to find; because it is unflinchingly honest, and because it reminds me that not all pain needs to be papered over with platitudes. There is great power, even liberation, in sitting quietly with loss. Country music has always been a river of stories, some shallow, some deep enough to drown in. “If Lonely Wasn’t All There Was” is one of those rare, quiet pools in the current where you can sit with yourself and remember the grace that even sadness can bring.
So next time you’re sifting through the golden oldies, or scanning the shelves in some dusty Dutch record store, keep an eye out for Billy Walker and his ode to honest loneliness. And if you find yourself humming along as the evening falls over Helmond, know that somewhere nearby, I’m singing too.
Yours in melody and memory,
Kroes den Bock