This song was known as the ‘Texas national anthem.’ The writer was from Fort Worth.

“Far across the blue waters ...”

If you are of a certain age and taste in music you know the rest of that lyric:

“lives an old German’s daughter.”

The year was 1957. The song was “Fraulein,” and it brought country music immortality to its writer:

Fort Worth’s Lawton Williams.

Lawton Edgar Williams was born in Tennessee in 1922, son of a fiddle-playing sharecropper. Music-making appealed to Lawton more than sharecropping, so he traded his hoe for a hoedown and began to perform locally. While he was in the Army during World War II he began writing songs. Williams wrote, performed and recorded in the late 1940s but without much success.

Then he wrote a song inspired by his broken romance with “a little blonde-headed German girl” he met during World War II. In the song the fraulein is in Germany, but during the war Williams had actually been stationed in Houston.

By 1948 Williams had rebounded from that broken romance and married Jeanette Crews.

When Williams wrote “Fraulein” he and Jeanette were living in Poly at 3432 Avenue D, just east of Texas Wesleyan University.

Then came 1957. Singer Bobby Helms, freshly signed to the Decca record label, recorded and released “Fraulein” as a single in January. The song resonated with ex-GIs who had been in Europe during the war. “Fraulein” hit the country chart in February. And it stayed there a full year. And you didn’t have to be “country” to know of the old German’s daughter. “Fraulein” crossed over to the pop chart and rose to no. 16. “Fraulein” was named Country Song of the Year at the Billboard and Cashbox awards in 1957.

The song came to be known as the “Texas national anthem” because of its two-stepability and was credited by some with reviving national interest in country music. WBAP deejay Bill Mack later said: “One thing about ‘Fraulein,’ many people say that was the song that turned country music around in 1957. When Hank Williams died [in 1953] the bottom dropped out. ‘Fraulein’ got us going again.”

“Fraulein” made Lawton Williams a 10-year overnight success.

After the Helms hit, “Fraulein” would be recorded by many artists, including Ernest Tubb, Hank Locklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley, Willie Nelson, Boxcar Willie, Steve Lawrence, Roger Miller and Conway Twitty. Townes Van Zandt also recorded “Fraulein.” And Kitty Wells recorded an “answer song”: “I’ll Always Be Your Fraulein.” And, yes, if you are wondering if “Fraulein” was ever recorded in Mandarin Chinese, Singapore singer/songwriter Fu Suyin did just that in 1967.

Williams continued to record, but he is remembered for the songs he wrote that were recorded by others. Many other artists had hit records with Lawton Williams songs, including Hank Locklin (“Paper Face” and “Geisha Girl,” an Asian equivalent of the Teutonic “Fraulein”), Jim Reeves (“Señor Santa Claus”), Gene Watson and Little Jimmy Dickens (“Farewell Party”) and George Jones and Elvis Costello (“Color of the Blues,” co-written with Jones).

In 1991 Williams was honored with a star on the Walk of Fame at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. He died in 2007.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.