Roy “Dixie” Walker’s story begins a long way from Heinemann Park and the old Southern Association box scores that sometimes still list him only as “Walker, p.” It starts in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, in 1893, with a boy who grew up between a small county seat on Jackson’s Military Road and the industrial neighborhoods of East Nashville, then spent the next three decades trying to control a fastball that had more life than he did.
By the time he died in New Orleans in 1962, newspapers were calling him one of the all time pitching greats of the old New Orleans Pelicans. One obituary credited him with twenty six wins in a single season and treated his name as part of the city’s baseball folklore.
In between those endpoints came a teenager’s leap from the Appalachian League to the majors, a sensational Nashville stabbing case that nearly ended his career before it began, a long run as a Southern Association strikeout artist, and a lifetime of confusion with another, more famous “Dixie Walker” who patrolled right field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
This is the Appalachian and Gulf South life behind the name: James Roy Walker of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, the original Dixie Walker of New Orleans.
Lawrenceburg Roots And East Nashville Sandlots
Modern reference works agree on the basics. James Roy Walker was born April 13, 1893, in Lawrenceburg, the seat of Lawrence County in southern Middle Tennessee. Lawrence County itself was a relatively young place, carved out in 1817, tied to the traffic along Jackson’s Military Road, and proud of early settlers like David Crockett.
Census-based research summarized by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) shows Roy as the third of six children born to Daniel and Ottie Walker, both Tennessee natives. Daniel worked as a furniture maker. Soon after Roy’s birth the family left Lawrenceburg for East Nashville, joining thousands of other rural Tennesseans who moved toward the growing cities along the rail lines.
For a boy who would stand around six foot one and about one hundred eighty pounds, according to later baseball cards and stat sites, East Nashville offered a new kind of playground. The city’s amateur and semi pro diamonds gave working class teenagers a chance to be seen, and by 1910 Roy was making a name for himself in the local City League.
Newspaper summaries preserved in the SABR biography describe him starring for the Geo. Moore & Sons team, where he not only pitched but also hit with surprising power. In one heavily covered game he struck out a string of batters while also slugging two home runs, the sort of performance that made local sports editors describe him as a coming professional.
That promise brought him to the attention of the Nashville Vols of the Southern Association. StatsCrew’s reconstruction of the 1911 Vols shows an eighteen year old “Roy Walker, R R, 6’1″, 180, born April 13, 1893 in Lawrenceburg, TN” making his professional debut with a single decision and a modest earned run average. It was hardly a breakout season, but it placed his name in the minor league registers and moved him firmly into the professional orbit.
Bristol, The Appalachian League, And A Big League Debut
In 1912 Walker stepped fully into the world that would define his twenties. Nashville farmed him out to Bristol of the Appalachian League, a Class D circuit that wound through the hills of Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The level was low, but the scouting attention was intense. Major league clubs could pick up a promising teenager from the mountains for a fraction of what an established Southern Association star might cost.
Contemporary box scores, as compiled by SABR and later statistical databases, credit Walker with a no hitter for Bristol against Asheville that summer and several other dominant outings. Those performances convinced the Cleveland Naps of the American League to purchase his contract late in the season.
Baseball Reference and MLB’s official player page both record that Roy Walker made his big league debut for Cleveland on September 16, 1912. He appeared once in relief, then disappeared from the American League stage. For many prospects that sort of brief, untidy debut would have simply meant more seasoning in the high minors.
For Walker it was almost the last major league appearance he would ever make.
“Roy Walker, Baseball Pitcher, Gets 10 Years”
When the 1912 season ended he returned to Nashville. There, in a city already uneasy with youth gangs and saloon fights, he became part of a case that ripped through the local press.
On December 13, 1912 the Augusta Daily Herald ran a wire story from Tennessee under the blunt headline “Roy Walker, Baseball Pitcher, Gets 10 Years.” The brief report identified him as “the baseball pitcher belonging to the Cleveland American League team” and stated that he and two other Nashville youths had been convicted on two counts of assault with intent to kill brothers Tom and Ben Northern after a stabbing in August. All three, the article said, were sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary and had been captured in Peoria, Illinois after fleeing Nashville.
SABR’s reconstruction, drawing heavily from The Tennessean and other Nashville papers, fills in the local detail. Walker and his companions were portrayed as part of a rough street set. The altercation with the Northern brothers escalated from a fight into a knife attack serious enough that prosecutors sought long prison terms.
The Augusta report and Nashville coverage are classic primary sources for Roy Walker’s life. They tie the promising young pitcher directly to a specific criminal conviction and a ten year sentence at a moment when national baseball writers were still calling him one of Cleveland’s most interesting prospects.
Taken at face value, that sentence should have ended his baseball career and quite possibly altered his life forever. In practice, the story took a different turn.
From Ten Years To Ninety Days
By early 1913 district officials and Walker’s lawyers had petitioned for leniency. The precise legal maneuvers survive in scattered court items and sports columns rather than in a single narrative, but newspapers pieced together by SABR and later researchers agree on the outcome.
The original ten year sentence to the state prison was reduced on review to roughly ninety days in the Davidson County workhouse, plus a fifty dollar fine and court costs. A sports column in the Atlanta Georgian noted in late January 1913 that Walker was “now serving a ninety day sentence in the workhouse,” tying him back to Nashville’s sporting community even while he worked off time on the county road gang. That short paragraph, read today, is a near perfect example of how local sports pages double as social history sources.
County workhouses in this period usually supplied labor for road construction and other public projects. Prisoners were often loaned out under a convict labor system that linked punishment, debt, and infrastructure. Tennessee’s counties used that labor heavily, and by the nineteen teens critics were already attacking the system’s abuses, particularly its disproportionate impact on poor and working class defendants.
For baseball historians, the workhouse record matters because it explains what SABR calls the “three months in a workhouse” that separated Walker’s first big league appearance in 1912 from his return to organized ball. For Appalachian and Southern historians, it also adds another name to the long list of young men whose lives bent around the intersection of violence, alcohol, and a punitive justice system that combined very harsh sentences with sometimes dramatic acts of clemency.
On March 13, 1913, the local press reported that Walker had completed his term and was back on the street. Within weeks he was in uniform again.
Pelican Blue, “Much Smoke, Little Control”
Cleveland, perhaps relieved that its young pitcher was free but wary of the headlines he attracted, assigned Walker to the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association for the 1913 season.
Sporting Life, the national baseball weekly, noticed the move. A short item from that summer, preserved in digitized issues, ran under a line that paraphrased local sentiment: plenty of speed, not much control. The piece described Walker’s blazing fastball and wildness and announced that he had been sent to New Orleans, “where they hope to make a pitcher of him.”
New Orleans turned out to be both the making and the undoing of Roy Walker.
He fit the city on the field. Over multiple stints with the Pelicans between 1913 and 1922 he became one of the Southern Association’s premier strikeout pitchers. SABR, drawing on Pelicans scorebooks and local newspapers, notes that he led or ranked near the top of the league in strikeouts in several seasons, with one twentieth century historian crediting him with more than two hundred punchouts in 1920 alone.
As early as the nineteen teens, New Orleans fans and writers had started calling him “Dixie” Walker. The nickname stuck. MLB’s modern bio lists his full name as James Roy Walker with “Dixie” as his nickname, echoing what Southern Association sportswriters had been using for decades.
Off the field, the Crescent City gave him a different kind of reputation. SABR’s biography, built on extensive New Orleans Item and Times Picayune coverage, portrays a talented but erratic pitcher who quarreled with managers, reported late, and lived a fast social life. New Orleans sources describe salary disputes, missed trains, and a messy divorce that ended his first marriage.
The tension between what he could do on the mound and everything else in his life would follow him for the rest of his career.
Back To The Big Leagues: Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis
Walker’s performance in New Orleans and the high minors was strong enough that he kept getting second chances in the majors. Baseball Reference and the SABR game logs show him pitching for the Cleveland club, now called the Indians rather than the Naps, in 1915, then for the Chicago Cubs in 1917 and 1918, and finally for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1921 and 1922.
Across six big league seasons he appeared in ninety one games, starting forty eight, with a career record of seventeen wins and twenty seven losses and an earned run average of 3.99. He struck out one hundred forty eight batters and walked many more than his managers liked, a pattern in keeping with the Sporting Life assessment that had tagged him as “much smoke” years before.
One of his most documented days on a mound came in May 1915, when he faced the New York Yankees at Cleveland’s League Park. The SABR Games Project’s reconstruction of that contest shows Walker making his first major league start of the year against Jack Warhop, a sinkerballer who had given up Babe Ruth’s first career home run six days earlier.
Walker pitched what the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “star game” but walked seven batters. In the seventh inning, two New York runners reached on a single and an error, then Roger Peckinpaugh tripled to the corner and eventually scored on a wild pitch. New York’s 4–2 win also featured a rare triple play in the eighth. The SABR account notes that the game stories, especially in New York newspapers, could not resist mentioning Walker’s past, describing him as temperamental and reminding readers that his earlier career had been interrupted by a stint in a workhouse after a Nashville stabbing conviction.
For a pitcher from Lawrenceburg and East Nashville, it was a strange kind of national fame. Box scores only record his walks and hits allowed. The game stories carry the shadow of Nashville’s 1912 trial.
A Dixie In The Crescent City, And Another In Brooklyn
By the early nineteen twenties, New Orleans sportswriters and fans spoke of “Dixie” Walker as a Pelicans institution. Team histories and the New Orleans Baseball site point out that he starred for the club during pennant runs and that he ranked among the franchise’s all time great pitchers.
In 1962, when he died in Charity Hospital after a long illness, the Shreveport Times obituary identified him as “James Roy (Dixie) Walker, 69, one of the all time pitching greats of the defunct New Orleans Pelicans,” and recalled a season in which he won twenty six games. Baseball Almanac and Baseball Reference both give his death date as February 10, 1962 in New Orleans and record his burial in Garden of Memories Cemetery in suburban Metairie.
By then, however, his nickname had been partially stolen.
In major league memory, “Dixie Walker” usually means Fred “Dixie” Walker, the Brooklyn Dodgers right fielder who won a batting title in the nineteen forties and later became notorious for opposing Jackie Robinson’s entry into the National League.
The overlap has confused fans and writers for decades. In 1960 Sports Illustrated’s readers section, “The 19th Hole,” printed a letter from an alert fan pointing out that the Dixie Walker who managed and played in New Orleans was not the Dodgers outfielder and that the Pelicans’ Dixie was actually pitcher Roy Walker, whose big league years had come with Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis. SABR’s biography cites that exchange as a key modern reminder that our subject is a different man entirely.
Even databases have struggled. Modern sites like Seamheads and Retrosheet maintain a page for “James Roy Walker (Dixie)” that ties his height, weight, and Lawrenceburg birth to a set of 1921 Negro League game logs. That linkage may reflect genuine crossover appearances in segregated baseball or may be a case where records from similarly named pitchers were merged. The log confirms that box scores from Black baseball in 1921 included a pitcher named Roy or James Walker. Whether every one of those lines belongs to the Lawrence County native remains a question for future researchers armed with more local newspapers and team documents.
What is clear is that there were at least two Dixie Walkers and more than one Roy Walker in early twentieth century baseball, a fact that forces historians and genealogists to be very careful when matching statistics, stories, and graves.
Genealogical Breadcrumbs And Lawrence County Memory
That caution shows up even in local genealogy work. In 2005 a researcher named Lane Walker posted a query to the Lawrence County TNGenWeb site asking for help with “Roy Walker, born in Lawrenceburg, TN 4-13-1893… He played Major League Baseball in Cleveland in 1915 & St. Louis in 1921. According to official baseball info he died in New Orleans 2-10-1962.”
The query itself has become a small but telling primary source. It shows that by the early twenty first century at least one Walker family researcher was tracing the Lawrenceburg born pitcher through Baseball Reference and other stat sites back to local roots. It also highlights how hard it can be to push beyond those basics without access to county level records.
For anyone following that trail, the Lawrence County Archives and the Lawrence County Public Library’s local history room offer logical next steps. The Archives, now based in Leoma just south of Lawrenceburg, preserves permanent county records, including loose court papers, record books, and an extensive microfilm collection. The library’s Lawrence County Room adds more than nine hundred local history and genealogy volumes and hundreds of family files, including materials that have never been digitized.
Together with state level repositories and federal census returns, those local collections make it possible to confirm the picture sketched by SABR and baseball reference sites: a Walker family that left Lawrenceburg for East Nashville, a young man whose teenage talent brought him into the Southern Association, and a life that moved back and forth between small Tennessee towns, major league cities, and the Gulf Coast.
An Appalachian Baseball Life In A Wider Frame
Roy “Dixie” Walker’s on field numbers are easy to summarize. The stat line on his MLB page lists him as a right handed pitcher with a seventeen and twenty seven major league record, a 3.99 earned run average, and one hundred forty eight strikeouts in three hundred eighty six innings.
His off field life, reconstructed from scattered court notices, obituaries, and local stories, is harder to compress.
Seen from Appalachia and the Upper South, his story stitches together themes that run through many early twentieth century lives. There is the movement from small counties like Lawrence into urban jobs and semi professional sport. There is the sharp edge of youth violence in a city like Nashville and a justice system that could swing from ten years at hard labor to three months in a county workhouse. There is the way that industrial Southern cities like New Orleans absorbed and reshaped rural migrants, turning a Lawrenceburg born, Nashville trained pitcher into one of the Pelicans’ iconic Dixie heroes.
There is also the question of memory. In the team histories and local obituaries of New Orleans he is simply “Dixie” Walker, a strikeout pitcher whose fastball once thrilled crowds at Heinemann Park. In Lawrence County genealogical circles he is a name in a query and perhaps a photograph in a family album. In national baseball talk he is often overshadowed or mistaken for Fred “Dixie” Walker, the Dodgers outfielder whose career and controversies came later.
For Appalachian and Southern historians, however, James Roy Walker offers a rich case study. He reminds us that the region’s story includes not only coal camps and logging camps but also sandlots, minor league trains, and workhouse roads. His life touched the Appalachian League and the Southern Association, small town archives and big city hospitals, the headlines of Augusta and Nashville and New Orleans.
To fully recover that story will require exactly the kind of patient, cross disciplinary work that Appalachian genealogists and baseball researchers already do so well: pulling microfilm at the Lawrence County Archives, scrolling through Nashville and New Orleans sports pages, digging into court dockets, and re checking every box score that simply lists “Walker, p.”
Sources & Further Reading
Augusta Daily Herald (Georgia), “Roy Walker, Baseball Pitcher, Gets 10 Years,” December 13, 1912, p. 3, via Georgia Historic Newspapers. Wire story from Nashville identifying Walker as a pitcher for the Cleveland American League team and reporting his conviction and ten year sentence for assault with intent to kill Tom and Ben Northern. Georgia Historic Newspapers
New York Tribune, “Lucky Seventh Brings Victory to the Yankees,” New York Sun, “Castoff Smites Three Base Blow to Lead Indians,” and Henry P. Edwards, “Peckinpaugh Leads Attack Which Beats Indians,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, all May 13, 1915, as cited and summarized in SABR’s Games Project account of the May 12, 1915 Yankees Indians game, with box score data from Baseball Reference and Retrosheet. SABR
Sporting Life, 1913 season coverage, including an item noting “Pitcher Roy Walker” being sent to New Orleans with plenty of speed but poor control, as cited in Chris Rainey’s SABR biography of Roy Walker. DigitalOcean Spaces+1
New Orleans Item and other New Orleans newspapers, 1913–1920s, reporting on Walker’s seasons with the Pelicans, salary disputes, and personal life; summarized with citations in the SABR biography and in local baseball histories. SABR+1
“James Roy (Dixie) Walker” obituary, Shreveport Times, February 10, 1962, describing him as one of the all time pitching greats of the New Orleans Pelicans and noting his death after a long illness in New Orleans. Newspapers.com
“WALKER” query, Lawrence County TNGenWeb, “Queries Posted October, 2005 – December, 2005,” in which Lane Walker seeks information about Roy Walker, born in Lawrenceburg 4 13 1893, who played for Cleveland in 1915 and St. Louis in 1921 and died in New Orleans 2 10 1962. TNGenWeb
Sports Illustrated, “19th Hole: The readers take over,” April 25, 1960, letters column in which readers and editors clarify that the New Orleans Pelicans pitcher and manager Dixie Walker is not the same person as Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Fred “Dixie” Walker; discussed in the SABR biography. Sports Illustrated Vault+1
Retrosheet, “Negro League Player Log: Roy Walker,” and Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, “James Roy Walker (Dixie),” which link 1921 Negro League game logs to a player of that name with the same birth and death data as the Lawrenceburg born pitcher, while also serving as a reminder of how fragile and contested early Negro League records can be. Seamheads+1
Chris Rainey, “Roy Walker,” SABR Biography Project, 2018, the most complete modern narrative of Walker’s life and career, drawing on census records, Nashville and New Orleans newspapers, and box score reconstructions, and tracing his path from Lawrenceburg and East Nashville through the Southern Association, the majors, and his later years. SABR
Jacob Pomrenke, “May 12, 1915: Yankees’ Jack Warhop beats Cleveland despite triple play,” SABR Games Project, 2025, which reconstructs Walker’s first major league start of 1915 using contemporary accounts and notes his earlier workhouse sentence after the Nashville stabbing case. SABR
Baseball Reference, “Roy Walker” player page and minor league register, which compile his MLB statistics, list him as a right handed pitcher born in Lawrenceburg and buried in Garden of Memories, Metairie, and provide season by season records with Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and numerous minor league clubs including the New Orleans Pelicans. Baseball Reference+1
MLB.com, “Roy Walker Bio,” which confirms his full name as James Roy Walker, gives his nickname as Dixie, and lists his birth and death details, debut date, and basic career stats. MLB.com+1
Baseball Almanac, “Roy Walker,” and BR Bullpen’s “Roy Walker” entry, which corroborate his vital statistics, physical measurements, burial place, and outline of his major league career while pointing readers toward deeper biographical treatments. Baseball Almanac+1
StatsCrew, “1911 Nashville Vols Statistics,” which document his early professional season with the Vols, listing him as a six foot one, one hundred eighty pound right handed pitcher from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and providing one of the earliest formal roster entries tying him to his home county.
New Orleans Baseball history sites, especially NewOrleansBaseball.com’s Pelicans timeline, which place Walker among the key figures in the club’s pennant winning years and help contextualize his role in Southern Association and Crescent City baseball history. New Orleans Baseball
Lawrence County Archives and Lawrence County Public Library, local history and genealogy pages describing the county’s archival collections, microfilmed newspapers, and family history files, all vital for anyone seeking to connect Roy Walker’s baseball story back to the wider history of Lawrenceburg and its people. Lawrence County Archives+1