DALLAS >> Joshua Ray Walker was heading to the airport when his doctor called to break the news.

This was December 2023, and the Dallas musician, an old soul with a baby face and one of the most captivating voices in country music, had been wracked by stomach pain for months. In September, he’d been opening for The Killers in Reno when his appendix perforated, a staggering pain he played through, winding up in the ER in the early-morning hours, where they pumped him full of steroids and antibiotics. The live set was such a banger, though, he released it as a live album: “I Opened for The Killers and All I Got Was Appendicitis.”

It was his fifth album in four years. Walker had been chasing The Big Break since his 2019 debut Wish You Were Here, whose melodic sketches about night crawlers and lonely hearts endeared him to critics and fans. Rolling Stone named his sophomore effort, “Glad You Made It,” the No. 5 Americana album of 2020. His third album, “See You Next Time,” hit the Americana Top 40 and earned him his first late-night spot on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in January 2022 and a showcase at the Grand Ole Opry in April. But always there was more to accomplish: more touring, more shows, more sales, more, more.

By the fall of 2023, his body was in rebellion. After the appendicitis, he struggled to keep down food, though he went on tour in Europe anyway. Maybe it was an ulcer? Whenever he brought up cancer, people batted away the idea. He was only 33 at the time. Too young! He got a colonoscopy, though. They put him under twilight anesthesia, and in a sign of how much he’d been pushing that season, when the doctor played Walker’s music on Spotify during the procedure (definitely not Walker’s idea), the nurses told him he kept trying to hit the high notes on his song “Sexy After Dark.” Even under sedation, Joshua Ray Walker was on.

Music was his inheritance. His grandfather opened up the world through vinyl records, a choose-your-own adventure of bluegrass and world music and jazz, and handed him a tenor banjo at the age of four. But cancer was also his inheritance. His father died of lung cancer. All four of his grandparents had cancer. Of his eight great-grandparents, seven had cancer. He knew it was gunning for him. He just didn’t know how fast.

When the doctor called, Walker was late to the airport. The news was bad: A cancerous mass in his colon that would require surgery. It was eventually diagnosed as stage 3B.

He had no time to break down, no time to hurl a glass against the wall, although neither is his style. He made a few phone calls to family before boarding the plane, which whisked him to Los Angeles, where he would perform on live television the next day.

His Dec. 5, 2023, performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! is remarkable, even if you don’t know the man at the microphone has been whiplashed by a diagnosis. Walker’s voice splits the silence as the camera holds close on his face, and he belts: “I’m cryin’ cuz I love you.” For the casual viewer, this had to be a needle scratch. Is that white man in a cowboy hat singing Lizzo? Indeed, his rousing cover of “Cuz I Love You” was one of the many covers by female artists (Cher, Whitney Houston) on his fourth album, “What Is It Even?”

The camera pans out to find the unmissable Walker in pink pants and pink shirt, flanked by a band in pink tracksuits, as if Victoria’s Secret spilled across the men’s dressing room. The aesthetic may be unconventional, but the voice is undeniable. Walker glides into falsetto, struts through lyrics like “baby, will you be my man?” and leans into the climax, a growling final note that sustains as the band drops out, a moment ripped straight from the gut.

“I gave everything I had left in the tank for that performance,” he told me recently, as he sipped a double espresso at Goodfriend Package, a coffee-and-deli spot near his home in Casa Linda. As commanding as he can be onstage, in person he is unassuming and real.

We were meeting to talk about his year, a path of pain, hard-won lessons and surprising joy that began last December. He knew 2024 would be bad. It was worse than he expected.

And also, much better.

Straight outta East Dallas

Walker grew up in East Dallas in a duplex next door to his grandparents. His dad was a long-haul trucker, gone much of his childhood, but he was tight with his mom, a PR rep for motorsports companies.

He started sneaking into Deep Ellum shows at 13. His mom took him to Vikon Village, the Garland flea market, to get a fake ID to slip past security. Punk, country, rock, he loved it all. Dallas music to him was like that classic 1978 marquee from the Longhorn Ballroom: Merle Haggard and the Sex Pistols.

His first lyrics came in the hours after his grandfather died. “The coat and the hat you wore all the time / Are still on that rack where you left them that night.” He was 19, and it would take a decade to put that song, “Fondly,” on his first album. In the meantime, he hosted open-mic nights, shredded guitar in the punk-outlaw country band the Ottoman Turks, and played hundreds of solo shows.

It was another death, his father’s, that inspired a song that would shape his future. “Canyon” is a haunting ballad about estrangement between people and within your own soul. “I’m a bottomless canyon without a drop to spill,” as the chorus goes. Walker reconciled with his father in his last years, and he wrote that song in about 45 minutes. It is so casually melodic, so bone-deep in its beauty, that when producer John Pedigo heard it, he was sold.