The Multifaceted Conway Twitty Was a Singular Artist

The name Harold Lloyd Jenkins doesn’t mean a lot to most people. That’s because in 1957, when Jenkins started having local and regional success in Arkansas and Mississippi, his manager decided he needed to come up with a show business name. With that in mind, Jenkins took out a map and found a city in Arkansas called Conway and a city in Texas called Twitty. That’s the day Conway Twitty was born.

Young Harold Lloyd Jenkins started playing music at 10 years old as part of a singing group called The Phillips County Ramblers. By the time he was 12 the Ramblers had their own radio show on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. Not only had the music bug bitten young Jenkins, so had a love of baseball. He graduated from high school with a .450 batting average the offer of a contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. He signed the contract but was soon drafted into the Army.

While serving, he performed with a band called the Cimarrons, entertaining his fellow troops. When he returned home, he fell for the music of Elvis Presley, and it inspired him to try his hand at rock and roll. Presley had such a strong influence on him that he modeled his new band – the Rockhousers – after the singer’s sound and took it to Sun Studios in Memphis to record. The recordings failed to attract fans. Some thought he seemed too similar to Presley and found it hard to tell the difference between Jenkins and the real thing.

Following the 1957 name change and the success of the B-side “It’s Only Make Believe”, Twitty had established himself as a rock and roll star. He followed with several chart successes.

Twitty was flying high but also becoming really disgruntled with the fans that he was drawing to his shows. In 1965, he became so fed up that he walked off the stage in the middle of a performance in New Jersey, sued his manager to get out of his contract, and moved to Oklahoma to try his hand at country music.

Initially, he considered returning to the name Harold Lloyd Jenkins and fresh start that might offer. His new manager convinced him to stick with Conway Twitty.

For the next three years, country music stations refused to play his music because of his rock and roll history.

Twitty finally kicked the door open in 1968 with the Top 5 song “The Image of Me,” He followed with a No. 1 - “Next in Line,” and then hits started coming. Still, it wasn’t until 1970 that Twitty became a household name with the country fans. It took just one song, the biggest hit of his career, to do it - “Hello Darlin’.”  Soon after, Twitty recorded and released his first duet album with close friend Loretta Lynn. They would go on to have multiple No. 1 songs, winning the Country Music Association for vocal duo four years in a row, as well as a few Academy of Country Music awards and Grammys.

In 1973 Twitty’s career was buoyed by his success with Lynn as well as his solo projects. It was in this environment that he released the song “You’ve Never Been This Far Before.”  The song that referenced a romantic rendezvous with a less-than-experienced partner and radio wanted nothing to do with it. Still, as forbidden fruit often does, it found an audience and spent three weeks at No. 1 as well as crossing over to pop radio. It wouldn’t be the last Twitty song that found success in innuendo. Others include “Don’t Take It Away,” “I’d Just Love to Lay Ya Down,” and “Happy Birthday Darlin’.”

In the late 1970s, Twitty began to lean into a pop country sound. His core fan base may not have been happy with it, but someone was. His next 23 songs reached the Top 10 and 13 went to No. 1. Twitty went on to have 50 No. 1singles, a record most said would never be broken – although George Strait managed the feat in 2002.

Twitty stayed true to what worked for Twitty - a combination of traditional and pop-style country, which inspired covers of songs such as Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” “Slow Hand” by the Pointer Sisters and “Rest Your Love On Me a While” by the Bee Gees.

The rock and roll star that went country changed music in a lot of ways. Outside of his music career, he was the first to open a country music theme park. It was Twitty City and it was his home as well. It stayed open until 1994, one year after his death.

Twitty left a mark on country music that is still felt today. His songs are still covered and reinterpreted - even in countries where country has not traditionally found broad audiences. Twitty was once tagged as the “Best Friend a Song Ever Had.”

It’s an honorific that still rings true today.