Conway Twitty

Helena

1933 – 1993

Conway Twitty was born Harold Lloyd Jenkins in Mississippi, but Helena, Arkansas, was where the future country star began becoming a musician. His family moved to Helena when he was ten, and he soon formed his first group, the Phillips County Ramblers. By twelve, he was performing on Helena radio station KFFA, growing up in a Delta music culture where country, blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues existed within hearing distance of one another.

After military service, Jenkins headed for Memphis and the emerging rock-and-roll scene around Sun Records. He ultimately adopted a new professional name by combining two place names: Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas. In 1958, “It’s Only Make Believe” became an international rock-and-roll hit and transformed Conway Twitty into a major pop star.

But Twitty’s deepest ambition was country music. In the mid-1960s, he made the difficult transition from teen-idol rock and roll to Nashville country, eventually becoming one of the genre’s dominant voices. Beginning with “Next in Line,” he accumulated a remarkable run of chart-topping records. His warm, intimate vocal style proved equally effective on solo hits and in his celebrated partnership with Loretta Lynn, whose recordings with Twitty became some of country music’s most successful duets.

Over a career spanning decades, Twitty recorded more than one hundred albums and achieved more No. 1 records than any country artist had accumulated at the time of his death. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999.

The career became national, but its earliest stage was Helena: a young musician forming a band, performing on local radio, and learning his craft in one of Arkansas’s richest musical communities.