Conway Twitty
Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins in Friars Point, Mississippi, in 1933 and raised across the river in Helena, Arkansas, Twitty grew up straddling musical worlds: a father who piloted a Mississippi River ferry, a tavern jukebox playing country records, and a country church where, in his own words, he'd cross the cotton patch behind the house and "sit on the ditch bank and listen to them sing for two or three hours; I'd be singing right along." He nearly turned pro in baseball before an Army discharge and an Elvis Presley record sent him toward Sun Records and a rockabilly career that broke through with 1958's "It's Only Make Believe." Seven years later, restless in rock and roll, he remade himself as a country singer and became the genre's most decorated hitmaker, amassing more than 50 number-one country singles, many in duet with Loretta Lynn, before his death in 1993.
Fresh off his Army discharge in 1956, Twitty heard Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" on the radio and, he later said, thought: "I think I can do that." He formed a band, the Rock Housers, and chased that sound hard enough at Sun Records that Sam Phillips still passed on signing him — but by 1958 the debt was audible: "It's Only Make Believe" broke as a moody, echo-drenched ballad cut with Presley's own backing group, the Jordanaires, and radio listeners who'd never heard of Conway Twitty assumed Elvis had recorded it under another name.
listen for"Mystery Train" rides a chugging Sun Studio shuffle under Presley's flat, unhurried delivery; "It's Only Make Believe" trades that rhythm for a string-laden, reverb-heavy ballad arrangement. But listen for the same trick in the voice: Twitty drops into a dark, sliding baritone growl on the verses before snapping back up into the hook, the same low-register pull that had some 1958 listeners phoning radio stations certain they were hearing Presley himself under a new name.