Conway Twitty (named after Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas) had a home in Oklahoma City. (I forget if it was in OKC proper or Moore which is a suburb.) We drove by it all the time on the way to my aunt's house. I don't know how often he stayed there, but I don't think anyone ever really bothered him.

I remember, quite well, "Hello darlin', nice to see ya. It's been a long time..."

He had a really good voice, very old school classic country. He was in that group with Waylon, Willie Nelson, Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, etc. Twitty really started to have hits by the late 60s and a string of them in the 70s. They had a sound, but the artists popular in the 70s changed it up a bit. Johnny Lee, BJ Thomas, Mickey Gillie, Charlie Daniels, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle, Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton, etc.

He continued to have major hits, and didn't fade even after the Urban Cowoby fame died down. That was the last real batch of 60s and 70s country stars making a mark into the 80s. Twitty still had #1s, a lot, in the 80s. His star didn't fade after a few short years where country may have been a fad for some listeners (not as a genre). His longevity was amazing.

He also did a cover of "Slow Hand," which the Pointer Sisters did first a year earlier. Twitty changed the pronouns to reflect a straight man talking about a woman.

[Edited 4/14/21 10:36am]

TrivialPursuit said:

He was in that group with Waylon, Willie Nelson, Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, etc. Twitty really started to have hits by the late 60s and a string of them in the 70s.

Conway started out as a R&B singer in the 1950s and had a few hits on the R&B chart then. Ronnie Milsap is another who began as a R&B singer and switched to country. Some of Ronnie's country records still had a R&B sound, so did others like Charlie Rich, Bobbie Gentry, & Barbara Mandrell.

MickyDolenz said:

TrivialPursuit said:

He was in that group with Waylon, Willie Nelson, Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, etc. Twitty really started to have hits by the late 60s and a string of them in the 70s.

Conway started out as a R&B singer in the 1950s and had a few hits on the R&B chart then. Ronnie Milsap is another who began as a R&B singer and switched to country. Some of Ronnie's country records still had a R&B sound, so did others like Charlie Rich, Bobbie Gentry, & Barbara Mandrell.

Yeah, and conway couldn't get his music on radio for a minute because he had sung R&B, which is ridiculous.

I loved Ronnie Milsap's voice. I remember he did Crossroads on CMT with Los Lonely Boys, who had a great reverence for Milsap and his career. I agree about the R&B influence on Milsap's songs. It's definitely there.

It really shows how white music is directly derived from Black music. White country music is really just blues and R&B from Black folks. (There's a clip in Dreamgirls where some song is sung by a bunch of white kids, then it's sung by the group or J.Hud's character as an urban song.)

My first boy crush was Jamie Sommers on The Bionic Woman. The next was Barbara Mandrell. I just lived for her show on Saturday night.

TrivialPursuit said:

It really shows how white music is directly derived from Black music. White country music is really just blues and R&B from Black folks.

The banjo is an instrument that originated in Africa. It was brought over to North & South America during the slave trade. The slide & steel guitar sound in both blues & country came from Hawaiian traditional music. There was a Hawaiian music craze in the USA during the 1920s and a bossa nova craze in the 1960s. In the 1950s there was a music called exotica that was popular too.

MickyDolenz said:

....The slide & steel guitar sound in both blues & country came from Hawaiian traditional music. There was a Hawaiian music craze in the USA during the 1920s and a bossa nova craze in the 1960s. In the 1950s there was a music called exotica that was popular too.

There's an album that really captures that, Martin Denny's Exotica. It's in mono, and they rerecorded it in stereo, but many prefer the mono because of the energy and exhuberance of the band. It was really lounge music, although that grew and evolved a bit more in the next few years. But Exotica is just great. Denny's songs often end up on Louge type compilations.

Truth: I saw the record in the background on a latter episode of Mad Men. I don't know why, but I was fascinated with it. So I found it, listened to it, and then bought it.

The Hawaiian thing definitely had its moments in the late 60s and into the 70s, and Don Ho milked it for all it was worth.