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Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins in Friars Point, Mississippi, on September 1, 1933, Conway Twitty grew up during the Great Depression watching his mother, Velma McGinnis Jenkins, carry the family whenever river work dried up. His father, Floyd Jenkins, worked as a Mississippi River ferryboat pilot whose pay depended on the weather and river traffic. Even when money was scarce, Floyd saved enough from his river wages to buy four-year-old Harold his first toy guitar and taught him basic chords between ferry runs. When Harold turned ten in 1943, the family crossed the river to the port town of Helena, Arkansas, hoping for steadier work. As work on the river remained unpredictable, Velma became the family’s primary breadwinner, working from early morning until late at night and counting loose change under an oil lamp to keep a roof over Floyd and their three children, Harold, Howard, and Norma Jean. Wanting to ease his mother’s burden, young Harold took weekend odd jobs in Helena and formed his first band, The Phillips County Ramblers, before he was a teenager, playing on local radio station KFFA to bring extra money home. After graduating high school in Helena and completing two years of military service in Japan from 1954 to 1956, Harold passed up a professional baseball contract to pursue music full-time under the name Conway Twitty, determined to lift his parents and younger siblings out of poverty. As he went on to record 55 number-one Billboard country hits, he brought his brother Howard and sister Norma Jean into his music business and kept the promise he made along the Mississippi River. In 1982, when he opened his nine-acre Twitty City complex in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he took the work-worn hands of the mother who had carried their family through the Depression and walked her into a home of her own where she never had to work again.

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In 1943, ten-year-old Harold Lloyd Jenkins crossed the Mississippi River with his parents from Friars Point, Mississippi, to the port town of Helena, Arkansas, carrying the early guitar chords his ferryboat-pilot father had taught him between river runs.

Born in Friars Point on September 1, 1933, to Floyd Dalton Jenkins and Velma Lee McGinnis Jenkins, Harold had received a Sears, Roebuck and Co. toy guitar at age four after his father set aside money from his riverboat wages. Along with lessons from his father and his maternal uncle, a cotton farmer who played country music on Saturday nights, the boy learned rhythm and harmony in Friars Point from an elderly Black neighbor doctors and locals called “Uncle”.

In Helena, the seat of Phillips County, river traffic and ferry schedules fluctuated with the weather, leaving Velma to carry the household through the final years of the Great Depression and World War II. Working long shifts from early morning until night, she stretched every dollar to feed Floyd and their three children: Harold, his younger brother Howard Floyd Jenkins, born in 1935, and his younger sister Norma Jean, born in West Helena in July 1939.

To bring extra money into the house, young Harold worked weekend odd jobs around town and put together his first country group, the Phillips County Ramblers, shortly after arriving in Arkansas. By the time he turned twelve in 1945, the teenage band had landed its own regular Saturday morning radio program on Helena station KFFA.

Launched at 1360 AM in November 1941, KFFA was already famous across the Delta for broadcasting Sonny Boy Williamson II and Robert Jr. Lockwood on the *King Biscuit Time* blues program. Every Saturday morning, before the afternoon blues shows came on the air, twelve-year-old Harold stood before the same KFFA studio microphones singing country standards for local sponsors and bringing whatever pay he earned straight back to his mother.

On Sunday mornings in Helena, when he was not at the radio station or playing sandlot baseball, Harold walked to the local Church of God in Christ and stood outside the open windows to listen to the congregation’s gospel choir. At Helena’s Central High School, he batted .450 as an outfielder and earned a minor-league contract offer from the Philadelphia Phillies upon graduating, before a 1954 United States Army draft notice sent him to Yokohama, Japan, for two years.

After entertaining troops in the Far East with an Army band called the Cimarrons, Harold returned home in 1956, passed up professional baseball to pursue music full-time, and adopted the stage name Conway Twitty in 1957 from a roadmap showing Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas. When his self-penned 1958 MGM single “It’s Only Make Believe” reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart and sold more than a million copies, he began moving his family out of financial insecurity.

Once he transitioned from rockabilly to country music in 1965 and relocated his operations to Hendersonville, Tennessee, Conway brought his younger siblings directly into his livelihood. His brother Howard joined the business and recorded country singles of his own, while his sister Norma Jean moved to Sumner County and worked within the family enterprise.

By 1982, after accumulating dozens of his 40 Billboard number-one country hits, Conway invested roughly $3 million to build Twitty City on nine acres along East Main Street in Hendersonville. Inside the brick-walled perimeter, alongside the showcase museum, gift shops, and his own colonial mansion, he constructed separate permanent homes for his four children—Michael, Joni, Kathy, and Jimmy—and a house specifically for his mother, known to the family and visiting fans as “Mamaw”.

Walking Velma into her new Hendersonville residence on opening day, Conway ensured the mother who had counted small change under an oil lamp in Arkansas never had to work another shift. Over the next eleven years, whenever he was off the road, Conway walked across the compound grounds every morning to sit at Velma’s kitchen table and drink coffee with her before greeting the tour buses at the front gate.

Even as tourists filed through Twitty City to view his stage suits and gold plaques, the property functioned first as a multi-generational home for the family that had crossed the Mississippi River in 1943. When Conway collapsed on his tour bus after a show in Branson, Missouri, and died at age 59 on June 5, 1993, Velma survived only sixty days without his morning visits, passing away in August 1993 at age 78 and taking her place beside him in the family crypt in Gallatin, Tennessee, where the bronze plaque next to hers carried only the name she had given him in Friars Point: Harold L. Jenkins.

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In the late 1930s, to save rent money during the Great Depression and stay close to river work in Friars Point, Mississippi, Conway Twitty’s parents moved their young family directly onto a wooden houseboat moored along the Mississippi River. Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins, the boy grew up right on the muddy water while his father, Floyd Jenkins, worked as a river ferryboat pilot. Whenever heavy cargo barges passed or Delta storms rolled in at night, the floating wooden house creaked and pitched, keeping Floyd and his wife, Velma, awake to check the mooring lines while their children slept. To young Harold, what his parents accepted out of financial necessity felt like what he later called a Huckleberry Finn childhood. He spent his days running along the levees, fishing straight off the houseboat porch, and sitting on the bow at dusk watching cotton steamers disappear into the river fog while their low horns echoed downstream. Life at the river crossing between Mississippi and Arkansas also surrounded the boy with the music of the Mississippi Delta. From the deck and ferry landings, he heard work chants and gospel singing rising from Black churches along the riverbank alongside Delta blues, before coming inside at night to listen to country shows on the family’s battery-powered radio. When Harold was four or five, Floyd returned from ferry shifts, set his son on his lap on the rocking deck, and taught him his first chords on a cheap toy guitar while river waves slapped against the hull. That blend of Delta soul and traditional country stayed in his voice long after he took the stage name Conway Twitty. Even decades later, living on his estate in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he said the sound of Mississippi River water lapping against that Friars Point houseboat remained the most peaceful lullaby of his life.

In August 1993, seventy-eight-year-old Velma McGinnis Jenkins died just sixty days after her son, country music star Conway Twitty, collapsed on his tour bus and passed away at age fifty-nine. Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins in Friars Point, Mississippi, during the Great Depression in 1933, Conway grew up along the Mississippi River in Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas, where his mother worked to support the family and backed his choice to turn down a professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Phillies for a guitar and military service in Japan. When he opened his nine-acre Twitty City complex in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1982 after earning dozens of number-one records, he built separate houses on the grounds so Velma and his four children, Michael, Joni, Kathy, and Jimmy, could live beside him and greet visiting fans every day. That family gathering place changed overnight in June 1993. While returning from a Father’s Day performance at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri, Conway collapsed on his bus and died early on June 5 at Cox Medical Center South in Springfield from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. Because he left behind an outdated will written years before his 1987 marriage to his fourth wife, Dee Henry, his estate immediately fell into a bitter legal dispute under Tennessee law between his widow and his four children. According to his children, their grandmother had been healthy and sharp before June, yet after standing before her son’s casket, she watched the compound he built for them face court battles and the threat of auctioning off family homes and memorabilia. Unable to bear the sudden absence of the son who visited her every morning and the division of the family he had gathered at Twitty City, Velma declined rapidly over two summer months. She was laid to rest in the family crypt at Sumner Memorial Gardens in Gallatin, Tennessee, directly beside the plaque bearing only her son’s birth name, Harold L. Jenkins.

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