When Conway Twitty knocked on the door of his oldest son Michael’s house inside the Twitty City compound one night around 1987, the singer was wearing his favorite Mickey Mouse pajamas and slippers and holding a single cassette tape in his hand.
Across four decades of touring, the man born Harold Lloyd Jenkins had played between 200 and 300 shows a year, a schedule that built a multi-million-dollar country music enterprise while keeping him on the highway for much of the childhoods of his four children, Michael, Kathy, Joni, and Jimmy. As Michael later recalled in a 2013 interview with *Savvy Dad*, growing up as the son of a touring star meant relying on daily phone calls from the road while his grandfather, Mississippi River steamboat captain Dalton Floyd Jenkins, and his uncle Howard stepped in at home.
That relentless travel also strained Conway’s marriage to Temple “Mickey” Medley, the mother of Kathy, Joni, and Jimmy. After marrying in 1956, divorcing briefly in 1970, and remarrying later that same year, the couple finally ended their 28-year marriage in 1984 before Conway wed his fourth wife, office secretary Delores “Dee” Henry, in 1987.
To bring his family under one perimeter whenever his tour bus pulled off the highway, Conway had poured more than $3.5 million into opening Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1982. Centered around his two-story brick Colonial mansion, the nine-acre complex included separate houses for his mother, Velma, and his adult children, allowing them to live a few yards apart and work inside the compound’s offices, gift shops, and exhibition halls.
Inside his own family, Conway remained a reserved man who rarely spoke at length about his emotions, choosing instead to provide houses, jobs, and financial security. When he stood on Michael’s porch in his pajamas that night, he did not arrive with a rehearsed speech; instead, he handed over a cassette tape of a song written by Gary Burr titled “That’s My Job,” which he was preparing to record for his 1987 album *Borderline*.
Conway walked inside, slid the cassette into Michael’s player, and sat down beside his son on the living room couch so they could listen to the track together. As the recording played through its story of a boy waking from a nightmare and a father promising to protect him even after death, Michael stayed quiet.
When the tape clicked off, Conway looked surprised to hear his son admit that he did not care for the recording at all. Michael, a musician himself who usually shared his father’s musical tastes, explained that hearing the track was the first time he had ever stopped to picture what life was going to look like after his father was gone.
Conway looked down at his slippers for a moment before answering. “Boy, I’m about to let you in on one of life’s great secrets,” he told Michael, explaining that while fathers eventually pass away, they never truly leave their children, and asking his son to play that recording whenever he needed to know his father was still with him.
Once the cassette finished, father and son stayed on that couch inside the Hendersonville compound for the next six hours. Talking straight through until sunrise, they spoke openly about their family timeline, love, career risks, and the years spent apart on the road, crying and hugging before Conway walked back across the lawn to the main mansion.
Released as a single in late 1987, “That’s My Job” climbed into the top ten on the Billboard country charts, carrying a private conversation from a living room couch in Hendersonville out to millions of radio listeners. For the children living inside Twitty City, those years around the compound grounds proved to be their final chapter together with their father.
On June 5, 1993, Conway died at age 59 from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm after collapsing on his tour bus following a concert in Branson, Missouri. Because his 1968 will had never been updated after his 1987 marriage, a court-ordered probate liquidation followed in October 1994, scattering more than 2,000 lots of his stage suits, gold records, vehicles, and household furniture under an auction tent and forcing the sale of the nine-acre Hendersonville property.
While strangers carried away the physical pieces of the compound and the family vacated the houses inside the brick walls, the six-hour conversation started by that cassette tape remained solely with his son. Years after the gates of Twitty City closed to the family, Michael still remembered his father standing in his slippers on the living room floor and promising that he would still be there whenever the tape played.