Conway Twitty was born Harold Lloyd Jenkins on 1 September 1933 in Friars Point, Mississippi, and became one of the most successful country music performers of the 20th century, topping Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart a record 40 times and enjoying a string of celebrated duets with Loretta Lynn. His Welsh connection is honestly a modest one: one published reference source, Terry Breverton's \"Wales: A Historical Companion,\" describes the Jenkins family as being of Welsh descent. No further detail — no named ancestor, no specific place in Wales, no date of emigration — has been found to substantiate this beyond that single citation, so it should be read as a reported claim rather than a documented fact.
It is worth noting plainly what the Welsh connection is not: Twitty's stage name is often assumed to echo the Welsh town of Conwy, but this is a coincidence. Twitty himself explained, including in a 1989 appearance on the David Letterman Show, that he built his stage name by combining two American place names, Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas, found on a map. The name has no connection to Wales.
Jenkins/Twitty rose from a rockabilly career at Sun Records in Memphis — where Roy Orbison recorded his song \"Rockhouse\" — to a run of pop hits including \"It's Only Make Believe,\" before switching decisively to country music in 1965. He topped the country charts 40 times, was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, and died on 5 June 1993 in Springfield, Missouri, following a sudden abdominal aortic aneurysm.