She Was Already in the Building
On Friday night, June 4, 1993, Conway Twitty played a show at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri. He was 59. He was still working like a young man.
After the show, he got on his tour bus to head home to Hendersonville, Tennessee. He never made it. He collapsed on the bus and was rushed to Cox South Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Doctors took him straight into surgery. A blood vessel in his abdomen had ruptured.
Here is the part that still gives people chills. Loretta Lynn was already at that hospital. Her husband, Oliver “Doo” Lynn, was there recovering from heart surgery. Nobody planned it. Nobody called her. She just happened to be there.
She saw Conway for a brief moment as he was brought in. According to The Tennessean, she then stayed with his wife, Dee, through the night while they waited on the surgery. Conway died early the next morning, June 5, 1993.
When the news broke, Loretta gave a short statement to the Associated Press. “Mooney and I are devastated by the news,” she said. Mooney was another name for Doo.
The Rumor They Never Could Shake
For more than twenty years, fans whispered about Conway and Loretta. It is easy to see why. Their first No. 1 together, “After the Fire Is Gone,” was about two married people falling for each other. “Lead Me On” told a similar story. On stage, the chemistry was real.
But the romance lived only in the songs. Loretta said it plainly in a 2016 interview: “Me and Conway were friends. We wasn’t lovers.”
Here is a small detail most people miss. One of Conway’s biggest fans was Loretta’s own husband. Loretta once said Conway was about the only person in the whole music business that Doo cared anything about. And Conway’s wives were fond of Loretta too. The two families were close for years.
Everybody Told Them No
Both of them had to fight just to get where they were.
Loretta wrote about real life for women. Cheating husbands. Drinking. Birth control. Radio did not like it. She once told a reporter that 14 of her songs had been banned at one time or another. “The Pill” was pulled by many stations. She kept writing anyway.
Conway had his own fight. He was born Harold Jenkins. He built his stage name from two towns, Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas. In 1958 he was a rock and roll star with a No. 1 pop hit. Then he decided he wanted to sing country, the music he grew up on. His managers, his booking agents and his record company all advised against it. One night he walked off a stage in the middle of a concert and never looked back.
When the two of them wanted to sing together, the doubts came again. Conway remembered it in his 1987 book, The Conway Twitty Story: “Everybody else fought us on it.”
They did it anyway. Starting in 1971, they scored five straight No. 1 country duets: “After the Fire Is Gone,” “Lead Me On,” “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone” and “Feelins’.” The first one won a Grammy. The Country Music Association named them Vocal Duo of the Year four years in a row, from 1972 through 1975.
The Same Two Words, at the Start and the End
Now for the question from the video. Their story began and ended with the same two words: make believe.
Go back to 1958. The song that made Conway a star was “It’s Only Make Believe.” It went all the way to No. 1 on the pop chart.
In 1971, when Conway and Loretta made their first album together, they called it We Only Make Believe. They even sang a duet version of his old hit on it.
Seventeen years later, in September 1988, their last single together came out. It was called “Making Believe.” It was an old song from the 1950s, written by Jimmy Work, about loving someone who will never be yours and pretending anyway. For two people who spent their whole career singing love songs while the world gossiped that it was real, it is hard to think of a more fitting title.
The single did not even make the chart. The album it came from was a collection of their duets, and it peaked at No. 62. Their goodbye came and went with almost no noise.
Five years later, Conway was gone. Loretta lived another 29 years. A few months before her own death in 2022, she posted about the day she lost him. She wrote that she and Doo had been heartbroken.
Make believe was where it started. Make believe was where it ended. The friendship in between was the real thing.