"Scratch Mouth" Got Them Covered
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Conway Twitty sometimes can get a wonderfully scratchy tone in his voice, as he does sometimes in his version of Ted Daffan's 1944 hit "Born to Lose" from Twitty's 1973 album You've Never Been This Far Before/Baby's Gone. Nobody has ever called him Scratch Mouth; I thought of the name a few minutes ago to dragoon you into checking out this post. I hope you also enjoy the uncredited melodic pedal steel playing on this. The photo above shows him thirteen years earlier, before his hair later unadvisedly covered his ears. There's another song by him in the first comment.
Comments (19)
Here is Conway Twitty, who started out in the 1950s doing rockabilly, singing “Long Black Train” (credited to Twitty/Moomoo) from 1971. It’s an inspired variation on Elvis Presley’s classic 1955 version of fellow Sun label recording artist Little Junior Parker’s 1953 song “Mystery Train,” about which deadmandeadman did a post sometime last year. I wish I knew who Twitty’s lead guitarist was on this. Twitty recorded this earlier, in 1960, but I don’t have that version.
(Footnote: Woody Guthrie so disapproved of the attitude represented by the song title “Born to Lose” that he titled a book of his Born to Win.)
Think I'll listen to that one again!
This is something I say to myself one in twenty times. Thanks.
As is so often the case, **Conway Twitty's** music has been unfairly disparaged in some quarters. (and a few dimes too, ((nyuk nyuk).
I like the honest simplicity of the lyric and performance on the first track, this is tears in the beer stuff. As real as a broken heart.
I have always sneered at Conway as smarmy old-time Country. But this is revelatory. Nice one, Spike!
revelatory.
Mr. Sellwood, one in twenty is about my ratio too. Thank you.
deadman and dermahrk, isn't it a little thrilling when something cuts through one's smarmy prejudices and communes with one's innards?
I think Conway brought a certain amount of scorn on himself by choosing such a ...twitty stage name. Real name: Harold Lloyd Jenkins.
Now doesn't he sound more like Harold Lloyd Jenkins on these tracks?
Twitty is, to my mind, fully the equal as a country singer of more lauded names (Jones, Haggard, Jennings). Any man who could hold his own in multiple duets with Loretta Lynn is a giant. These two cuts are superb.
Buzz, I don't remember being alert enough to even marvel at his stage name. Sheltered, I never rubbed elbows with or even heard tell about those who scorned his name, or heard tell of anybody else exotically named Conway or Twitty. By now, my ears are set enough in their ways to accept only his stage name, but I would fight to the death to defend your right to prefer the sound of his real name. :=)
ivylander, it's great hearing that you liked them. Now you've made me want to check out his duets with Loretta Lynn.
Quick historical note: Conway and Twitty are two towns in Texas. I'm wondering whether he would have gotten any more respect as Harold Jenkins. We probably would barely have notived him....
ivylander, you might be onto something. I once noticed a Howling Wolf Bayou on a Mississippi map, near where Howling Wolf came from, but haven't kept up with blues literature to know if it inspired his name.
Now that I think about it, I know this because Twitty told me himself. Back in the late Seventies when I was a reporter with my hometown newspaper - which was so small everybody had four or five beats - I reviewed all the concerts that came to the area, including his. He let me interview him for a solid hour and, despite the fact that I was ignorant and dismissive of country music at the time, I left the encounter, and the concert, with a profound respect for his talent and his way of looking at the world. Unlike Waylon Jennings, then in the depths of addiction, who played the same venue three months later and blew more than just coke.
Covering all the concerts sounds like a fascinating job. Best of all, it prepared you well for the rigors of Mogging. How did Twitty look at the world? One of these years I'll get a chance to interview you for a solid hour.
I wish I'd gotten to do more concert reviewing - I was only at the paper for a little more than a year, and apart from Twitty and Waylon Jennings (who I didn't get to meet), the two others of note were Johnny Cash (very unfashionable then, but another excellent performer and gracious human being) and Talking Heads (I got to hang out with their drummer, Chris Frantz, at an afterparty - we talked about our favorite live records and how across-the-board disco-haters were de facto racists. This position of Frantz's was pretty surprising to white suburban America in those pre-hip hop, pre-Blondie's "Rapture" days).
I should dig out the Twitty article - it's in the garage somewhere. My recollection of him is that, more than anything else, he was grateful.
We will sit down together one day, I am convinced of this. And it will last for more than an hour. And I will be interviewing you more than you are interviewing me.
ivylander says: "We probably would barely have noticed him (as Harold Jenkins)...." And yet George Jones overcame the stigma of a bland name. In fact, the plainness of his name is positively an asset in his field. Something else again is the case of Merle Haggard, who happens to have worn the impossibly perfect country-western name from birth.
To be fair, I'd like to hang out for at least an hour with most of my trusteds, assuming they'd put up with me.
Buzz, you're right. If a work is mind-blowing, we develop a fondness for the name of its creator. One could argue that the Beatles is not the greatest name. It's hard to top the name Merle Haggard, though.
Hasil Adkins and Ersel Hickey come close....
Let's try to not forget the country or rockabilly singers Merdel Floyd, Buford Peek, Travis Wammack, Buzz Busby, Dub Pritchett, Blackie Jenkins, Vern Pullens, Weyman Parham, Marv Blihovde, Ulysses L. Baxter, Zeke Clements, Trice Garner and Tyrone Schmidling.