Juli Thanki

USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee

In 1994 Mike Patton bought a stack of yellowed papers at an auction in Hendersonville. He brought them back to his Galesburg, Ill., home and didn't touch them for two decades. Just a few months ago, he learned that the pages may include several unpublished songs written by Country Music Hall of Famer Conway Twitty, who died at the age of 59 on June 5, 1993.

In October 1994, more than 2,000 items — clothes, cars, guitars, jewelry and other possessions — from his "Twitty City" complex in Hendersonville were sold to the highest bidders during a three-day estate sale. Patton, a lifelong collector of music and movie memorabilia, was in attendance.

"Conway Twitty was one of my favorite singers," Patton said. "He died so suddenly that I just wanted to get something to remember him by."

Patton doesn't remember what he paid for the handwritten lyrics, but he took them home "and stuck them away for a long, long time."

Fast forward to 2016. Patton is preparing to move into a smaller home, which requires him to downsize his extensive memorabilia collections. He enlisted a friend, Ramsey Dean of Chicago, to help. When Dean began researching Twitty's lyrics, he found that only four of the eight songs had been recorded.

One of the lyric sheets, labeled "Little Darlin'," seems to be an early draft of "The Story of My Love," which Twitty co-wrote with Jack Nance, then recorded for his 1959 debut album. Another page appears to be a half-finished draft of a song that Twitty recorded called "Together Forever."

Some lyrics — including one song called "I Kinda, Sorta Think You're Wonderful" — were copyrighted, but were never recorded by Twitty or registered with a performing rights organization such as BMI (with whom Twitty was affiliated for 35 years), ASCAP or SESAC, while other pages, including "I Want Everyone to Know," cannot be found in either the U.S. Copyright Office database or the BMI repertoire database.

If a country singer were to put Twitty's words to music, they wouldn't be the first artist to tackle such a task. Del McCoury along with Billy Bragg and Wilco have released albums of unpublished Woody Guthrie songs set to new arrangements, and in 2011, artists ranging from Merle Haggard to Jack White recorded lyrics found in "The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams."

"If these can be proven to be Conway's work, there might be some (artists) interested in doing something with them," said Jay Orr of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He noted that Twitty was often called "a song's best friend" because of his skill as an interpreter, and pointed to the chart-topping singles "Linda on My Mind" and "You've Never Been This Far Before" as an example of Twitty's songwriting abilities.

"I think it would be fascinating to have more songs written by Conway," Orr said, "but without his inimitable vocal style applied to them, they wouldn't be the same. He was able to transform a song with his performance. If you look at the lyrics to 'Linda on My Mind,' they don't have quite the same impact on the page that they would coming out of his mouth."

Reach Juli Thanki at jthanki@tennessean.com.

About Conway Twitty

Born Harold Lloyd Jenkins in 1933, Conway Twitty started his music career in the 1950s as a rock 'n' roller before making the move to country music. He recorded several classics as a solo artist ("Hello Darlin'," "Slow Hand") and with Loretta Lynn ("Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man"). Twitty died in 1993 and was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame six years later.