THE SAINT AND THE SINNER : It Is Hard to Imagine Two Country Musicians Who Have Followed Paths More Different Than Conway Twitty and George Jones

One is a straight arrow, the other has taken the role of the profligate country star to extremes.

One heard the young Elvis Presley and had a revelation; the other shared early concert bills with Presley and saw a threat.

One has been flexible, changing his sound over the years in keeping with commercial demands; as for the other, if hard-core country traditionalism were a mountainside, his creased and wrinkled road map of a face would be carved into it.

One guards his privacy; the other has played out personal dramas in full public view.

It is hard to imagine two country musicians who have followed paths more different than George Jones and Conway Twitty. And yet, as they move into the 1990s, they find themselves occupying a good deal of common ground.

At a time when country music is bursting with new faces who champion old styles, Jones and Twitty stand as emblems of the durability and lasting fan loyalties that a country star can achieve.

Each established himself in the 1950s; each has been a consistent commercial force ever since, scoring his share of hits in every subsequent decade. Jones and Twitty now stand tied with 63 Top 10 hits on the Billboard country singles charts, excluding duets. Overall, Billboard ranks Jones as the second most successful country singles artist of all time, behind Eddie Arnold. Twitty stands fifth (Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard are third and fourth, respectively).

Over the past few years, Jones, 60, and Twitty, 58, frequently have toured together, with Jones playing his straight, traditional country style, and Twitty the more pop- and ‘70s-soft-rock-tinged brand of country that has marked his albums since the mid-’80s. Both have new albums out on the same label, MCA. And, speaking in separate phone interviews recently, Jones and Twitty both saw themselves as active competitors for fans’ attention in the ‘90s, even if the ascendancy of younger men in cowboy hats has made it more of a struggle than in the past.

“We’re opposites, as far as image goes, which means we should draw two different crowds,” Twitty said of the logic behind the mutual bills they have played (each does his own set, with no sitting-in on the other’s). As a concert draw, he said, that combination of opposites “should work, and it does work.

“We’re not real close friends,” Twitty added. “I don’t have many of them in the music business. But George has been as close a friend as I’ve had in the music business over the years.”

It was Elvis Presley who drew Twitty to a musical career, although music was something that had come naturally for him from early childhood.

Until he was 10, Twitty--born Harold Jenkins--lived in Friars Point, Miss., a river town in the Delta region famed for spawning the country-blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Twitty says the presence of black music “made all the difference” in his musical development.

“I was right in the middle of it. An old black gentleman named Uncle Fred lived right next door to me. He played harmonica and guitar. I heard him more than I heard the Grand Ole Opry.” Twitty says he also would sit outside black churches, listening to Gospel music.

“At that point I wasn’t thinking about using (those influences). I was just enjoying it. Certainly it implanted itself in me, along with the country stuff.”

Twitty was 4 when he started playing the guitar and singing, picking up some of it from his father, who piloted a ferryboat on the Mississippi River. Later, the family moved to Helena, Ark., where the teen-aged Twitty formed a country band and landed a weekly gig on KFFA, the same radio station that broadcast the “King Biscuit Time” blues show featuring Sonny Boy Williamson.

While he played country music for fun, Twitty, a star high school athlete, figured his real future lay in baseball.

“I guess I thought that competing with people who were my heroes in country music was just out of reach,” he said. “I never once thought of it as a profession.”

After high school, he served a hitch in the Army and he continued to play country music while stationed in Japan. Discharged in 1956, Twitty was ready to sign a baseball contract with the Philadelphia Phillies organization--until Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Mystery Train” changed his mind.

“It was the first thing I heard (after returning from Japan). Like everybody else, it just bowled me over. It was a mixture of blues and gospel and country. It was everything I could identify with, and it was a brand-new music. Not a lot of people were doing it. It was something I thought I could compete in.”

Twitty’s first stop was the Sun Studios in Memphis, the cradle of rockabilly. Sun’s owner, Sam Phillips, recorded him, but didn’t deem any of the results worth releasing.

“It was crushing, is what it was,” Twitty recalls. “I didn’t know there were any other record labels.”

But he rebounded, finding a manager who helped him discover that there were, in fact, other outlets for aspiring rock ‘n’ rollers. The manager also suggested that he find a name more colorful than Harold Jenkins. The young rocker turned to an atlas for inspiration. Conway, Ark., and Twitty, Tex., were names that caught his fancy.

“My father thought it was the funniest thing he’d heard,” said Twitty. “But I knew the deejays get hundreds of records every week, and you needed a unique name to catch their attention. Of course, once you made it onto the turntable, you were on your own.”

He made his impact in 1958 with “It’s Only Make Believe,” a dramatic ballad of unrequited love that he delivered in a decidedly Presleyan voice. The song went to No. 1 on the pop charts; Twitty followed it with two more hits, a rocked-up treatment of “Danny Boy,” and another Presley-style ballad, “Lonely Blue Boy.”

While pursuing rock ‘n’ roll success, Twitty said, he left the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle to others. “I’ve never had a drink in my life, or had a pill, or smoked a what-do-you-call-it. I’ve never let myself get caught up in that part. I had a brain, and I could see what that was doing to other people.”

When the musical comedy “Bye Bye Birdie” was being developed in 1960, Twitty said, the producers approached him with an offer to read for the part of Conrad Birdie. The character was a teen-idol patterned after Elvis but named, in a spoofing way, after Twitty.

Twitty didn’t mind having his name appropriated on Broadway, but he had no desire to appear there. “I didn’t want to be tied to one town and one street,” he said. “I needed to be out there in every town. I didn’t make the wrong decision. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”

As the early ‘60s went on, and the hits waned, Twitty found that rock ‘n’ roll meant less and less to him. Country music, he said, “had always been in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do. After 10 years doing the rock thing, I felt I had lived long enough to experience the things that a country song is all about.”

Twitty’s rebirth as a country singer in 1965 led at first to diminished sales and concert proceeds. But by 1968, country audiences had warmed to the ex-rocker, and his streak of hits--both on his own and with his steady duet partner, Loretta Lynn--began.

Twitty’s grand theme has been romantic contrition. In such songs as “Hello Darlin,’ ” he plays the part of a husband who neglects his long-suffering wife until she ditches him. Only then does he awaken to the value of what he has lost. By then, the too-late-wise husband can only express his regrets and beg for another chance.

It’s not often, if ever, that one hears the woman being blamed in a Twitty heartbreak ballad. That, he said, is by design.

“You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and women buy most of the records,” he explained. “Women are my favorite people. They’re more sensitive, easier to talk to and bounce things off of. Because of that, when I start listening to a song (submitted for possible use on a record), if it’s not saying the things I think a woman might want to hear, I just get rid of it in most cases. If the song is saying the things most men want to say and just don’t know how, it’s getting in the right ballpark.”

Twitty continues to play his accustomed role of sensitive or contrite lover on his new album, “Even Now.” He leaves it to others to provide a more bitter take on relationships.

“That’s the image I have, and it’s the way I really am,” he said. “To turn around and do another kind of song totally, people wouldn’t expect that from you. Where they would accept the same thing from someone else, they’d resent it from you. Waylon Jennings might come out with something like that. They already expect it from him.”

Ask Twitty how his musical themes reflect his own experiences in the marital trenches, and he’ll politely but firmly draw down a curtain of privacy.

“I’ll never tell,” he said. “I’ll just say this: I don’t think that you can sing about it and make it believable if you haven’t lived it.”

Twitty says he decided early in his career not to give anything of his private self away--an unusual approach in country music, where performers typically want to at least give the illusion of sharing close confidences with their fans.

Presenting only the romantic persona of his songs, rather than the contours of his personal life, Twitty said, has created “a little mystique” that he thinks contributes to his career longevity. As part of that mystique, he said, he won’t talk on stage--something you might expect from rockers such as Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead, but a drastic departure from country custom.

“If I could walk off that (touring) bus and nobody knew who I was, I would be the happiest dude in the world,” Twitty said. “I think that rock group Kiss had it right,” with its elaborate makeup that masked the members’ real-life identities. “They could be a regular person walking around. That would be ideal.”

Twitty thinks his aloofness may be one reason why he has never won an award from the Country Music Assn. But he said he can do without the ego gratification and perquisites of celebrity.

“I don’t require any of it. I get some of it, but I certainly don’t require it, and would rather not have it. That part of the business I don’t care for.”

Twitty has, in fact, been through a couple of divorces that might qualify him to sing about romantic regrets. Asked how long he and his current wife, Dee Henry, have been married, he again politely drew the curtain. “Now we’re getting off onto personal things,” he said. For evidence of Twitty’s success in protecting his “personal things,” one need only turn to “Nashville Babylon,” a book of gossip-mongering whose cover blurb promises “the uncensored truth and private lives of country music’s stars.” The “uncensored” Twitty barely registers a blip with less than a handful of passing mentions.

George Jones, on the other hand, has a chapter all to himself.

“A lot of people didn’t think I’d be here at 60,” Jones said over the phone from his Nashville home, sounding like an affable, gravelly-voiced Southern sheriff. “Now that I’ve got my head on straight, I don’t see how I did it, either.”

Perhaps even more than the most dissolute rocker, Jones knows about growing up and falling down in public. His past includes a long, harrowing struggle with alcohol and drugs. By most accounts, Jones sober is a generous, considerate man, while Jones drunk is susceptible to physical violence, gunplay, automobile mishaps, and weird flights of fantasy. He also was prone to go A.W.O.L. when he was supposed to be giving concerts, a habit that earned him the nickname “No-Show Jones.”

Through it all, Jones never lost the keening, pinched voice capable of amplifying the last scintilla of hurt that a lyric and a melody can convey. His songs, many of them about drinking, often confronted the pain that was all-too-real in his personal life. In “I’ve Aged Twenty Years in Five,” from 1980, Jones summed up his crisis: “Oh, I’ll change this way of living/Or I’ll be gone before my time.”

About six years ago, Jones said in the interview, he acted on that ultimatum. At the behest of his wife, Nancy, he left Nashville for a few years to “get my life straightened out and get off booze and all those wild escapades I went through.”

Now he has attained a measure of normalcy, and returned to Nashville about a year and a half ago to be closer to country’s business hub. Jones said he doesn’t regret that his past “escapades” and soap operatics, like the breakup of his 1970s marriage and singing partnership with Tammy Wynette, were played out so publicly.

“That doesn’t bother me. You owe your life to your fans. They want to be near you. They want to know everything in the world they can find out about you. I never was one for hiding anything--my past proves that. It’s part of living. We all make mistakes. We all one way or another have to clean ‘em up.”

Jones says he has one last addiction to clean up: “I’ve got a little bronchitis problem, and I’m trying to quit smoking. That’s my worst enemy now. If I get that whupped, I’ll be in a lot better voice.”

Ever since he dropped out of school in the seventh grade, Jones has staked his living on that voice. Raised in east Texas, he was captivated by some of the same early influences as Twitty: Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe, coming over the radio on the Saturday night broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry.

Later, Hank Williams became his idol. Williams’ influence was obvious on Jones’ first hit, the 1955 song “Why, Baby, Why.” But within a few years, Jones had developed a style of his own, a nakedly emotional way of singing that has been as influential to country music as that of his contemporary, Ray Charles, has been to R&B.;

In the mid-’50s, Jones could see the Elvis Presley phenomenon building. At the time, Jones was a regular on “Louisiana Hayride,” an Opry-like radio concert show that was broadcast from Shreveport.

“When Elvis Presley got started, he worked there half a dozen times or so, and the whole crowd (at the Hayride) completely changed,” Jones recalls. “After he left, no one could draw a crowd there anymore. We’d lost the true country-type fans, and got teen-agers in there. It killed the gig, so I came to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. I’ll be flat honest with you--I hated rock ‘n’ roll, except for some of the ‘50s stuff.”

Today’s younger singers regards Jones as an icon of the pure-country sound. At the same time, those new favorites also are his rivals.

“I’m thankful” that traditional country has gotten a lift from such younger hands as Randy Travis, Clint Black and Garth Brooks, Jones said. “I’m not jealous at all. But I would like to be able to still compete. The radio stations complain that they don’t have time to air them all. This is what’s making it harder for artists of my caliber and age. They don’t have a lot of room for us.”

Unhappy about the promotion he was getting at his longtime label, Epic, Jones switched to MCA for his new release, “And Along Came Jones.”

On it, he continues to choose songs that hit close to home. His latest video and single, “She Loved a Lot in Her Time,” is the sentimental story of a long-suffering mother who stands by her children as they sort through personal troubles. Its narrator is a son plagued by drinking problems.

“My mother passed away a few years ago, so (the song) kind of touched me,” Jones said. “It’s a true story. Country music is about things that really happen in a lot of people’s lives.” To drive home the connection to his own family, Jones said, “I called my oldest sister, Helen, in Texas and got her to get these pictures together. All of them are (photos of) kinfolk, and I made them a part of the video.”

For all their differences, Jones and Twitty have a similar outlook on how long they ought to carry on: indefinitely.

Twitty has amassed a portfolio of business interests--including Twitty City, a family homestead outside Nashville that doubles as a tourist attraction, and Twitty Bird, a line of wild bird feed. But his plan now is to divest himself gradually of all his outside holdings, and devote himself exclusively to music.

The time that he saves on business, Twitty said, will go to songwriting. Twitty wrote many of his hits during the first 20 years of his career but set aside his pen over the past decade as his extra-musical concerns took up more and more of his time.

He foresees no letup in a touring schedule of about 200 dates a year. As for retiring, “That word’s not even in my vocabulary.”

Jones, meanwhile, looks forward to easing back somewhat on his current performing schedule of about 150 dates a year.

“I still love it, don’t get me wrong, but I want to slow down, relax and do some things I never had time to do before. I never relaxed in my life. But as long as I can sell enough records and the people still want me, I’ll probably do this till the day I die.

“Music is different from being an ironworker or an electrician. Music just stays in your blood, and I think you’ll go down fast if you ever quit that.”

Who: George Jones and Conway Twitty.

When: Saturday, Nov. 30, at 8 p.m.

Where: The Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim.

Whereabouts: Take Harbor Boulevard south from the Riverside Freeway or north from the Santa Ana Freeway and head east on Broadway. The Celebrity is on the left, just past Anaheim Boulevard.

Wherewithal: $33. The show is sold out.

Where to call: (714) 999-9536.