The song is “The Likes of Me,” track six on Final Touches, the album Conway Twitty was still working on in May 1993. It runs three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, it was written by Larry Boone and Rick Bowles, and two years after Conway was gone, the same producer who made it with him took it back into the studio with Marty Stuart. To understand why that song carries the weight it does, you have to start with the album it lives on, and with the night in Branson that turned an ordinary title into something much heavier.
The last night in Branson
On June 4, 1993, Conway Twitty played the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri. He was expected in Nashville right after, for Fan Fair, the yearly gathering where country stars met their fans face to face. It is the event that later became CMA Fest.
He never got there. Conway collapsed on his tour bus after the show and was rushed to Cox South Hospital in Springfield. He died in the early morning hours of June 5. The cause was an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He was 59 years old, and he was still one of the biggest names in the business, with forty No. 1 Billboard country hits to his name by the Country Music Hall of Fame’s count.
An album nobody meant as a goodbye
The sessions for Final Touches had stretched from March 1992 to May 1993 at the Sound Shop in Nashville. The producer was Don Cook, who was riding high at the time from his work with Brooks & Dunn. Conway Twitty and his wife, Dee Henry, were credited as associate producers, so this was not a record handed to him to sing over. He had a hand in shaping it.
The players were some of Nashville’s busiest: Brent Mason on electric guitar, Rob Hajacos on fiddle, Bruce Bouton on steel and slide guitar, Glenn Worf on bass and Lonnie Wilson on drums. Ten songs made the album, among them the title track, “Final Touches,” and “An Old Memory Like Me,” which Don Cook co-wrote with John Barlow Jarvis.
The name came from one of those ten songs. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes the album as “coincidentally titled,” and that is the heart of it. When the title was chosen, nobody was writing an ending. It only became one after Branson.
Where “The Likes of Me” fits
“The Likes of Me” sits in the middle of the record, right after “I Don’t Love You,” the song country writer Chuck Dauphin later singled out as the best on the album. It was never one of the Conway Twitty songs that radio played over and over. For most fans, it was simply part of the last full album he finished, one more performance from a voice that had been on country radio for a quarter of a century.
Released early, then quietly gone
After Conway’s death, MCA did not hold the album back. According to Dauphin, its release was moved up on the schedule, and Final Touches reached stores on August 31, 1993. It peaked at No. 29 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and No. 135 on the Billboard 200. Dauphin, who considered it one of Conway’s finest albums, wrote that it “kind of came and went” without the promotional push he felt it deserved.
There is one more detail longtime fans will appreciate. Final Touches was his last studio album, but it was not quite the last time he stood at a microphone. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that his final recording session was a duet with soul singer Sam Moore on “Rainy Night in Georgia,” released in 1994 on the MCA collection Rhythm, Country & Blues. AllMusic’s reviewer even felt that duet made a more fitting farewell than the album did.
The same song, two years later
In 1995, MCA put out The Marty Party Hit Pack, a collection of Marty Stuart’s hits. Two of its songs were brand new, and one of them was “The Likes of Me.” Don Cook produced it, the same man who had been behind the board for Conway’s version. Marty Stuart’s take ran a little longer, at three minutes and forty-seven seconds.
It was released as a single and climbed only to No. 58 on the country chart. Not every critic was kind to it, either. Jay Orr of New Country magazine waved it off as generic radio fare. So the song never became a hit for either man.
But it does hold a small, unusual place in country music history. Conway Twitty sang it on the album he was still finishing in the spring of 1993, and when the song came back two years later, it came back through the same producer’s hands. On the original Final Touches track list, it is still number six, right where Conway left it.