Conway Twitty has made a name for himself for his hit country duets in his career, and in 1975, he allowed his teenage daughter, Joni Lee, to perform on a track that became a surprise hit on the charts.
“Don’t Cry, Joni” has quit the backstory of how it was created, after some hesitation from Twitty. It’s one of the rare few tracks that he would release in his career without Loretta Lynn as his singing partner. Twitty was hesitant to let a 16-year-old Joni enter the music business, despite years of her trying to convince her father.
The father and country singer wasn’t new to his children wanting to dabble in the music business. After two of his children, Kathy (aka “Jessica James”) and Mike (aka “Charlie Tango”), failed to make a hit, he wasn’t too keen on letting Joni also become a singer.
Twitty ended up relenting to his daughter’s wishes and let her perform in the duet. “Don’t Cry, Joni” tells the story of a teenage Joni who falls in love with their 22-year-old neighbor, Jimmy. She asks Jimmy to wait for her until she’s old enough to marry, but he breaks her heart, telling her he cannot wait that long. He moves away to find the woman of his dreams and fails, realizing Joni was the perfect one all along.
Jimmy returns home hoping to find Joni and ask her to marry him. To his surprise, Joni had fallen in love and married his best friend. There were never any details to suggest that the lyrics to the song were based on a true story, but Joni once revealed that her father had actually tricked her into appearing in the duet.
“I had no idea I was going to be on the actual record,” she recalled to Billboard. “Dad kind of tricked me. He told me he was going to take my voice off of the track and replace it with a professional singer. When I went into the studio, my paper was shaking so badly from holding the paper to read the lyrics from.”
Twitty’s other track “Touch The Hand” had become a success with radio jockeys, who soon flipped the record over and began playing “Don’t Cry, Joni.” To everyone’s surprise, the song hit the charts at No. 63 and No. 4 on the Billboard Country Singles chart.
“I was going to college up in Virginia, and said ‘You’re not going to believe this. We have a hit record.’ I had no idea that my voice was still on the record. Being a kid, I started calling the radio stations asking them to play that new song by Conway Twitty and his daughter,” said Joni.
Joni went on to continue her music career in the 1970s as Joni Penn. Her solo single “I’m Sorry Charlie” peaked at No. 16 on the Hot Country Songs chart. Grunge named the track as one of the best duets of the ’70s that had a sizable age gap between its singers.
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