Twist (Cross County)

An unincorporated community located in Cross County, Twist is best known for being the location where legendary blues musician B. B. King named his guitar Lucille. Twist Township is located in the northeastern corner of the county and includes the community.

Twist is located on Arkansas State Highway 42, about eight miles northwest of Earle (Crittenden County) and four miles east of Coldwater (Cross County). It is less than one mile north of the St. Francis River.

Little settlement took place in the area that would become Twist before the early twentieth century. Ira Twist Sr. of Sangamon County, Illinois, operated a large farming operation in his native state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learning about available land in eastern Arkansas, he obtained 3,881 acres in Crittenden County for $50,500 in 1910 and placed his oldest son, John Francis (Frank) Twist, in charge of the operation; the family continued to add more acreage to its holdings in both Crittenden and Cross counties for several decades. Clarence Ciscero (C. C.) Twist, the younger son of Ira, moved to the area to assist Frank in 1918, and the rest of the family moved from Illinois shortly after. The family eventually controlled between 18,000 and 21,000 acres of land, which measured about thirty-two square miles.

Clearing the land of most timber, the family established a large-scale farming operation centered on cotton. The farm needed large numbers of workers to operate in the period before mechanization and created a community named for the family to offer services for the workers. By 1922, more than 100 houses were located on the property, housing sharecroppers. The community was originally known as Twist Headquarters, denoting the role it played in the operations of the farm, but the name was eventually shortened to just Twist. The community reached a peak population of around 1,400, before beginning a decline. In the 1940 federal census, Twist and its surrounding area included a total population of 854. At the time of the census, individual homes and a grid of roads stretched from the main community west to a curve in the St. Francis River. A 1937 work detailing unique place names across the county listed the community and stated that it was part of the Twist Leasing Cooperative Association, a managed project for African Americans and part of the Farm Security Agency.

As agricultural machines began replacing workers, the number of people living in the community began to decrease. By the 1980s, wheat, milo, rice, and soybeans had replaced cotton as the major crop grown on the land. The Twist family sold much of the land by the early 1980s.

Twist is most famous for being the location of an early performance by blues guitarist B. B. King. He later recounted that in the winter of 1949, he played in a juke joint in Twist. Due to the cold temperatures, a burn barrel was placed on the dance floor with a kerosene fire lit inside. During the performance, two men began fighting over a woman, and the barrel overturned, leading to a fire that consumed the entire structure. At least one source claims that two people lost their lives in the fire. After initially making it outside, King returned to save his guitar from the flames. After learning that the men were fighting over a woman named Lucille, he adopted the name for all of his guitars in honor of her, to remind him never to do anything as foolish as returning to a burning building again.

The community included a post office that operated from 1916 until 2002, when the Earle post office took over service for the area. Twist is part of the Earle School District.

The population in the area has continued to decline, and in the 2020 federal census, Twist Township had a population of thirteen. The area is heavily agricultural, and little evidence exists of the once bustling community. A historical marker in Twist memorializes B. B. King’s connection to the community. Blues harmonicist Little Mack Simmons was also born in the community. The papers of the Twist family are held at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro (Craighead County).

For additional information:
Ira F. Twist Records. Dean B. Ellis Library Archives and Special Collections. Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Finding aid online at https://arch.astate.edu/finding-aids/46 (accessed August 6, 2025).

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. The B. B. King Companion: Five Decades of Commentary. New York: Shirmer, 1997.

Moyer, Armond and Winifred. The Origins of Unusual Place-Names. Emmaus, PA: Keystone Publishing, 1958.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University