Roy Orbison

Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, a small town in north Texas near the Oklahoma border. His father, Orbie Lee Orbison, worked as an oil field laborer and car mechanic, and his mother, Nadine, was a nurse. The family moved repeatedly during Roy's childhood as his father followed work through the Depression and wartime years, spending time in Fort Worth before settling in Wink, a windswept oil town in west Texas, where Roy spent most of his youth ^[1].

Music entered his life early. His father gave him a guitar around his sixth birthday, and the boy absorbed the country songs he heard on the radio, along with the border-station broadcasts that carried rhythm and blues and Mexican music across west Texas. By his own later account he knew by the age of seven that music would be his life. He was a shy child with poor eyesight who wore thick corrective glasses, and he found in singing a confidence that everyday life did not offer ^[1].

At Wink High School he formed a country band called the Wink Westerners, which played local dances, radio spots, and civic events. Any Roy Orbison biography has to begin in these dusty rooms: a teenager with an unusually pure voice working through honky-tonk standards for oil workers and their families. After graduating in 1954 he enrolled at North Texas State College in Denton, then transferred to Odessa Junior College, studying with the vague idea of becoming a teacher or geologist while music kept pulling him away ^[2].

The turning point came through television and a fellow Texan. In Odessa the Wink Westerners, renamed the Teen Kings, landed a local TV show, and Orbison watched the rise of Elvis Presley with growing conviction that rock and roll was his route out. A college acquaintance connection led him to a song called "Ooby Dooby", written by two North Texas students, and in 1956 the Teen Kings recorded it. On the advice of Johnny Cash, whom Orbison had met when Cash passed through Odessa, he approached Sun Records in Memphis, and Sam Phillips signed the band. The Sun version of "Ooby Dooby" became a modest national hit, selling well enough to put Orbison on package tours alongside Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis ^[2].

Sun, however, wanted an uptempo rockabilly shouter, and Orbison's real gift lay elsewhere. Frustrated, he drifted toward songwriting. His composition "Claudette", named for his young wife, became a hit for the Everly Brothers in 1958, and the royalties carried him through lean years. He moved to Nashville, wrote for the Acuff-Rose publishing house, and in 1959 signed with the small Monument Records label run by Fred Foster ^[1].

At Monument everything changed. Foster encouraged Orbison to sing in his full range rather than imitate anyone, and together with arranger Anita Kerr and Nashville session musicians they built lush, string-laden productions around his voice. In 1960 "Only the Lonely", co-written with Joe Melson, reached number two on the American charts and number one in Britain. The record announced a new kind of pop singer: a still, black-clad figure delivering songs of loneliness and longing with a near-operatic climb that seemed to defy the conventions of rock and roll ^[3].

Between 1960 and 1965 Orbison recorded one of the most remarkable runs of singles in American music. "Blue Angel", "Running Scared", "Crying", "Dream Baby", "In Dreams", "Blue Bayou", "It's Over", and "Oh, Pretty Woman" all reached the upper levels of the charts in the United States, Britain, or both. "Running Scared" and "Oh, Pretty Woman" each went to number one in America, and "Oh, Pretty Woman", released in 1964 at the height of the British Invasion, sold millions of copies worldwide at a moment when few American artists could compete with the Beatles ^[3].

What set these records apart was structure as much as voice. Orbison and his co-writers, first Joe Melson and later Bill Dees, largely abandoned the verse-chorus formula in favor of songs that built continuously toward a single emotional peak, often ending on a high note held with startling power. Critics and fellow musicians frequently described his range as spanning several octaves, and Elvis Presley is widely reported to have called him the greatest singer in the world. The dark glasses that became his trademark arrived by accident: he left his regular glasses on a plane before a 1963 British tour with the Beatles and performed in his prescription sunglasses, an image so striking he kept it for life ^[4].

Among the most cited Roy Orbison facts is his influence on the generation that followed. The Beatles toured beneath him in 1963 before eclipsing every act on earth, and both John Lennon and Paul McCartney acknowledged studying his songcraft. Bruce Springsteen name-checked him in the opening lines of "Thunder Road" and later inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, saying that as a young man he had wanted to write words like Bob Dylan and sing like Roy Orbison. In 1989 the Recording Academy honored him with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement recognition of a catalog that had reshaped what a pop ballad could do ^[4][5].

Orbison married Claudette Frady in 1957, and the couple had three sons: Roy DeWayne, Anthony King, and Wesley. The marriage strained under constant touring and a brief separation, and the couple divorced in 1964 before remarrying the following year. Then came the first of the tragedies that shadowed his middle years. On June 6, 1966, while the two were riding motorcycles near Gallatin, Tennessee, Claudette was struck by a truck and killed. Orbison, riding just ahead of her, witnessed the accident ^[1].

Worse followed. In September 1968, while Orbison was touring in England, a fire destroyed his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. His two eldest sons, Roy DeWayne and Anthony, died in the blaze; the youngest, Wesley, was saved by Orbison's parents. Friends later said the singer coped by refusing to stop working, staying on the road almost continuously through the years that followed ^[1][3].

In 1969 he married Barbara Jakobs, a German teenager he had met in Leeds the year before the fire. Barbara became his manager and closest business partner, and the couple had two sons, Roy Kelton Jr. and Alexander. Those who knew Orbison consistently described a gentle, soft-spoken, and unassuming man, almost comically at odds with the brooding figure his stage image suggested. He loved model airplanes, fast cars, and quiet domestic routine, and he rarely spoke publicly about his losses ^[4].

The years after 1965 were commercially unkind. A move from Monument to MGM Records brought a film contract and steady advances but few hits, and changing tastes pushed his dramatic ballads to the margins of American radio, though he remained a substantial draw in Britain, Australia, and Germany. Health problems accumulated as well: he underwent open-heart surgery in 1978. Through the 1970s he recorded for a series of labels with little success, a working musician sustained by touring and by the durability of his old catalog ^[3].

Rehabilitation came gradually, then all at once. Linda Ronstadt's 1977 cover of "Blue Bayou" became a huge hit and reintroduced his songwriting to a new audience. In 1980 his duet with Emmylou Harris, "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again", won a Grammy Award, his first. Don McLean's version of "Crying" topped the British charts the same year. Then, in 1986, David Lynch built a disturbing centerpiece of his film Blue Velvet around "In Dreams", and suddenly Orbison was a subject of fascination for a generation that had grown up after his hits ^[4].

The momentum of 1987 and 1988 answered the question of who was Roy Orbison for millions of younger listeners. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its second class in 1987, the same year he re-recorded his classics for the album In Dreams. In September 1987 he filmed the television concert A Black and White Night at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, backed by admirers including Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, k.d. lang, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt. In 1988 he joined George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys, whose debut album became a multi-platinum hit, and he completed a solo album, Mystery Girl, produced largely by Lynne ^[5][6].

Orbison did not live to see the comeback crest. After spending December 5, 1988, flying model airplanes with his sons and visiting his mother, he suffered a heart attack at his mother's home in Hendersonville and was pronounced dead at a hospital in the Nashville area late on December 6, 1988. He was 52 years old ^[6].

Mystery Girl appeared in February 1989 and became the highest-charting solo album of his career. Its lead single, "You Got It", written with Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, climbed into the American top ten, giving Orbison his first major solo pop hit in nearly a quarter century, achieved posthumously. The Traveling Wilburys album, still on the charts at his death, went on to win a Grammy Award, and tributes poured in from across the music world ^[5][6].

Few catalogs of Roy Orbison achievements fit tidy categories, because he belonged to no single genre. He came out of rockabilly, recorded in Nashville with country musicians, and wrote what were essentially miniature arias about loneliness, dread, and desire. Later singers as different as Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Chris Isaak, and k.d. lang have cited the permission his records gave them to treat pop singing as serious emotional drama. Rolling Stone has repeatedly placed him among the greatest singers in the history of the form ^[4][5].

Institutional recognition kept accumulating after his death. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989, and "Oh, Pretty Woman" gained a further commercial afterlife when the 1990 film Pretty Woman took its title from the song. His recordings have been added to halls, registries, and greatest-lists across four decades, and his estate, managed for many years by Barbara Orbison until her death in 2011 and afterward by his sons, has kept the catalog in continuous circulation through reissues, documentaries, and the 2017 orchestral album A Love So Beautiful ^[5][6].

The deeper legacy is harder to measure. Orbison demonstrated that vulnerability could be a form of power in popular music, that a still figure in dark glasses singing about fear and heartbreak could hold an audience as completely as any showman. In west Texas, Wink maintains a small museum in his honor, and the annual attention paid to his birthday and his catalog suggests that the voice, more than the image, is what endures ^[1][6].