Roy Orbison

Roy Orbison carved out a singular strain of country and pop-infused rock and roll in the early 1960s, even though his beginnings overlapped with the rockabilly foundations laid by Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley. Where stage magnetism and striking appearance fell short, Orbison compensated through a distinctive trembling operatic delivery and emotionally heightened tales of unreturned affection and intense longing. Along the way he crystallized rock and roll prototypes of the perpetual outsider and the eternally lovesick failure. Those archetypes received further emphasis from contemporaries such as Del Shannon and Gene Pitney while also shaping later roots-rock artists including Bruce Springsteen and Chris Isaak, as well as present-day country outfit the Mavericks.

Orbison cut his earliest widely circulated sides for Sun Records in 1956. A competent rockabilly vocalist, he scored a modest national success with the label’s initial single, “Ooby Dooby.” Even at that stage he felt more at home interpreting ballads than adopting the high-energy persona of a rockabilly performer. Additional Sun releases failed to connect, prompting him by the close of the decade to focus chiefly on songwriting, where his earliest major achievement was “Claudette,” later cut by the Everly Brothers.

Following an abortive, short-lived period at RCA, Orbison located his signature approach at Monument Records and reached number two in 1960 with “Only the Lonely.” The track crystallized the Roy Orbison persona once and for all: a brooding rock ballad of love gone wrong, built around a memorable, evocative melody and heightened by his Caruso-like vocal flourishes at the emotional peak. Those Monument successes and the ones that followed also featured inventive, nearly symphonic arrangements in which Roy’s voice and guitar were supported by sweeping strings, foreboding drum patterns, and ethereal backing choirs.

From 1960 through 1965 Orbison placed fifteen singles in the Top 40 on Monument, among them the suspenseful miniature dramas “Running Scared,” “Crying,” “In Dreams,” and “It’s Over.” Beyond tearful ballads he could also project a rugged, blues-inflected attitude on “Dream Baby,” “Candy Man,” and “Mean Woman Blues.” His strongest and most enduring chart triumph proved to be his most forceful rocker: “Oh, Pretty Woman” climbed to number one in late 1964, coinciding with the height of the British Invasion.

At that moment Orbison appeared positioned to weather the mid-1960s British wave. He had shared bills with the Beatles during their 1963 British trek, and John Lennon later acknowledged attempting to echo Orbison’s style while composing the Beatles’ first British chart-topper, “Please Please Me.” Yet Orbison’s commercial standing dropped sharply once he departed Monument for MGM in 1965. While the new label’s inability to match the distinctive sonic character of the earlier Monument productions played a role, the deeper issue lay in Orbison’s material beginning to echo prior successes in diluted form and in shifting rock and soul currents rendering his sound increasingly dated.

Like numerous pioneering rock figures, Orbison could reliably draw substantial audiences abroad. The twenty-year stretch from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s nonetheless proved difficult both personally and professionally. An attempt at an acting career in the late 1960s collapsed. In 1966 his wife perished in a motorcycle crash; two years afterward his home burned, claiming the lives of two sons. Sporadic return efforts via uneven 1970s albums yielded little.

Orbison reentered public awareness through unforeseen channels. In the mid-1980s David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet spotlighted “In Dreams” on its soundtrack, prompting the singer to record an entire album of reinterpreted hits under T-Bone Burnett’s production. Though no replacement for the originals, the project helped reestablish his standing within the industry. Soon afterward he joined George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys. Their well-received album paved the way for Orbison’s strongest work in more than two decades, Mystery Girl, which evoked the atmosphere of his classic 1960s recordings without seeming repetitive. By the time the album charted in early 1989, however, Orbison had succumbed to a heart attack in December 1988. Four years later, leftover tracks from the Mystery Girl sessions were completed and issued as King of Hearts.

Orbison’s estate launched the Orbison imprint in the late 1990s, issuing several live performances spanning the singer’s career; the centerpiece of the series was 1999’s Roy Orbison: Authorized Bootleg Collection box. Bear Family gathered every Sun and Monument recording for the seven-CD set Orbison in 2001. Virgin issued a 25th Anniversary edition of Mystery Girl in 2014, while Universal restored Orbison’s long-unavailable MGM catalog in 2015 via the expansive box The MGM Years 1965-1973, which also contained the previously unreleased album One of the Lonely Ones, originally tracked in 1969 and later given its own standalone release.

In 2017 Roy Orbison’s original vocal tracks received new orchestral overdubs from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for the album A Love So Beautiful. The project achieved Gold status in the U.K., which led to the 2018 follow-up Unchained Melodies.