Although he had an immaculate rockabilly pedigree that included a spell with the legendary Sun label in Memphis, Roy Orbison had to wait until the early Sixties to achieve recognition as one of the most charismatic solo singers in pop music.  Emerging at a time when rock in general was passing through a distinctly lightweight phase, Orbison injected a degree of real emotion into the charts with the songs that explored more than the ups and downs of adolescent romance. Almost single-handedly, he brought a new maturity to rock just when it was most needed.

         Orbison took much of his inspiration from country music, the chief subject-matter of which has always been guilt, infidelity and loss - themes only rarely touched upon by Tin Pan Alley songwriters.  Leaning heavily on the 'beat ballad' style perfected by such performers as Conway Twitty and Don Gibson, Roy wrote and sang material that would have placed him right in the mainstream of Sixties country but for his immense popular following. Yet there was much more to Roy Orbison than just his mastery of the country idiom:  not only did he have that precious commodity of 'image' in his favour. he also possessed an extraordinary ballad-singing voice.

The Wink Westerners

    Born in Vernon, Texas on 23rd April 1936, Roy Kelton Orbison was brought up some 300 miles away in the west Texas town of Wink, where his father had found work as an oil-rig driller. During the Forties, west Texas had a country music scene that was almost self-contained, and the local popularity of western swing combos and honky-tonk singers played a large part in fashioning Roy's musica outlook. It was in loose imitation of the western swing bands that he formed his first group, the Wink Westerners, soon after starting at West Texas High School.
         The Westerners played numerous gigs in and around the Wink area and even had a radio programme of their own on station KVWC, while Roy himself was chosen as the musical representative of the state of Texas at the International Lions Conclave held in Chicago in 1952. A little later, while taking a geology course at North Texas State College, he met up-and-coming pop singer Pat Boone and was sufficiently impressed by his fellow student's success to consider a singing career.
        The Wink Westerners, meanwhile, continued to play dance music in the style made popular by Hank Thompson, Moon Mullican and others, plus a fair sprinkling of popular material by the likes of Glen Miller and Hoagy Carmichael. The sudden  growth of rockabilly between 1954 and 1956, however, made for a major change in  repertoire.
          Orbison later recalled the circumstances. 'I had a TV show in Odessa, Texas, and we played mainly country music. But after Presley came through town for a show in late 1954 I began to notice the rhythm music. I had heard groups like the Clovers and their hits like "One Mint Julep", all based on seventh chords, and I really didn't like them, but at a New Year's Dance in 1954 we had to play through the actual time of midnight and when someone requested "Shake, Rattle And Roll" we struck up on it, but we had nearly ten minutes to go to the hour so we kept playing the same song. By the time we were finished I was fully converted. I think it's a matter of instruments that defined whether you were playing country or rock. We just got ourselves a drummer.' One consequence of the band's switch to rockabilly was a change of name from the rather traditional Wink Westerners to the Teen Kings, an appellation more in keeping with their new youth-oriented sound. Under this guise, the band Jack Kennelly, James Morrow, Billy Pat Ellis and  Johnny 'Peanuts' Wilson - approached local record labels in search of a recording deal. In time, they landed an audition with producer Norman Petty at his studio in Clovis, a hundred or 50 miles across the border in New Mexico.

From Sun to songwriting

         At Clovis, Roy and the Teen Kings made their recording debut with 'Ooby Dooby', a song written by two college friends named Wade Moore and Dick Penner. It was released on the Je-Wel label with an R&B ballad. 'Tryin' To Get To You' as the flipside, but poor distribution prevented it from making much impact. (The record is now a collector's item.) They promptly rerecorded the song for Columbia, who rejected the demo but had one of their own  rockabilly hopefuls, Sid King, record it for the local market  To confuse matters further, the West Coast label, Imperial, acquired 'Tryin' To Get To You' and released it as the flipside of Weldon Rogers' 'So Long, Good Luck And Gbodbye', erroneously giving Rogers the credit for both sides. Neither that disc nor the Sid King version of 'Ooby Dooby' sold particularly well, however, and Orbison gladly accepted Sun's invitation to record the song for the third time in March 1956. This time the disc took off: by June it had reached Number 59 in the Billboard Hot Hundred and by the end of the summer its sales had peaked at 350,000 copies. The record was credited not to the Teen Kings alone but to Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, reflecting Sam Phillips' preference (in the wake of his success with Presley) for pushing solo acts. Despite the big sales for 'Ooby Dooby', Orbison's years as a Sam Phillips protege were not especially fruitful. Though often excellent  rockabilly,  none  of  his subsequent Sun recordings reached the national chart and by the time of his fourth release,  'Chicken-Hearted',  the  Teen Kings had broken up altogether. Orbison became increasingly disenchanted with the rockabilly style and found that Phillips was unwilling to let him record ballads for release as singles. Faced with the prospect of having to work out his contract with Sun at the expense of a potentially productive recording career elsewhere, Roy offered to buy back the contract in return for all subsequent royalties on songs he had composed while on the company's pay roll. In 1958 he left Sun and moved to Nashville, where he began a short career as a house-songwriter for the huge music       publishers, Acuff-Rose.

Nashville and success

         Roy Orbison's talent as a songwriter had been noted as early as 1957, when the Everly Brothers recorded his song 'Claudette'  (dedicated to Orbison's wife) as the flipside of their million-selling 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'. Through this, Roy came to the attention of Acuff-Rose boss Wesley Rose,  who signed him up to write material for the many country artists who used the firm as a source of material.
        One of the key backroom figures in country music in the Fifties, Rose soon realised that Roy's talents were being wasted and he arranged for Orbison to record a few songs with producer/guitarist Chet Atkins at the RCA studios in Nashville.'Almost 18' was released as a single on RCA Victor, backed with another Orbison composition called 'Jolie', but the mix of  Orbison's voice with an already well-tried production formula did not quite work. Atkins' penchant for lightweight songs, jaunty rhythm accompaniments and submerged vocals  precisely the formula he applied so successfully on records by the Everly Brothers, Jim Reeves and countless others  suited neither the melodramatic nature of Roy's songs nor his high, soaring voice
.
         Undeterred, Rose next arranged for Roy to audition for one of the independent  labels based in Nashville, Fred Foster's  newly-launched Monument Records. In Foster, Orbison found a producer with no fixed ideas about commercial formulae: all he wanted was saleable records that would suit the country and pop markets equally well. Roy's first record for Monument was an uptempo affair called 'Paper Boy' that echoed his rockabilly beginnings, but sales of just 18,000 cast doubt on the wisdom of  simply following an established trend. When Orbison's second Monument release, another self-written song in the rock 'n'roll vein called 'Uptown', reached only Number 72 in the national charts, he and Foster decided on a change of pace.
         Orbison had two songs with similar melody lines; hearing them both, Foster suggested he combine them as one song, and the resulting number was entitled 'Only The Lonely'. Inevitably, the song sounded a little contrived and the effect was heightened by the addition of a male vocal section to the recording in apparent imitation of Presley's backing group, the Jordanaires, and the black doo-wop groups who enjoyed chart success in the late Fifties. The record was neither conventional country nor mainstream pop but a shrewd marriage of popular black and white styles. It reached Number 2 in the US charts and Number 1 in Britain.
 
Million-selling ballads

                'Only The Lonely' was a typically introspective Orbison ballad. The presence of a male chorus belied the melodrama at the a heart of the lyric, but the tone was set for nearly all Orbison's subsequent hit singles. Loneliness, guilt and fear of losing one's lover became the prevalent themes in his songs. Even his more optimistic lyrics like 'In Dreams' and 'Falling' had an undercurrent of despair, as if he dreaded the very thought of falling in love.
                One of the major influences on Orbison's songwriting was Don Gibson, the creator of such country-pop standards as 'I Can't Stop Loving You', 'Oh Lonesome Me' and 'Legend In My Time'. After a period as a hillbilly-cum-honky.tonk singer since the late Forties, Gibson had switched to a more rock-oriented country style following Presley's success, and it was his consummate ability to fashion material in a 'crossover' vein (neither wholly country nor wholly rock, yet not 'rockabilly' either) that so impressed Roy. They met during Orbison's brief spell with RCA in 1958 and Roy made a point of regularly recording Gibson's material, including a whole album of Gibson songs in 1966. Like his mentor, Orbison took desolation and heartbreak as key subjects, yet wrote in a style that was in no way self-pitying or even particularly sentimental. The dream motif so central to Orbison songs like 'In       Dreams', 'Only The Lonely' and 'Blue Angel' was also a Gibsonian touch, recalling such Gibson classics as 'Sweet Dreams and 'Blue Blue Day'.
         Orbison wrote the majority of his hits  (including 'Only The Lonely') with Joe Melson, an Acuff-Rose songwriter from 1959 who worked with Orbison until 1962. The pair had travelled from Texas to Nashville together, having met at Odessa College, Texas. Other hits were written in collaboration with Bill Dees. Although the themes rarely changed from song to song, Fred Foster's productions became more conventional as Orbison's popularity grew. 'Blue Angel', the follow-up to 'Only The Lonely', was recorded during the same session and followed much the same pattern. By the time of Roy's fifth hit for
Monument, however, the backing voices had receded far into the background and Orbison's quivering, despairing voice completely dominated the track.
         That hit was 'Running Scared', his third consecutive million-seller and also his first American Number 1. Characteristically, the record began with a quiet vocal introduction and built up an atmosphere of ominous expectancy before erupting into a storming climax. Depicting the agony of being the third party in an emotional triangle, Roy's voice matched the tortured lyrics perfectly. He used exactly the same
formula - forboding lyrics over a gathering crescendo - on most of his releases between 1960 and 1965, and applied it to cover versions of country songs like 'Distant Drums', which appeared on the B-side of the 1963 hit, 'Falling'.

The man in black

         Although Orbison had a string of hit singles and albums in America before 1965, he enjoyed his greatest success in Britain By the close of 1965 he had reached the British Top Fifty on 18 separate occasions, and he consistenUy outsold all of his American contemporaries bar Elvis Presley. Even the onslaught of Beatlemania, which effectively ended the hit-making careers of American stars like Bobby Rydell and Bobby Vee, did not affect his popularity: he took second billing to the Beatles on their first headlining tour of the UK in May 1963, and later became the only American solo performer of the Merseybeat era to head a tour of the British provinces. In 1964, a year dominated by British beat groups, he was one of only two American acts to top the UK chart, achieving this with 'It's Over' and a charming piece of rock'n'roll fantasy, 'Oh Pretty Woman'.
          At a time when the Beatles seemed to have rendered solo singers obsolete, Orbison's continuing success was certainly anomalous. Yet he was always a man on his own, a singer whose style would have fitted any era, and in terms of both image
and vocal approach he had little in common with the teen stars who had all but controlled the pop charts in the early Sixties. His appeal, too, was extremely broad, taking in everyone from hard-line rockers to Beatles fans themselves. Lennon and McCartney numbered themselves among Orbison's greatest admirers and 'they even wrote a song which, in its original slow
tempo, echoed Orbison's lamenting lyrics and his falsetto trademark - 'Please Please Me'.
          Orbison also had undeniable charisma. The performer that fans saw on those British tours was no conventional rock singer - in fact he hardly looked the part at all. Dressed all in black, his eyes hidden by huge dark glasses and hair combed back in a pompadour, he would stand on stage and barely move a muscle throughout a whole evening's performance. An intensely shy man, he appeared to dislike performing and seemed constantly to be trying to hidefrom the public gaze, yet somehow all this helped to accentuate the lonely image evoked by his songs. He looked and sang like a man in the grip of tragedy, and the image was one of the most potent in early  Sixties rock.

Real-life tragedy

         Orbison's career took a downturn in 1965, soon after he left the Monument label for MGM in a deal that was reported to be worth nearly a million dollars. Although this move produced no great change in musical direction, his American record
sales dipped dramatically with each release and even his British sales suffered  'Ride Away' and 'Crawling Back' (possibly his most doom-laden song ever) achieved only lowly chart positions and two uptempo records, 'Breakin' Up Is Breakin' My Heart' and 'Twinkle Toes' failed to halt the decline. He also made a rather disastrous film debut in an MGM production called
 The Fastest Guitar Alive.
          In 1966, tragedy entered Orbison's life when his wife Claudette was killed in a motorcycle accident. In the wave of public sympathy that followed her death, Roy's version of Don Gibson's 'Too Soon To Know' reached Number 3 in the UK charts and gave him his last Top Ten entry of the Sixties. Just over two years later he was dealt another devastating blow when two of his young sons were killed in a house fire while he was touring England.
          The effect of these tragedies on his career was profound, and he toured constantly to relieve his sorrow. The late Sixties and early Seventies were barren years for Orbison, with only a few of his records managing to reach even the lower half of the chart, despite a reunion with former co-writer Joe Melson. The mediocre quality of his recordings - an uninspired  revival of 'Memphis Tennessee', for instance, in 1972  pleased few beyond his ever-loyal hard-core following. The year 1977, however, found him renewing his partnership with Fred Foster at Monument on a notable album called Regeneration, and he turned increasingly towards the country music that had always been his first love. In 1979 and 1980 he returned to the country charts on the Electra  Asylum label, recording an album entitled Laminar Flow. Despite open-heart surgery in the late Seventies he resumed touring and seemed set to continue his career into the next decade and add to his distinguished record of hits.
          Roy Orbison's greatest period of influence might well have passed by the late Seventies, but those years produced timely reminders of his legacy  in Linda Ronstadt's revival of 'Blue Bayou' in 1979 and Don McLean's chart-topping version of  'Crying' in 1980. in a much-repeated quote, he once put his success down to 'packing as  much poetry and philosophy into a two minute pop record as I possibly can' . Mixing the romanticism of country with the solid beat of pop, Roy Orbison not only created a poetry all his own but also helped provide some of the most memorable  moments in Sixties music.

STEPHEN BARNARD

 Singles
Teen Kings (Roy Orbison vocal) Ooby Dooby/Trying To Get To You (Je-Wel 101,1955).

Roy Orbison:
 

Ooby Dooby/Go! Go!                                (Sun 242, 1956)

Rock House/You're My Baby                         (Sun 251, 1956)

Sweet And EasyTo Love/Devil Doll                  (Sun 265, 1957)

Chicken Hearted/I Like Love                       (Sun 284, 1957)

Sweet And Easy To Love/Devil Doll                 (Sun 353, 1960)

Sweet And Innocent/Seems To Me                    (RCA Victor 7381,1958)

Almost Eighteen/Jolie                             (RCA Victor 7447, 1959)

Paper Boy/With The Bug                            (Monument 409, 1959)

Up Town/Pretty One                                (Monument 412, 1959)

Only The Lonely/Here Comes That Song Again        (Monument 421, 1960)

Blue Anger/Today's Teardrops                      (Monument 425,1960)

I'm Hurtin'/I Can't Stop Loving You               (Monument 433,1961)

Running Scared/Love Hurts                         (Monument 438, 1961)

Crying/Candy Man                                  (Monument 447, 1961)

Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)/The Actress    (Monument 456, 1962)

The Crowd/Mama                                    (Monument 461, 1962)

Leah/Workin' For The Man                          (Monument 467, 1962)

In Dreams/Shahdoroba                              (Monument 806, 1963)

Falling/Distant Drums                             (Monument 815, 1963)

Mean Woman Blues/Blue Bayou                       (Monument 824, 1963)

Pretty Paper/Beautiful Dreamer                    (Monument 830, 1963)

It's Over/Indian Wedding                          (Monument 837, 1964)

Oh Pretty Woman/To Te Amo Maria                   (Monument 851, 1964)

Goodnight/Only With You                           (Monument 873, 1965)

(Say) You're My Girl/Sleepy Hollow                (Monument 891,1965)

Let The Good Times Roll/Distant Drums             (Monument 906,1965)

Lana/Our Summer Song                              (Monument 939,1966)

Rideaway/Wondering                                (MGM 13386, 1965)

Crawling Back/If You Can't Say Something Nice     (MGM 13410, 1965)

Breakin' Up Is Breakin' My Heart/Wait             (MGM 13446, 1966)

Twinkly Toes/ Where Is Tomorrow                   (MGM 13498, 1966)

Too  Soon To Know/You'll Never Be Sixteen Again   (MGM 13549, 1966)

Communication Break Down/Going Back To Gloria     (MGM 13634, 1966)

So Good/Memories                                  (MGM 13685, 1967)

Crawlin' Back/Rideaway                            (MGM 13756, 1967)

Breakin' Up Is Breakin' My Heart/Too Soon To Know (MGM 13757, 1967)

Twinkle Toes/Where Is Tomorrow                    (MGM 13758, 1967)

Sweet Dreams/Going Back to Gloria                 (MGM 13759, 1967)

You'll Never Be Sixteen Again/There Won't Be Many Coming Home (MGM 13760, 1967)

Cry Softly, Lonely One/Pistolero                 (MGM 13764, 1967)

She/Here Comes the Rain Baby                     (MGM 13817, 1967)

Born To Be Loved By You/Shy Away                 (MGM 13889, 1968)

Flowers/Walk On                                  (MGM 13950,1968)

Heartache/Sugarman                               (MGM 13991, 1968)

Southbound Jericho Parkway/My Friend             (MGM 14039,1969)

Penny Arcade/Tennessee Owns My Soul              (MGM 14079, 1969)

She Cheats On Me/How Do You Start Over           (MGM 14105, 1970)

So Young/If I Had A Woman Like You               (MGM 14121,1970)

(Love Me Like You Did It) Last Night/Close Again (MGM 14293, 1971)

God Love You/Changes                             (MGM 14358, 1972)

Remember The Good/Harlem Woman (If Only For A While Alt.Flip Side] (MGM 14~3, 1972)

Memphis/I Can Read Between The Lines             (MGM 14441, 1972)

Blue Rain (Coming Down)/Sooner Or Later          (MGM 14552,1973)

I Wanna Live/You Lay Easy On My Mind             (MGM) 14626, 1973)

Sweet Mama Blue/Heartache                        (Mercury 73610, 1974)

Hung Up On You/Spanish Nights                    (Mercury 73652,1975)

It's Lonely/Still                                (Mercury 73705.1975)

Belinda/No Chain At All                          (Monument 8690, 1976)

(I'm A) Southern Man/Born To Love Me             (Monument 200, 1976)

Drifting Away/Under Suspicion                    (Monument 215,1977)

Easy Way Out/Tears                               (Asylum 46048,1979)

Poor Baby/Lay It Down                            (Asylum 46541,1979)

That Loving You Feeling Again/Lola               (Warner Brothers 49262, 1980).

Albums (selective)

At The Rock House                                (Sun LP 1260)

Lonely And Blue                                  (Monument 4002)

Crying                                           (Monument 4007)

Early Orbison                                    (Monument 8623)

More Of Roy Orbison's Greatest Hits              (Monument 8624)