Roy Kelton Orbison (April 23, 1936 – December 6, 1988) was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist known for his distinctive and powerful voice, complex song structures, and dark, emotional ballads.

Orbison also said that a formative experience was the regular singing sessions at Fort Worth, where he was surrounded by soldiers who were intensely emotional because they were about to be sent to the front line in World War II.

[6] He attended Denver Avenue Elementary School[5] in Fort Worth until a polio scare in 1944 prompted his parents to send Orbison (then aged 8) and his brother Grady Lee to Vernon to live with their grandmother.

[10] In 1949, Orbison (then 13 years old) formed the band "Wink Westerners"[6] with school friends Billy Pat Ellis on drums, Slob Evans on bass fiddle, Richard West on piano and James Morrow on electric mandolin.

[15] The band was made of Orbison, Billy Pat Ellis and James Morrow from the Wink Westerners, plus Jack Kennelly on bass and Johnny Wilson.

[3]: p51  The Teen Kings were granted a reprieve when Carl Perkins was badly injured in a car crash, resulting in "Ooby Dooby" being released (along with "Go Go Go") as Sun Single 242 in May 1956.

[6] The Teen Kings played alongside Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Warren Smith and Eddie Bond at the Overton Park Shell on June 1, 1956, but Orbison's relationship with the rest of the band was deteriorating at this stage.

[21] Nonetheless, he continued to pitch his ballad "Claudette" (which he began working on in early 1956) to singers he met on tour[3]: p68  and in April 1958 The Everly Brothers recorded it as the B-side of their hit "All I Have to Do Is Dream".

After spending an entire day writing a song, he would make several demonstration tapes at a time and send them to Wesley Rose, who would try to find musical acts to record them.

[3]: p91  Orbison and Melson instead recorded the song at RCA Victor's Nashville studio, with sound engineer Bill Porter trying a completely new strategy, building the mix from the top down rather than from the bottom up, beginning with close-miked backing vocals in the foreground, and ending with the rhythm section soft in the background.

[3]: p95  The success of "Only The Lonely" transformed Orbison into an overnight star and he appeared on Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show out of New York City.

[3]: p98 Soon after recording an early version of his next hit Blue Angel, Orbison and his wife and son (Roy DeWayne, born in 1958) moved from Wink to the suburb of Hendersonville in Nashville.

[3]: p107  "Crying" was coupled with an up-tempo R&B song, "Candy Man", written by Fred Neil and Beverley Ross, which reached the Billboard Top 30, staying on the charts for two months.

A riff-laden masterpiece that employed a playful growl he got from a Bob Hope movie, the epithet mercy Orbison uttered when he was unable to hit a note, it rose to number one in the autumn of 1964 in the United States and stayed on the charts for 14 weeks.

[3]: p126  While on tour again in the UK in 1966,[51] Orbison broke his foot falling off a motorcycle in front of thousands of screaming fans at a race track; he performed his show that evening in a cast.

[3]: p148 A grieving Orbison threw himself into his work, collaborating with Bill Dees to write music for The Fastest Guitar Alive, a film that MGM had scheduled for him to star in as well.

[54] Orbison's character was a spy who stole and had to protect and deliver a cache of gold to the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and was supplied with a guitar that turned into a rifle.

[3]: p153  During the counterculture era, with the charts dominated by artists like Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors, Orbison lost mainstream appeal, yet seemed confident that this would return, later saying: "[I] didn't hear a lot I could relate to, so I kind of stood there like a tree where the winds blow and the seasons change, and you're still there and you bloom again.

[6] During a tour of Britain and playing Birmingham on Saturday, September 14, 1968,[57] he received the news that his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, had burned down, and his two eldest sons had died.

[3]: p183  In 1981, he and Emmylou Harris won a Grammy Award for their duet "That Lovin' You Feelin' Again" from the comedy film Roadie (in which Orbison also played a cameo role), and things were picking up.

lang performed a duet of "Crying" for inclusion on the soundtrack to the film Hiding Out (1987); the pair received a Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals after Orbison's death.

They were joined by Jackson Browne, T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, James Burton, JD Souther,[74] and k.d.

"[3]: p207  The concert was filmed in one take and aired on Cinemax under the title Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night; it was released on video by Virgin Records, selling 50,000 copies.

[77][78] Expanding on the concept of a traveling band of raucous musicians, Orbison offered a quote about the group's foundation in honor: "Some people say Daddy was a cad and a bounder.

In the final three months of his life, he gave Rolling Stone magazine extensive access to his daily activities; he intended to write an autobiography and wanted Martin Sheen to play him in a biopic.

[89] According to Rolling Stone, "Mystery Girl cloaks the epic sweep and grandeur of his classic sound in meticulous, modern production—the album encapsulates everything that made Orbison great, and for that reason it makes a fitting valedictory".

[102] Peter Watrous, writing for the New York Times, declared in a concert review, "He has perfected an odd vision of popular music, one in which eccentricity and imagination beat back all the pressures toward conformity".

Elton John's songwriting partner and main lyricist Bernie Taupin wrote that Orbison's songs always made "radical left turns", and k.d.

[109] Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant favored American R&B music as a youth, but beyond the black musicians, he named Elvis and Orbison especially as foreshadowing the emotions he would experience: "The poignancy of the combination of lyric and voice was stunning.

His parents worked in a defense plant; his father brought out a guitar in the evenings playing the driving rhythm of western swing, and their friends and relatives who had just joined the military gathered to drink and sing heartily with him.