A voice worth returning to

Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas, and grew up in Wink, a West Texas oil town so small it seemed an unlikely cradle for one of the most extraordinary voices in popular music. His father gave him a guitar when he was six. By his teens he was fronting a band, the Wink Westerners, and in 1956 — now calling themselves the Teen Kings — they cut “Ooby Dooby” for Sun Records. Sam Phillips released it, and it became a regional hit: Orbison’s first and only Sun success, a rockabilly footnote to a career that would soon go somewhere entirely different.

The years that followed were fallow. Two seasons at RCA Victor, from 1958 to 1960, produced seven recorded songs, two singles, and not a flicker of chart action. Then Fred Foster, the young founder of the independent Monument Records, signed him. With songwriting partners Joe Melson and later Bill Dees, producer Foster, and engineer Bill Porter at Nashville’s RCA Studio B, Orbison found his sound: the revolutionary “top-down” mix built from the backing vocals down, the strings, the doo-wah refrains, and above it all a voice that could travel from a whisper to a full-throated cry across three octaves. Between 1960 and 1964, he placed 22 records in the Billboard Top 40 — and wrote or co-wrote nearly every one of them.

The peak was almost absurd. In 1963 he headlined a British tour with the Beatles — already famous at home — as his support act, and reportedly left them stunned night after night. Billboard later noted that in a 68-week span beginning in August 1963, Orbison was the only American artist to reach number one in Britain, and he did it twice: with “It’s Over” in June 1964 and “Oh, Pretty Woman” that October. The dark sunglasses became his trademark — worn, he said, because he was shy, and because they let him sing without feeling watched. He barely moved on stage. He didn’t need to.

The hits dried up after he left Monument for MGM in 1965, and the decade closed in tragedy: his wife Claudette died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, and two of his three sons were killed in a house fire in 1968. Orbison kept recording and touring through the seventies, but the charts had moved on, and for years he seemed destined to be a golden-oldies memory.

The comeback began in 1987, all at once. Bruce Springsteen inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He re-recorded “Crying” as a duet with k.d. lang and won a Grammy. The all-star concert film A Black and White Night reminded everyone what the voice could still do. And in April 1988, he joined George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in Dylan’s Malibu garage to cut a B-side that became “Handle with Care” — and the Traveling Wilburys were born. Their album Vol. 1 arrived that October. That same year Orbison finished Mystery Girl, his first album of new material in years, cut with Lynne, Petty’s guitarist Mike Campbell, and songs from U2’s Bono and the Edge.

He did not live to see it released. On December 6, 1988, Roy Orbison died of a heart attack at his mother’s home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He was 52. A month later, “You Got It” was released as a single and climbed into the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic — his first in nearly twenty-five years. Mystery Girl followed in late January 1989. “Only the Lonely,” “Crying” and “Oh, Pretty Woman” now sit in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and the voice — that impossible, soaring instrument — remains one of the wonders of recorded music.

This collection traces him from the doo-wah breakthrough of 1960 to the posthumous triumph of 1989: ten recordings, each with its own story. Listen for the moments when the voice leaves the ground — that is Orbison at his most himself.

Follow the years