Roy Orbison
Rock Singer — born 1936
Roy Orbison was an American singer and songwriter.
Roy Orbison was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist whose three-decade career across 1953–1988 produced multiple defining late-1950s and 1960s American rock-and-roll songs — particularly his 1964 Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Oh, Pretty Woman" and his 1960 Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Only the Lonely." He was born Roy Kelton Orbison on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas. His father Orbie Lee Orbison was a Texas oil-derrick worker and amateur guitarist who taught Roy his first guitar chords at age six, and his mother Nadine Schultz was a homemaker. The Orbison family relocated multiple times across his West Texas childhood — Fort Worth, Vernon, and finally Wink, Texas in 1946.
His education at North Texas State College in Denton (1954–1956; without earning a degree) launched his early-career path. His 1956 first commercial single "Ooby Dooby" with the Wink, Texas band the Teen Kings — recorded for Sun Records under producer Sam Phillips (one month after the March 1956 Sun Records release of Elvis Presley's first major-label single) — launched his early-career American rock-and-roll public profile.
His 1959 Monument Records signing — and his subsequent 1960 single "Only the Lonely" — launched his early-1960s American rock-and-roll commercial breakthrough. The 1960 "Only the Lonely" single sold over two million copies worldwide and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 (kept off the top spot only by Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry"). His subsequent early-1960s Monument Records hit-singles sequence — particularly "Running Scared" (1961, his first Billboard Hot 100 number-one), "Crying" (1961), "Dream Baby" (1962), "In Dreams" (1963), and "Oh, Pretty Woman" (1964, his second Billboard Hot 100 number-one) — produced his 1960s American rock-and-roll public profile.
His late-1960s biographical narrative was shaped by the 1966 motorcycle-crash death of his first wife Claudette Frady, and the 1968 fire deaths of his two sons Roy DeWayne and Anthony King at his Hendersonville, Tennessee home. His 1988 founding of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty — and the December 6, 1988 death of Orbison from a heart attack at age 52, weeks before the late-1988 Wilburys album commercial peak — produced his later commercial revival. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
His name Roy derives from the Old French roi meaning "king." Roy was a popular American boys' name through the early-to-mid-20th century.