Roy Orbison

    One of my all time favourite singers was the wonderful Roy Orbison. His lyrics were heart- wrenching and when he sang, he was clearly in the kind of agony you only experience when you are a teenager and love has gone terribly wrong. 'Crying' was one of the most perfect examples. “I was alright, For a while, I could smile, For a while” then the inevitable happens, he runs into her and his heart breaks all over again...”Then I saw you last night, You held my hand so tight”....the sentiment and emotion washed over this teen-aged girl like caramel syrup being poured over ice cream. Roy was the master. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he had an enviable range in his voice of three (some say four) octaves, something seldom heard. He was also a magnificent song writer whose music was very complex.

     It wasn't just the lyrics that got me going. It was the dreamy music and swaying to it in the arms of my current boyfriend. There was nothing like it—dancing on a crowded dance floor, Mr. Perfect leading me around, peeking every now and then to see all the other couples, their eyes closed, enjoying young love. The only thing better was listening to those songs with a broken heart. I felt the words so profoundly; they seemed to be written with only me in mind. Lying on my bed, a half-empty box of tissues next to me, sipping on a Dr Pepper and singing softly the words my portable record player was blaring out. The words that were intended to make my breaking heart shatter into a million pieces. When a heart is breaking those songs are better than any therapy. It was heaven to a teen-aged girl.

     Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936 in a small town in Texas. At six, he received a guitar as a gift and by the time he was seven he was completely given over to music. At eight he performed on a local radio show of which he was the host by the late 1940s. He sang in a band in high school and was signed by Sun Records. A classmate named Pat Boone was signed to a record deal which strengthened Roy's belief that he had a future in music. In the early 1960s twenty-two of his songs placed on the US Billboard Top 40.

     In 1960 he wrote a song called 'Only the Lonely' which was turned down by Elvis and The Everley Brothers so he sang it himself. It shot to Number 2 in the US and to Number 1 in the UK and Australia. The rest, as they say, was history.

There were many stories about Roy Orbison—that he was blind, that he was an albino, that his entire family was wiped out in one huge tragedy. Probably they were invented to explain his wearing of sunglasses, his wearing of black and his seemingly melancholy presence on stage as he sang his sad and mournful songs. Due to a childhood bout with jaundice, he had a permanently sallow complexion. He also had very bad eye sight and wore extremely thick glasses. Once, while on tour, he left his glasses on an aeroplane so wore his prescription sunglasses on stage. He found he preferred them to his regular glasses so continued to do so. His penchant for dressing in black had nothing to do with having a melancholy nature; he was in fact a happy and out going man. He was, quite simply, a bad dresser who had no manager so he never benefited from someone telling him how to dress or act on stage.

     While in the UK in 1963, he fronted a new local band called The Beatles. Roy enthralled the audience so much that after fourteen encores he was discouraged from singing anymore so that The Beatles could take the stage. It's said that the Fab Four, whose act was showy and action packed, were completely astounded at the way Roy stood completely still and simply sang his fourteen encores.

     Tragedy struck in 1966 when his wife, Claudette, (whom he had divorced and re-married and was the catalyst for the song Claudette that he wrote for the Everley Brothers) was killed while riding her motorcycle in Tennessee. Then, in 1968, while on tour in England, he received the news that his home in Tennessee had burned down killing his two eldest sons. He remarried a much younger woman in 1969 with whom he had two children.

     As a teenaged girl, I simply loved the feeling I got when I heard his voice; its melancholy lyrics stirring up teenaged girl sentiments. Even today, I find myself being able to recollect exactly where I was, with whom I was dancing, over whom I was crying, when I hear, “You held my hand so tight, As you stopped to say hello…”