Crying by Roy Orbison

Crying, Roy Orbison's third album, landed on Monument in January 1962, his second for the label, and it takes its name from the aching 1961 single at its heart. Fred Foster produced, and the record also carries "Running Scared", the slow-building hit that had already gone all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

This is Orbison doing what few men in rock and roll dared: letting a singer sound wounded. That huge, operatic voice climbs through these ballads until it seems about to break, and it never quite does. He fills out the set with covers, "The Great Pretender" and "Love Hurts" among them, plus an early reading of "She Wears My Ring", which Ray Price would later turn into a big country hit. The song "Crying" entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002, and the album stayed on the Billboard LP chart for 31 weeks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.