Roy Orbison

Roy Orbison, born in Texas in 1936, sang like nobody else: a huge, trembling voice that could climb from a hush to an operatic cry in the space of a verse, on ballads so dark and emotional they seemed to hurt. At a time when male singers played it tough, he let himself sound vulnerable, and he stood almost perfectly still to do it, dressed in black, with dyed black hair and dark glasses.

He was a teenager when he started out singing country and western, and Sam Phillips signed him to Sun Records in 1956 after Johnny Cash urged him to. "Ooby Dooby" was his first Sun recording. The real success came at Monument, where 22 of his singles reached the Billboard top 40 between 1960 and 1966, nearly all of them songs he wrote or co-wrote: "Only the Lonely", "Running Scared", "Crying", "In Dreams" and "Oh, Pretty Woman".

Personal tragedies and a faltering career followed, but the late '80s brought him back. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1987, and in 1988 he formed the Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. A heart attack killed him that December, aged 52, and a month later "You Got It" became his first top-10 hit in both the US and the UK in nearly 25 years.

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