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Roy Orbison was one of the most distinctive--and most uncategorizable--singers in the history of American pop. When he died 20 years ago, Robert Sandall penned this thoughtful obituary of an artist whose life was as tragic as his haunting sound.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Roy Orbison died on the crest of sudden universal acclaim for his soaring and deliciously mournful ballads, ending a 30-year recording career in which life imitated art with unimaginable cruelty.

"All artists go through a period when they turn on success or success turns on them," Roy Orbison remarked with characteristic steadiness not long before his sudden death last December. "Most of them can't ride that out. I guess I was fortunate in that I had been playing and singing for 13 years when success came. It touched me deeply but it didn't make me crazy."

There spoke a man--latterly known as a "legend"--who knew what he was talking about; a man who had grown up with the modern pop industry itself, alongside Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley in the 1950s, who had toured Britain in 1963 with the Beatles as his support act, who had known extremes of adulation and neglect and who had seen a good many contemporaries go crazy or die or both in the process. Roy Orbison really was, to use that dog-eared expression, a survivor.

Born in Texas in 1936, the son of an oil worker, Orbison began playing in public early, at the age of eight, on local radio stations. By his late teens he was "discovered" by Norman Petty, the producer who later discovered Buddy Holly and whose home recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, was the only such facility in the Southwest in the early 1950s. Nothing came of this liaison, so Orbison moved to Memphis to record for the mighty Sam Phillips' Sun label and enjoyed a minor hit in 1956 with "Ooby Dooby." But the rockabilly style didn't suit Orbison's more introspective songwriting tendencies any more than it did his piercingly dramatic tenor voice and staid, unglamorous demeanor. He spent the rest of the decade in Nashville writing songs for other artists like the Everly Brothers.

Then, abruptly, in the summer of 1960, Orbison's career took off with the first of what was to become a series of about 20 memorably plangent ballads: "Only The Lonely" hit Number 2 in America and did one better in Britain, where it stayed on the chart for nearly six months. His luck held for another six golden years but when it finally broke in 1966, the man in black and self-appointed spokesman of loners and losers found his life imitating his art with an unimaginable cruelty.

First his wife Claudette died in a road accident. Two years later, two of his three sons were incinerated in a fire which destroyed his Tennessee ranch home. To make matters worse, pop was going hairy and growing into rock. "The hippie thing," Orbison admitted, "was not my kind of thing." And thus followed 10 years of cabaret and obscurity which didn't lift until Linda Ronstadt recorded the Orbison classic "Blue Bayou" in 1977. It sold 10 million copies--just nine million more than the original--and set a mini-trend. In 1981 Van Halen had a hit with a cover of ‘Oh Pretty Woman.'

But equally important in the reversal of Orbison's fortunes in the 1980s was the patronage and support of a younger generation of more archivally-minded rockers: in particular Bruce Springsteen, who name checked him in an early song, "Thunder Road," claimed Orbison as a key vocal influence and proposed his induction into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame--a thoroughly American institution set up three years ago to honor great performers whose recordings go back 25 years or more.

Suddenly, everybody wanted to write songs with or for Orbison. Bono of U2, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols--"he's just a sweetheart," according to Orbison--and Madonna's team of Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg all beat a path to his Nashville door.

Overheated reactions to the early songs were all the rage. Film director David Lynch, an Orbison fanatic, used "In Dreams" in his psycho-thriller Blue Velvet and played it to the assembled cast at regular four-hour intervals during the filming.

A new solo album for what had become a new solo career was recorded with the illustrious assistance of Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, and is due out early next year. And then of course there are the Traveling Wilburys. The idea for the oldest super group in the world came about as a result of the many collaborations surrounding Orbison's own album. And indeed Roy "Lefty" Wilbury's individual track "You're Not Alone" is one of the finest on the Wilburys album. The aching, wailing soulfulness of the Big O's voice sounds remarkably undiminished; the meticulous craftsmanship which distinguished all his songs has not fallen into clichéd decay.

His misfortunes, however, took their toll of his health, and Orbison underwent open-heart surgery in the late '70s. His death--of heart failure at the age of 52--suited the staunchly non-showbiz nature of the man: no plane crash or overdose for him. But it was, like his songs, a sad and strangely moving event all the same.

Hear an audio interview with Roy Orbison, and read more articles about him, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 13,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.