Born Roy Kelton Orbison on April 23, 1936 in Vernon, Texas, Roy Orbison transformed the landscape of American popular music and culture via his profoundly influential recordings, iconic persona, and deeply felt performances. As a young singer-songwriter in the 1950s, Orbison became one of the founding fathers of the emerging American art form, Rock & Roll, and, over the course of a career spanning more than four decades, created an enduring catalog of songs -- "Only The Lonely," "In Dreams," "Oh, Pretty Woman," "Crying" and countless others -- distilling love's yearnings and heartbreaks into the essence of his other-worldly four-octave voice, effortlessly gliding from glottal growls of desire to the long lonesome sorrow and spiritual triumphs of his celestial falsetto.
Roy's mother, Nadine, was a nurse and his father, Orbie Lee, a factory worker who gave him his first guitar. The first proper song Roy learned to play was the 1939 standard, "You Are My Sunshine," penned by former Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis. By 1944, Roy had written his first song, "A Vow of Love," in front of his grandmother's house in Vernon, where Roy landed his own radio show on local KVWC in 1945 after winning a contest. In 1946, the already peripatetic Orbison moved with his family to the West Texas oil town of Wink, where, at the age of 13, he formed his first band, "The Wink Westerners." Roy Orbison graduated from Wink High School in June 1954 and, before long the Wink Westerners were becoming regulars on local television and radio programs performing a protean rock & roll repertoire which included "That's All Right, Mama," "Rock Around The Clock," and "Ooby Dooby," a song written by Wade Lee Moore and Dick Penner, two friends of Roy's from his abbreviated term at North Texas State College in Denton.
The band became "The Teen Kings" to reflect an increasing interest in rock & roll and were given a weekly local Saturday TV show in Odessa, Texas, on KOSA-TV, which was part of the nat
