A problem many exceptional guitar players have with songwriting is choosing chords that are right for the melodic and harmonic path of the appropriate vocal performances.
And then there was Roy Orbison, a master of both picking and structure with a vocal method that was the American roots music equivalent of Caruso’s — literally a voice for the ages.
Although Orbison was most often seen with a Gibson ES-335 on stage, for songwriting he often used a 12-string acoustic Epiphone Bard model. The guitar, with its lush, natural chorusing quality, was the perfect compliment to the heavy purr of his singing. And it’s the instrument that helped him create “Oh, Pretty Woman” with fellow Texas songwriter Bill Dees during a mere 40 minutes in 1963.
The Gibson Company immortalized Orbison’s acoustic with the Ltd Ed Roy Orbison Signature 12-String Acoustic. The guitar is a highly accurate reproduction of Orbison’s 1962 original. It has a solid spruce top, a solid mahogany back, a rosewood 12-string bridge and vintage tuners. For this limited edition release, the back of the guitar’s headstock includes a replica of Roy’s signature and the notation for the first measure of the “Oh, Pretty Woman” intro riff.
A little known aspect of Orbison’s history is that early in his career Sun Records’ boss Sam Phillips — who signed Orbison’s group the Teen Kings in 1956 and made the minor hit “Ooby Dooby” with them — valued him more for his picking than his songwriting, and that Orbison could tear out a rockabilly solo with plenty of fire. In fact, he played guitar on Sun’s singles for Ken Cook and others.
Orbison got his first guitar when he was only six years-old and typically composed the riffs that served as the hooks of his songs himself, including the memorable pattern that opens “Oh, Pretty Woman.”
His first significant commercial success was as a songwriter for others, penning his first big hit, “Claudette,” for the Everly Brothers. In fairness, even Orbison contended that his voice wasn’t fully developed until 1960, when he recorded “Only the Lonely.” At first, he tried pitching the tune to his friend Elvis Presley and to the Everly Brothers. Orbison believed so strongly in the song that after they turned it down he cut it himself, and it reached number two on the Billboard charts to make him a star. At that point Orbison had developed a method of singing that came from his chest and abdomen rather than his throat.
Further hits like “Crying” and “Running Scared,” the latter based on Maurice Ravel’s famous compositionBolero, cemented his reputation and forever insured that Orbison would be remembered for his voice rather than his guitar. He also developed a memorable look to compensate for his lack of movement on stage, dressing head to toe in black.
Unlike most early rock heroes, Orbison was never a slave to the backbeat. His tunes were arranged more to fit the seemingly capricious nature of his vocal lines. They are full of daring chromaticism and defy the variations of the I-IV-V structure of most tunes of the era, in soaring contrast to the works of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, for example. Orbison’s darkly beautiful song “In Dreams,” for example, eschews any verse-chorus-bridge-verse pattern to deliver instead seven distinct verses without a repeated lyric hook or chorus. “Running Scared” repeats its first verse four times before resolving with a chorus and abruptly finishing.
And his themes were often plucked from the troubled corners of romance, where love is eternally insecure, often fleeting and loaded with consequences. That gave his songs a more adult perspective than typical teenage fare, with the notable exception of the blithe “Oh, Pretty Woman.” And yet, that song is also partly a wish, with an edge of quiet desperation in the singer’s hope that the lady in the title will look his way.
Another testament to his vision is that throughout the 1960s Orbison refused to edit takes together or splice performances. He believed in the collective strength of individual performances and that editing diluted that strength. Despite the depth of his musical resolve, Orbison suffered from stage fright regardless of his ability to create silenced awe in his audiences and win such fans and friends as Bob Dylan and George Harrison, with whom he shared the spotlight in the Traveling Wilburys for a short time before his death from a heart attack in 1988.
Orbison left behind an expansive catalog, including 23 authorized solo albums, nearly 100 singles and four live discs. He appears on only the first Traveling Wilbury’s disc and died shortly after it was recorded. But Orbison’s career was once again on an upward arc even before he entered the studio with that supergroup. Director David Lynch used Orbison’s staggeringly powerful song “In Dreams” for a particularly brutal sequence in his surrealist noir revival film Blue Velvet in 1986, which introduced the Other Man in Black to a new generation of hipsters.
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