Roy Orbison dyed his pale hair black long before the sunglasses
The black hair was never natural. As a shy kid in a dusty West Texas oil town, Roy Orbison was embarrassed by hair so pale it was nearly white, and he began dyeing it jet black while still a teenager. The dark clothes and sunglasses came later, completing a look built for aching ballads.
He was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas, the middle of three sons of an oil-field driller who struggled for work and a mother who painted and wrote poems. Poor eyesight put him in thick glasses from age four. His father handed him a guitar on his sixth birthday, and by seven, he said, he was finished for anything else. Lefty Frizzell's slurred singing moved him so much that he later called himself Lefty Wilbury. In Fort Worth he sang among soldiers about to ship out to the war, an emotional setting he counted as formative.
A polio scare in 1944 sent him back to his grandmother in Vernon, where at eight he began singing on a local radio show and later hosted it. The family moved to Wink in 1946, a place he summed up as football, oil, grease and sand. At school he strummed alone during recess while other kids played games. At 13 he formed the Wink Westerners, and an offer of $400 for one dance convinced him music could pay. A 1953 television talent win in Midland led to weekly shows.
He enrolled at North Texas State in 1954 intending to study geology as a fallback, then switched to history and English. Classmates wrote Ooby Dooby, which became his first Sun Records single after Johnny Cash urged Sam Phillips to sign him in 1956. The real success came at Monument Records: between 1960 and 1966, 22 singles made the Billboard top 40, including Crying and Oh, Pretty Woman, almost all written or co-written by him.
After personal tragedies stalled him, the late 1980s brought a revival. In 1988 he joined Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in founding the Traveling Wilburys. A heart attack killed him that December at 52, and a month later You Got It became his first top-ten hit in both America and Britain in almost 25 years.
Source: Roy Orbison
