(1936-1988) Birthplace: Vernon Genre: Rock and Roll Influenced: the Beatles, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, many others

Roy Orbison's life story is one of the strangest and most tragic in all of rock. His wide-ranging tenor voice and haunting ballads of lost love touched millions in the sixties and earned him the enduring respect of some of the greatest stars of rock, including the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. But after horrifying accidental deaths in his family Orbison's career went into a near eclipse in the seventies, only to be revived to even greater heights in the mid-eighties, shortly before his own early death.

Roy Kelton Orbison was born in Vernon, but grew up in the small West Texas oil town of Wink. By age six he was learning to play guitar from his father and soon showed a precocious talent, performing on the radio and for school friends. While still in high school he formed the Wink Westerners, but didn't get serious about music until he left for North Texas State College. There he met fellow student Pat Boone and backed him on guitar in an early recording. Boone's quick success with rhythm and blues covers in 1955 was an object lesson. Orbison left college after two years, transformed the Wink Westerners into the Teen Kings, and began to tour West Texas.

On the strength of a recording of "Ooby Dooby" done at Norman Petty's studio, Orbison and the Teen Kings received a contract from Sun Records. There his only success was a rerecording of "Ooby Dooby," which was a hit in 1956. Deciding to concentrate on his writing talents, Orbison dissolved the Teen Kings and started composing songs, among them "Claudette," a paean to his wife that the Everly Brothers made into a 1958 hit, allowing Orbison to buy out his Sun contract. In 1959 the Monument Records label offered a recording contract, and by 1960 the company's international hits began to flow, nearly all penned by Roy Orbison. Between 1960 and 1964 Orbison produced the classics "Only the Lonely," "Blue Angel," "Running Scared," "Blue Bayou," "It's Over," and "Oh, Pretty Woman." In addition, Orbison won influential friends: While touring England in 1963 he met the Beatles, who were great admirers of his work.

A series of personal tragedies began in 1966 when his wife, Claudette, died in a motorcycle accident. Two years later, two of their three sons died in a fire that destroyed his home. Although Orbison remarried in 1969 and continued to tour in the seventies, the hit records would not come. Health problems complicated the end of the decade, and in 1979 he had to have heart surgery.

Orbison's popularity was renewed by singers such as Linda Ronstadt and Van Halen, who recorded his sixties songs in the late seventies and eighties, a 1980 duet with Emmylou Harris ("That Lovin' You Feelin' Again") that won a Grammy, and his 1987 induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. The next year promised a full renewal of his career, with the release of The Traveling Wilburys, Volume One, a collaboration with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Lynne. But within a month Orbison was dead of a heart attack. A posthumous collection contained the last great song of Orbison's career, "You Got It."