Members / Roy Orbison

Roy Orbison: Lefty Wilbury, and the Voice That Made the Whole Band Make Sense

Wilbury alias: Lefty Wilbury (Vol. 1, 1988 only) Role: Lead and backing vocals, acoustic guitar

Every supergroup needs a reason to exist beyond star power, and the Traveling Wilburys found theirs the moment Roy Orbison opened his mouth. George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne were, by any measure, extraordinary songwriters and superb performers. None of them could do what Orbison did, which was sing like a man auditioning for something considerably higher-stakes than a garage session in Malibu. Producer Mo Ostin put it plainly: Orbison was somebody the other four "all idolized." Even in a room stacked with certified legends, he was the one act nobody in the group was pretending not to be starstruck by.

The Insurance Salesman With the Three-Octave Voice

Orbison's own rise was never a straight line. Born in Vernon, Texas, in 1936, he formed his first band at 13 and dropped out of college to chase music, eventually landing at Sun Records, the same Memphis label that gave the world Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins. His first hit, 1956's rockabilly novelty "Ooby Dooby," barely hinted at what was coming. It wasn't until he moved to Nashville's Monument Records in 1960 that Orbison found the sound that made him unmistakable: lush, dramatic, near-operatic ballads about heartbreak and dread, delivered in a voice that could climb three octaves without appearing to strain. "Only the Lonely," "Crying," "In Dreams," and 1964's "Oh, Pretty Woman" turned him into one of the only American rockers to hold his own against the British Invasion, no small feat, considering the British Invasion arrived largely because of him. The Beatles themselves opened for Orbison on a 1963 UK tour, and John Lennon later admitted to modeling the tempo of "Please Please Me" on an Orbison ballad, on Harrison's specific suggestion.

Visually, Orbison became just as recognizable: black suit, jet-black hair, and the trademark dark glasses that started, by most accounts, as an accident: he'd left his regular glasses somewhere before a gig and borrowed a pair of prescription sunglasses instead. He kept the look for the rest of his life. Onstage, he barely moved. "He never even twitched," Harrison once recalled, sounding genuinely baffled by the contrast between that stillness and the sound coming out of him.

Tragedy, Twice

Orbison's story carries a weight that few of his bandmates' biographies do, and it would be dishonest to write around it. In 1966, his wife Claudette was killed in a motorcycle accident, with Orbison riding just ahead of her when it happened. Two years later, while he was on tour in England, a fire tore through his Hendersonville, Tennessee, home and killed two of his three young sons, Roy DeWayne and Anthony. Orbison, understandably, found it almost impossible to write for a long stretch afterward, and by his own family's account, he never attended a funeral again for the rest of his life. He kept touring anyway, through the 1970s, even as chart success dried up almost entirely and, by his 40th birthday in 1976, some of his American shows were playing to half-empty rooms.

He remarried in 1969, to a young German woman named Barbara Wellhönen Jakobs, who would later become his manager and the driving force behind his eventual comeback. It's worth sitting with how long that comeback took to arrive: nearly two full decades of scattered, underappreciated records before the culture caught back up with him.

The Comeback, Right on Schedule for Once

The turnaround, when it finally came in the mid-1980s, arrived from an unlikely direction: David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet used "In Dreams" to deeply unsettling effect, introducing Orbison's voice to an entirely new generation that had no idea who he was. A year later, Bruce Springsteen personally inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, citing Orbison as a direct influence on his own writing. The concert special Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, filmed in 1987 with Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and Bonnie Raitt all backing him up, made the comeback impossible to ignore. By the time Jeff Lynne (who considered Orbison "the best producer" he'd ever collaborated with, a compliment Orbison happily returned) started work on his comeback album Mystery Girl in early 1988, Roy Orbison had gone from oldies-circuit afterthought to the most in-demand comeback story in American music, seemingly overnight.

It was during this exact window that Lynne, who had reportedly been trying to coax Orbison back into the studio "for ages," folded him into the Wilburys sessions almost as an afterthought to an afterthought: Harrison needed a B-side, invited Lynne, and Lynne brought Orbison along for the ride. Orbison ended up with one of the most memorable vocal turns on Vol. 1, his sole lead performance on the album, "Not Alone Any More", a ballad that let his full range breathe in a way none of the ensemble tracks quite managed. He also delivered the soaring bridge on "Handle With Care" that, more than any other single element, tells you within thirty seconds exactly why this band existed.

By all accounts, Orbison was also the group's resident storyteller during the long studio evenings at Dave Stewart's house, holding the rest of the band rapt with tales of his Sun Records days and running with a young Elvis Presley, material that, by Jeff Lynne's telling, was "fabulous" enough that you almost wish someone had been recording those conversations instead of just the songs.

December 6, 1988

Vol. 1 was released in October 1988. Orbison lived just long enough to watch it climb the charts ("Handle With Care" was moving up the singles chart the week he died) and to finish Mystery Girl, the album he considered, and critics would later confirm, the finest work of his career. He never heard it released.

On December 6, 1988, after a hectic run of European promotional appearances and at least one interview conducted through what he later described to Johnny Cash as chest pains, Orbison flew home to rest at his mother's house outside Nashville. That evening he flew radio-controlled model airplanes with his son Wesley and the family's longtime driver and friend, Benny Birchfield, an ordinary, almost sweetly mundane way to spend an evening. Later that night he complained of chest pain and collapsed. He died of a heart attack at his mother's home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He was 52 years old.

Mystery Girl was released the following January, reached number five on the Billboard 200, the highest-charting album of his entire career, and produced the posthumous hit "You Got It," co-written with Lynne and Petty. It remains the best-selling record Roy Orbison ever made, and he made it without ever getting to hear the applause.

The Empty Chair

Orbison's Wilburys pseudonym, Lefty, was chosen as a tribute to Lefty Frizzell, one of his own country-music heroes, a small, telling detail about a man who, even at the height of his own comeback, was still thinking about who he'd learned from. When the surviving Wilburys regrouped in 1990 to record Vol. 3, they dedicated the album to "Lefty" in the liner notes, and simply never replaced him. There is no fifth voice on that record. There was no attempt to find one.

Orbison was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989 and won a posthumous Grammy in 1991. His estate, run for years by Barbara Orbison until her own death in 2011 and now managed by his sons, is still releasing archival material more than three and a half decades after he died in the middle of the best stretch of his career.

Hear the record that finally caught up with him: our Roy Orbison solo essentials guide starts with Mystery Girl. Or go back to the full Wilburys story to see how a spare B-side gave him one last, joyful chapter.