In 1960 rock ’n’ roll and pop music were quite rightly perceived as diminished by two watershed events: Elvis Presley’s enlistment in the army and Buddy Holly’s death. I was fifteen years old at the time and, like many others, I felt a void that it seemed would never be filled. No one was positioned to carry on what those greats had begun, or so it seemed. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, Roy Orbison appeared-a man who, unbeknownst to most rock ’n’ roll fans (myself included), had close personal ties with both Presley and Holly. Yet one would not...

Even if they knew nothing about the singer, anyone picking up Roy Orbison’s posthumously releasedMystery GirlCD (1989) might quickly conclude that the true mystery is not the girl of the title song but the dark, enigmatic figure on the cover.Mystery Girlshows two images of Orbison’s face and arm, the second being an upside-down inversion of the first, with everything pitch black except the whiteness of the skin of his face and hand, the latter mysteriously cupped near his mouth. The lenses of his glasses are as black as the frames and the utterly black background against...

If Roy Orbison is a significant artist, what kind of artist is he? Obviously he is a singer, but he is also a prolific songwriter. To be more precise, he is not just a singer but a recording artist. He did not, however, produce most of his recordings, nor did he play instruments on many of them. He did perform live throughout his career, and so he was also an instrumentalist, always playing guitar and occasionally harmonica. Given all of these roles, the attempts of critics and musicians to draw parallels between Orbison’s and classical music, comparing him to everyone...

Any discussion of the aesthetics of Roy Orbison’soeuvremust raise a number of theoretical as well as critical issues. In this chapter I will attempt to address those issues and to survey a few fundamental aspects of Orbison’s aesthetics. In addition, I want to address the questions of authorship (in what sense does it even make sense to speak of Orbison’s music as “his”?); style periods (early, middle, and late), and the melodramatic nature of much of Orbison’s music. The argument that a major component of Orbison’s music lies in a complex masochistic aesthetic is developed in Chapter 5,...

This scene opens the best-known novel of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the term masochism derives. We are following a conversation between a man and a beautiful woman, when suddenly we discover that it is all a dream. Later in the novel the protagonist awakens from another dream: “I wake after a feverish night troubled by nightmares…. Which of my confused memories are real? What have I experienced, what have I merely dreamed?” (187). When he examines his body and realizes that the beating of which he has dreamed has actually occurred, he declares, “My dream has come true.”...

Boy Orbison has become a movie star, but not a conventional one, nor the one he initially envisioned becoming. Following Elvis Presley’s successful entry into films, it became almost expected that rock ’n’ roll stars would attempt the same transition. A successful career as a pop singer led naturally to film acting. The Beatles continued this tradition with A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965), coming shortly after they attained superstar status, much as Presley’s Love Me Tender (1956) came shortly after he signed with RCA and attained that status. Since Presley’s and Orbison’s careers had intersected several times...

When, at the time of Roy Orbison’s death, U2’s lead singer Bono called him “the finest white pop singer on the planet,” I interpreted the reference to race as a sign of Bono’s sensitivity to racial matters. I assumed, that is, that he did not want to privilege this white singer over singers of color by elevating him above all others. While I still believe that that was Bono’s intention (Bono, as is shown in the documentary filmRattle and Hum, has great knowledge of and affection for black music), I want to inflect his racial reference somewhat differently here....

Roy Orbison frequently mentioned that his earliest association with music was death: as a little boy, he remembered singing at home as part of farewell parties for young men going off to fight in World War II.¹ As we have seen, death played an unusually prominent role in his music, and the untimely deaths of Claudette and his two children preceded his at the age of fifty-two, when he was on the brink of a major comeback.

But did his death really end his career? In some ways Orbison’s posthumous career has been as unusual as-and more successful than-his career...