Very Early Roy

Roy Orbison had a number of distinct careers. People probably know about the period in the early 60's when he had his greatest success -- the Pretty Woman/It's Over years. He enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980's, spurred on by some collaborations with newer stars and his membership in the Traveling Wilburys, just before his untimely death in 1988. He's also had a posthumous career as a PBS fundraiser, for it seems like every time pledge week rolls around my local PBS station has his Black and White Nights special scheduled.



His earliest career is relatively unknown, except among hard-core Roy fans. From his West Texas home, and during his college years at North Texas State University, he was working as a rock and roll singer with his band the Teen Kings. A meeting with a touring Johnny Cash got him a stint at the legendary Sun Records studio in Memphis with Sam Phillips. While there from 1956 to 1958, he recorded a number of his songs, as well as songs written by Phillips and others. He didn't have a lot of success with this material, with only one song, Ooby Dooby (written by some classmates from North Texas State) getting some success at the time. While he worked as a studio musician at Sun and continued recording, not much happened to his career. He eventually left Sun and went back to Texas (and the rest, as they say, is history).



His Sun singles, plus a number of unreleased songs, have been compiled in a newly-released CD, Orby Records Spotlights Roy Orbison. This is part of a series by Orby featuring the Sun works of Roy, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins. (Sam Phillips sold off the rights to his Elvis recordings years ago, which is why The King isn't part of this series.) In a sense, these 1950s songs are new material, because most of them don't show up on his greatest hits compilations, or were never released at all. In addition to Ooby Dooby, the only songs on this album that you see elsewhere would be Go, Go, Go and Claudette, both of which were performed in the Black & White PBS special.



These songs are not in his lush ballad style that shaped his big hits of the 60's. Instead, they are in the Rockabilly style of the Sun studios, which don't quite do justice to his voice. In fact, I was listening to this in the car as I picked up my teen-age daughter and her friends at school, and their snap opinion was "Sounds like Elvis." (Well, I've at least trained my daughter so that she can distinguish between the Temptations and the Four Tops, but haven't worked back to the 50's yet.)



Don't approach this album as representative Roy Orbison. However, if you are interested in how he got his start, or in the legendary Sun Records company, or rockabilly in general, then this album will be intriguing.



(This review originally ran at www.blogcritics.org)