Cover of Roy OrbisonWhen I first heard Roy Orbison's recording of "Oh, Pretty Woman", I was just entering my second year of junior high school in Merrillville, Indiana. I absolutely fell in love with the song. Orbison's plaintive voice really added to the yearning that the song expressed--a yearning that I as a young adolescent understood so well.
After that hit, Roy Orbison was on my radar as he came up with one hit after another over the next few decades. In the 1980s, surrealistic film director David Lynch included Orbison's "In Dreams" in a bizarre sequence of his film Blue Velvet. At first offended, Orbison later recognized the ingenious use of the song in the film sequence.
As his career was experiencing a resurgence, Roy Orbison died from a heart attack in 1988 at age 52. His haunting catalog of music would make a good soundtrack for anyone's dreams.
