Roy Orbison Birthplace — Vernon, Texas

Roy Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas, and grew up partly in Vernon and partly in Wink, a small oil-patch town in the Permian Basin. His extraordinary voice — a three-octave tenor capable of operatic runs that no contemporary could match — was the defining instrument of his career, and the melancholy grandeur of songs like 'Oh, Pretty Woman,' 'Crying,' 'In Dreams,' 'Running Scared,' and 'Roy Orbison — Only the Lonely' placed him in a category of his own among 1950s and 1960s pop artists. He wore dark glasses not as an affectation but because he was genuinely very short-sighted and had left his regular glasses on a plane.

Orbison recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis alongside Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins — the Million Dollar Quartet — before his greatest commercial success with Monument Records in the early 1960s. A series of personal tragedies — the death of his wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and two of his sons in a house fire in 1968 — derailed his career, but a late-1980s revival through the Traveling Wilburys (with Dylan, Harrison, Petty, and Lynne) and a brilliant late album Mystery Girl restored him to prominence just before his death in 1988.

Vernon is a small city in north Texas near the Oklahoma border. A historical marker acknowledges Orbison's birth there. The Wink, Texas connection — where he attended school and formed his first band, the Wink Westerners — is the more documented part of his early geography, and Wink has a Roy Orbison Museum.