TEXAS IS HOME TO A STYLE its creators dubbed “Cat Music,” for the ‘cool cats and kittens’ who played it with their hip style of dress and demeanor on stage. Texas rockabilly artists mixed Western swing, the blues, and jazz, and include Sid King & the Five Strings and Lew Williams. We’ll also profile Roy Orbison, one of the most enigmatic of the rockabilly cats, who came from the tiny, wind-swept oil town of Wink, Texas. He formed a teenage band, The Teen Kings, who played at high school dances and rowdy honky-tonk bars before recording their first hit, Ooby Dooby. Yet it took several years of experimenting with new sounds before Roy developed his own operatic-rock style of singing that was a departure from his raw rockabilly, with such hits as Pretty Woman and Only the Lonely.

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