PROGRAM #7
Shake This
Shack
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 cool demeanor on stage. Texas rockabilly artists mixed Western swing, the blues, and jazz, and include Sid King & the Five Strings, Lew Williams and the enigmatic Roy Orbison, who grew up in the tiny, wind-swept oil town of Wink, Texas. Orbison 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,” in 1956. 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.”
Roy Orbison, with his signature shades and skyscraping pompadour that was dyed black, started his career at Sun Records in Memphis before he had a string of ballads in the 1960s about heartbreak and lost love. The son of a Texas oil field hand, his mother was a painter and poet who inspired him. His sad songs revealed a vulnerable soul in an era when male rock ’n roll singers exuded burly manliness. Orbison wore thick glasses from the age of 4 due to his poor eyesight. (Publicity Photo)
