Orbison box set is bittersweet for his widow
Beverly Keel • December 29, 2008
The Tennesean


The definitive Roy Orbison box set is receiving rave reviews from critics, including a rare five-star review from Rolling Stone.

Roy Orbison: The Soul of Rock and Roll is a four-CD box set containing 107 songs, including demos, live recordings and a dozen unreleased tunes that impressively span the entire career of Roy, who died in 1988 and lived in Hendersonville.

Assembling the project was an emotional roller coaster for Roy's widow, Barbara Orbison, who maintains a Nashville home and publishing company. (Their son, Roy, wrote the liner notes and helped her with song selection and order.)

"There were three parts of it," she says. "One side was historical. I imagined in 50 years, when all of us are gone, that teachers in schools will say, 'OK, next week let's just look at modern rock 'n' roll through the works of an artist called Roy Orbison,' because he just happened to be at all the places where rock 'n' roll was founded. … That was easy for me to do because I have a total fascination with leaving something behind that will be a study map to a greater piece of history.

"Of course, then my personal side arrived, and it was really bittersweet," she says. "The emotion that I felt… It was coming up on 20 years (since his death) and that was a coincidence.

"It was slightly overwhelming to me. In the last 20 years, I had never had without Roy a project that took so much emotions out of me. Because when you look at the book that is the companion to this four-CD set, I had to go through photographs and confront myself, 'Can I put this in there? Should I put it in? It's a personal photo. What belongs in this box set? What do I owe to the fan or, in 50 years, to a sense of history?'

"The third one was my perfectionism that I wanted to make it right and put everything in it that needed to be. Then you look at a career of 50 years that Roy had and all of the different parts and getting permission and completing something I wanted to hold up to the test of time. So I'm sure glad I did it, but I never would have done it if I would have known how much it would have taken out of me. I wouldn't have touched it."

After poring through scrapbooks and listening to his catalog, she developed a newfound appreciation of Roy.

"I am always totally amazed at how much Roy gave to his craft, to what he loved so much, to music," she says. "Yet he had a full life with me and the kids. Sometimes I looked at the touring schedule and interviews that he did and songs that he wrote, and thought, 'Wow, I just thought he was married to me.'

"Roy was a 24/7 mind. He always gave me the feeling like I was the only thing that mattered in his life. Then I looked at all these recordings and remembered when he recorded or wrote them. He had another life."

He had the Voice Elvis was worried about, or should I say envied.

robpop wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 3:22am:



Thankfully, we don't have to...