Roy Orbison's Birthday

In my morning perusal of Right Wing blogs {so's to know what I should think today} I see Powerline's Scott Johnson paying tribute on the anniversary of Orbison's birth.

I find the wiki article on Orbison to be pretty comprehensive. Note the early connections through Johnny Cash and Sam Phillips of Sun - it reeally WAS a small pop music world back then!

But it saddens me a little to realize that his broadcast tribute... which I recall as 'not long ago'... happened in 1987.
That was a great show. But, to me, the crowning achievement was his joining the Traveling Wilbury's.

What set Orbison apart from all the others was his voice; certainly it wasnt his looks. And in the early sixties, a good song with a great alto voice was plenty to make it on the charts... and the charts were full of them. As I recall, the great ones at that time were Johnny Mathis - whose appeal to guys was limited by his obvious 'gay-ness' {but if you wanted music to seduce by, there was none better than Mathis}, Dee Clark who made a GREAT one-hit wonder 'Raindrops (falling from my eyes)', which sadly doesnt exist online anywhere I can find, and Orbison.

And Roy Orbison was the king!

 

RE: Roy Orbison

One of the biggest copyright law cases in the recent past was Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, probably better known as the 2 Live Crew case. For those who don't know, 2 Live Crew were sued by Acuff-Rose Music (the copyright holders) for sampling (and parodying) Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" in their own "Pretty Woman" without authorization.

I'm not going to go into the details of the case, because they're really extraneous to this story. The point, though, is that it's a seminal case on parody and fair use, so we spent the better part of a week on it in my Copyright Law class a couple of years ago. And throughout this protracted discussion, every time my professor referred to Orbison, he called him Ray Orbison. We thought about correcting him, but it was just too funny watching to see whether he might catch the error himself.

Anyway, that's my Roy Orbison story. Happy birthday, Roy.

 

Clay, yes... Raindrops 'It must be RA-aindrops.. falling from my Ay-Eyes' - no.

Not saying he didnt record a cover... saying it was only Dee Clark's that mattered. Here's a karaoke version.... best I can find. Tense your back muscles at the end .. you'll need it. At least it's the original music.

The big difference between you and me, Don... is that your romantic outlook extends to your politics.

 

Re: RE: Roy Orbison

That's interesting in itself... did the subject of Weird Al and the LACK of litigation on his pieces come up? since I'm a BIG Weird Al fan.

 

RE: Re: RE: Roy Orbison

... Right on the former. Rightbrained on the latter!

If you libs want to make the perfect world; Suggest you start with the bad guys... or do you subscribe there really arent any. That we can all just get along?

 

Re: RE: Roy Orbison

I don't recall that coming up. As I understand it, Weird Al generally gets permission to do parodies; the Coolio business was an anomaly that reportedly involved some confusion between Coolio and his record label, and eventually resulted in an agreement to pay royalties rather than litigation.