Roy Orbison: 50 years of Oh, Pretty Woman. This week saw the 50th anniversary of Roy Orbisons rock and roll classic. We take a look at the songs origin and legacy. A driving beat. A twanging guitar. A jarring 3/4 time signature. Roy Orbison’s iconic breakthrough hit secures its classic status in the space of 10 seconds, before he’s even begun singing. Orbison co-wrote Oh, Pretty Woman with Bill Dees in 1964 in tribute to Orbison’s first wife, Claudette, after the two had separated, divorced and then reunited. Speaking about the song’s genesis on NPR in 2008, Dees said: “[Claudette] came bopping down the stairs and said, ‘Give me some money’. ‘What do you need money for?’ [Roy] said. She said ‘Well, I’ve got to go to the store’, and as she walked away they were whispering and kissing bye bye, away from me. I stood up at the table, and he came back to the table, and I said ‘Does this sound funny? [singing] Pretty woman, don’t need no money’. He laughed, and he said ‘There’s nothing funny about pretty woman’. He right away started, [singing] ‘Pretty woman, walking down the street’. By the time she got back, we had it written.” The song marked somewhat of a departure from Orbison’s typical subject matter of heartbreak. As Bruce Springsteen said in his keynote speech at SXSW 2012: “He was the true master of the romantic apocalypse you dreaded and knew was coming after the first night you whispered ‘I love you’ to your new girlfriend.” Rather, Oh, Pretty Woman sees the man actually get the girl after a fleeting encounter on the street – a moment, a look, a plea, a disappointment.and suddenly: “but wait, what do I see? Is she walking back to me?” Though Orbison is most associated with the Gibson ES-335 guitar, he wrote Oh, Pretty Woman on an Epiphone Bard 12-string acoustic, which was reproduced by Epiphone in 2009 and released as Orbison’s signature guitar. The recorded single was released on Monument Records, based in Nashville, Tennessee, and featured Billy Sanford on guitar, who went on to play in session with Elvis, Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers. It proved to be Orbison’s biggest hit – Oh, Pretty Woman topped the US Billboard chart for three weeks, and was at #1 in 22 countries simultaneously. The single sold 680 thousand copies in the UK, and over a million copies in the US. The song was given a further boost when it inspired the title and featured on the soundtrack for Garry Marshall’s 1990 film Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Orbison received a posthumous Grammy in 1991 for the live version of Oh, Pretty Woman from his 1987 Black & White Night concert, which was aired as an HBO television special in January 1988. Featuring an star-powered backing band including Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, kd lang, T Bone Burnett and Bruce Springsteen, it’s a mark of Orbison’s presence and status on stage that the focus always remains on him. Fifty years on from release, Orbison’s best-known song and defining classic still sounds fresh. Mercy, indeed. youtu.be/_PLq0_7k1jk
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 08:51:46 +0000
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