📍Wink, TX 79789, USA
1946 – 1954“My father gave me a guitar for my sixth birthday, and by the time I was seven, as I later said, I was finished for anything else. I was born in Vernon, Texas, and during the hard years we moved around for work, to Fort Worth and back, before settling in Wink, an oil town in the flat west Texas desert near the New Mexico border. I described life there as football, oil fields, oil, grease and sand, and I was a shy, short-sighted boy who never quite fitted in with the football crowd. Music was how I belonged. In high school I formed a band with friends, the Wink Westerners, and we played country standards and big-band numbers at dances and honky-tonks around the oil towns. We also had a weekly radio show on KERB in nearby Kermit, which taught me to perform even when I couldn't see the audience. My voice was unusual, high, operatic and full of feeling, and in Wink I learned to trust it. After school I studied briefly in Denton and Odessa, and then the band, renamed the Teen Kings, recorded Ooby Dooby, which took me to Sun Records in Memphis. Later, with Only the Lonely, Crying and Oh, Pretty Woman, I sang about loneliness and longing in a way people said they had never heard before, and some of that came from the lonely spaces of west Texas. I was glad to leave Wink, but Wink was proud of me; the town opened a small Roy Orbison Museum, and fans still come to see where my voice began.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today