Today we are remembering Roy Orbison’s friend and cowriter, Conway Twitty, who passed away on June 5, 1993.

The two were friends from early in their careers.  Written by Roy Orbison and Harold Jenkins (Conway Twitty’s birth name) and recorded by Roy at Sun Records, “RockHouse” is a fun number from 1956 that became a standard with the early 1980’s Rockabilly Revival bands. To today’s ears, it has a prototypical rockabilly sound like you might hear on a tv show theme song or cartoon. But it was a pretty raunchy early rock song.

Here is Conway Twitty’s version of a song that Roy wrote with Joe Melson, “(I’m in a) BLUE, BLUE MOOD,” which was also recorded by Roy Orbison for his 1965 MGM album THERE IS ONLY ONE ROY ORBISON-