This Friday we are celebrating 50 years since Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” reached #1, but Roy’s first number 1 single was “RUNNING SCARED.”
American Songwriter Magazine is featuring “Running Scared” as their Lyric of the Week:
“In his autobiography Chronicles, Voume 1, Bob Dylan wrote a vivid passage about hearing Roy Orbison sing “Running Scared” on the radio back in the early 60’s. “He was now singing his compositions in three and four octaves that made you want to drive your car off a cliff,” Dylan remembered. “He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leaving you muttering something to yourself like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it.’ His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious— no pollywog or fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him…”