In 1958, Roy Orbison used what little money he had to buy out his contract at Sun Records, trading a label deal for the back seats of parked cars.

After his 1956 single “Ooby Dooby” charted, Sun owner Sam Phillips pushed the shy, nearsighted singer in thick glasses to shout and gyrate like Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis. Refusing to spend his career faking wild rockabilly on stage, Orbison paid his way out of the contract and walked away broke.

His young wife, Claudette, was expecting their first child, and relatives urged him to quit music for a steady paycheck in the West Texas oil fields where his father worked. Orbison had studied geology at North Texas State College with that very path in mind, yet he chose to keep driving overnight between Texas and Nashville’s Music Row to pitch songs for Acuff-Rose and send small checks home.

With no money for motels, he slept in the back of friends’ cars or on the apartment floor of his songwriting partner, Joe Melson, before smoothing out his suit each morning to audition ballads that executives called too slow for radio. A brief deal at RCA Victor brought more commercial failures, until producer Chet Atkins realized RCA did not know how to use Orbison’s operatic voice and steered him toward Fred Foster at the new independent label Monument Records in 1959.

Back home in Odessa, Texas, Orbison and Melson sat for hours inside a car parked at the curb, building orchestral ballads around his natural range. After Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers both turned down their new song, “Only the Lonely,” Foster let Orbison record it his own way with strings in the spring of 1960.

The record reached No. 2 in the United States and No. 1 in Britain, proving that the quiet Texan standing still behind the microphone never needed to imitate anyone else.

When Sun Records engineer Jack Clement listened to Roy Orbison sing a slow ballad named “The Clown” in Memphis, he told the young Texan outright that he would never make it as a ballad singer.

At the time, Sun owner Sam Phillips was building an empire on the wild rockabilly of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. Orbison had scored a No. 59 single on the label in May 1956 with “Ooby Dooby,” which sold roughly 200,000 copies, yet he was a shy, nearsighted guitarist in thick corrective glasses who hated jumping around on stage.

After his subsequent Sun singles failed to chart and his band, the Teen Kings, broke up in late 1956, Orbison grew tired of forcing a loud rockabilly delivery that did not fit his natural voice. In 1958, he used his own money to buy back his recording contract from Phillips and walked out of Memphis on his own.

That decision left the twenty-two-year-old singer nearly broke just as his teenage wife, Claudette Frady, was expecting their first son, Roy Dewayne, who arrived on September 16, 1958. Back in West Texas, relatives urged him to give up music and take a dependable oil field job like his father, Orbie Lee, especially since Roy had studied geology at North Texas State College for that exact fallback.

Instead, Orbison signed as a staff writer with publisher Wesley Rose at Acuff-Rose Music in Nashville. Early in 1958, he pitched a love song written for his wife titled “Claudette” to the Everly Brothers, who placed it as the B-side to their smash hit “All I Have to Do Is Dream”.

Although that songwriting royalty check briefly lifted his spirits, the money ran out quickly, forcing Orbison and his young family to move in with his parents in Wink, Texas, before renting a tiny apartment in Odessa. One day in 1958, local musician Joe Melson tapped on the window of Orbison’s car in Odessa and suggested they try writing together.

Because Orbison’s cramped apartment left no quiet space to work with a newborn inside, the two men turned the front seat of his parked car into their daily studio. Whenever they drove the long overnight stretch to Nashville to pitch their material, they lacked the cash for motel rooms, sleeping in the back seats of cars or on floors before smoothing out their suits for morning appointments on Music Row.

Even experienced Nashville hitmakers were puzzled by his quiet demeanor. Songwriter Boudleaux Bryant recalled Orbison singing softly and bashfully at auditions, as if he were afraid someone in the office might be disturbed and reprimand him.

Wesley Rose still believed in him and arranged a three-session deal with Chet Atkins at RCA Victor in 1958. Across seven recordings, RCA released only two singles, “Seems to Me” and “Almost Eighteen,” both of which missed the charts entirely.

Realizing RCA had no idea how to frame Orbison’s multi-octave voice, Atkins and Rose steered him in mid-1959 toward Fred Foster, who had just launched an independent label called Monument Records. At their first session in June 1959, they cut “Paper Boy,” followed in September by the Orbison-Melson collaboration “Up Town,” where Foster brought in strings and the Anita Kerr Singers to surround Roy’s voice.

“Up Town” reached No. 72 on the pop chart in early 1960, giving Orbison his first national chart appearance in more than three years and convincing Foster to take a bigger gamble. Back in Texas, Orbison and Melson wrote a sweeping dramatic ballad called “Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel)”.

Hoping for a major payday, they drove to Memphis to pitch the song to Elvis Presley, only to wait outside Graceland while Presley slept through the appointment. They next offered the ballad to the Everly Brothers in Nashville, who turned it down because they wanted to record one of their own compositions instead.

On March 25, 1960, inside RCA Studio B in Nashville, Foster placed Orbison in front of top session players including pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarists Hank Garland and Harold Bradley, bassist Bob Moore, and drummer Buddy Harman. Rather than asking Orbison to shout like a rockabilly frontman, Foster let him build from a gentle verse to a soaring operatic falsetto.

Released in May 1960, “Only the Lonely” climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit No. 1 in the United Kingdom that October, launching a run of Monument classics that included “Running Scared,” “Crying,” “In Dreams,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman”. By betting on his own voice during those lean years between parked cars in Odessa and studio doors in Nashville, Roy Orbison proved that standing dead still behind a microphone was more than enough.