Roy Orbison – "Oh, Pretty Woman" (1964)

I don’t believe you, you’re not the truth

No one could look as good as you

(Mercy!)

In the fall of 1964, I had concurrent (not consecutive) crushes on a number of girls in my 7th grade class.

One of them was Eloise M, a dark-haired beauty from Mississippi whose garter-revealing short skirts drove me to distraction.

I was far too shy to pledge my troth to her face, so I called in to “The Green Monster Show” on radio station WMBH and dedicated Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” to her.

Roy Orbison

(WMBH was the oldest radio station in Joplin.   The call letters of most radio stations situated west of the Mississippi River begin with a “K,” not a “W,” but WMBH began life as a portable radio station located east of the Mississippi before permanently relocating to Joplin – which is west of the Mississippi by a couple of hundred miles.) 

The WMBH DJ who hosted that show every weeknight identified the dedicator and dedicatee only by their initials.  Both Eloise’s and my initials were not very common, so if she had heard the dedication, she probably could have figured out who it was from.

If so, she didn’t let me know.  A year or so later, she and her family moved away from my hometown, and that was the last I ever saw of Eloise M.

I’ve asked a few of my classmates who were friends of her if they know what ever happened to her, but none of them do.

Here’s a quote from the late author Larry McMurtry which is apropos to Eloise M and myself:

 Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women, which was that there are just too many nice ones.  One simply can’t fall in love with, sleep with, or marry all the nice women.  One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who for whatever accident of timing or attraction simply slips by and recedes to return only in dreams. 

Truer words were never spoken.

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“Oh, Pretty Woman” – don’t forget the “Oh”! – took over the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” the week of September 26, 1964, and stayed there three weeks.

For purposes of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, the pop music’s “Golden Decade” began when I entered middle school and ended when I graduated from college: to wit, mid-1964 through mid-1974. 

So “Oh, Pretty Woman” barely qualifies.  But if a miss is as good as a mile, then the reverse is true as well.

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“Oh, Pretty Woman” certainly didn’t miss – it’s a perfect little three-minute pop record that was Roy Orbison’s biggest hit.  (It sold seven million copies.)

It was ranked #4 on the Billboard “Top Records of 1964” chart, just behind the first two Beatles #1 hits  (“I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”) and Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!”   

None of those records can hold a candle to “Oh, Pretty Woman,” but there are two singles from 1964 that I think deserve to be ranked higher: “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys and “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, which came in at #5 and #38, respectively, in the Billboard year-end rankings.  (Both records were previously inducted into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, which now includes “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

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Everything about Roy Orbison was unique, including the way he looked and the way he moved around – or didn’t move around – on stage.  But nothing about Orbison was more unique than his quasi-operatic voice, which Dwight Yoakam once described as like “the cry of an angel falling backward through an open window.”

Here’s what Bob Dylan had to say about Orbison’s singing:

With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera.  He kept you on your toes.  With him, it was all about fat and blood.  He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop.  [His records] made you want to drive your car over a cliff.  He sang like a professional criminal.  His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, “Man, I don't believe it.”

(Soooo . . . Dylan liked him – right?)

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Fun fact about Roy Orbison: he toured with the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.  (Name another recording artist who has done that.)

Click here to listen to “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: