Joe Melson, a musician and songwriter whose close collaboration with singer Roy Orbison in the late 1950s and early 1960s produced a long list of operatic rock ballads that established Mr. Orbison as an international star, including the hits “Only the Lonely,” “Crying” and “Running Scared,” died July 1 at his home in Nashville. He was 91 years old.
His son-in-law and manager, Dwayne Byerly, confirmed the death.
Until Melson and Orbison began working together in 1959, American rock music was mostly defined by hard-hitting rhythms and emotionally direct lyrics.
Early Orbison songs, such as “Ooby Dooby” (1956), followed that model. Although the song reached the Billboard Top 100 chart, it struggled to produce another hit that would distinguish it from the rest.
At the time, both men lived around Odessa, an oil city in West Texas; They both played in rockabilly bands and met through the local music scene.
One day, Melson noticed Orbison sitting in his car, playing a tune on his guitar. He knocked on the glass and they struck up a conversation. Soon they were writing together.
Although they agreed from the beginning that Mr. Orbison would sing most of it, their collaboration was closer than that of many writing pairs. Melson saw something in Orbison that the singer didn't: a voice that could not only span three octaves, but could also do so with a flexible bluesy inflection that added dramatic flair.
The lyrics they wrote together were equally dramatic: laden with melancholy, jealousy and even fear, and setting a tone that would later pair naturally with Mr. Orbison's signature dyed black hair and wraparound sunglasses.
After scoring a minor hit with their song “Uptown” in 1959, they struck gold the following year with the Latin-inflected “Only the Lonely,” which reached No. 2 in the United States and No. 1 in Britain. As with many of his songs, Mr. Melson sang the accompaniment. (That's him singing the catchy “dum-dum, dumb doo wum”).
“Only the Lonely” may have narrowly missed the number one spot in the United States, but it became an anthem for romantic lovers everywhere. Among its many fans was Elvis Presley, who bought boxes of the single to give to his friends in Memphis.
Shortly after, Mr. Melson's second child, daughter Michelle, was born. Rushing home from the hospital, a police officer pulled him over for speeding. Dazed by the emotions of the moment, he wrote the song “Blue Angel” for the rest of the trip home.
Shortly afterward, Orbison moved to Nashville and asked Melson to join him there. Melson immediately quit his job as a Standard Oil employee, packed his family into his Oldsmobile, and headed east.
“Blue Angel” peaked at No. 9 in 1960. It was followed by her first No. 1 hit, “Running Scared,” in 1961, and “Crying,” which peaked at No. 2 the same year.
Along with Ray Rush, the pair also wrote an early version of another Orbison signature song, “Pretty Woman,” although it was a later version, which Orbison wrote with Bill Dees in 1964 and titled “Oh, Pretty Woman,” that became a hit.
Melson and Orbison broke up after 1963, but reunited in the early 1970s to produce several more songs, including “The World You Live In,” which Melson wrote with his wife, Susie.
In total, Melson and Orbison's collaboration resulted in more than 200 songs, and the distinctive sound they developed influenced decades of musicians, including Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney, as well as the rockabilly revival of the 1980s and 1990s.
Claudie Joe Melson was born on May 11, 1935 in Bonham, a small town in northeast Texas. His father, Clarence, was a sharecropper, and as a teenager, Joe worked alongside him in the fields. His mother, Bernice (Burk) Melson, managed the home.
After high school, Mr. Melson moved to Odessa, where he worked in the mailroom at Standard Oil and took night accounting classes at Odessa Junior College (now Odessa College).
His first two marriages, to Susie Mills and Dagmar Frazier, ended in divorce. He married his long-time fiancée, Julie Tan, in 2025.
She survives him, along with two children from his first marriage, Michael Melson and Michelle Byerly; two daughters from his second marriage, Melodie Garner and Serena Aaker; two grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Katie Bethel.
Melson wrote for several other musicians, including country singers Dan Folger, Don Gibson and Glenn Barber, and recorded several songs on his own. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.
Most recently, he collaborated extensively with Irish-Australian musician Damien Leith, including the single “Heart Love,” released in February.
But nothing eclipsed his work with Orbison.
“People are liberated through these big, exciting, layered songs,” Melson told writer Ellis Amburn in his book “Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story” (1990). “They love it because they have expressed through Roy what they wanted to shout.”
