Roy Orbison Collection Gold

The listener is immediately convinced, from the opening a cappella bits of "Only the Lonely," that no one conveys pain and longing more sublimely or succinctly than Roy Orbison. But his songs are also masterpieces of production: so technically precise that his deceptively simple tunes and lush melodies flow even more smoothly behind his desperate baritone croon and quivering falsetto…

What it says is what you get. This double-disc collection on Monument collects all of the Roy Orbison singles recorded for the label after he left Sun, and before he left for MGM. In other words, this is CLASSIC Roy. There are 52 cuts from his biggest years, including a couple of German-language versions of "Mama" and "San Fernando." For the uninitiated, this set does leave off cuts such as "Rock House" and "Ooby Dooby," but those can be found easily elsewhere – on a comp called The Sun Years, for example. This set boils down the big Monument box set to a pair of discs that contain pure gold, revealing the diversity and depth of Orbison's genius as a writer and a singer. From "In Dreams" and "Blue Bayou" to "Shahdaroba" and "Oh, Pretty Woman," all of the bases are covered.

Johnny Cash was one of the most imposing and influential figures in post-World War II country music. With his deep, resonant baritone and spare percussive guitar, he had a basic, distinctive sound. Cash didn't sound like Nashville, nor did he sound like honky tonk or rock & roll. He created his own subgenre, falling halfway between the blunt emotional honesty of folk, the rebelliousness of rock & roll, and the world-weariness of country. Cash's career coincided with the birth of rock & roll, and his rebellious attitude and simple, direct musical attack shared a lot of similarities with rock. However, there was a deep sense of history – as he would later illustrate with his series of historical albums – that kept him forever tied with country. And he was one of country music's biggest stars of the '50s and '60s, scoring well over 100 hit singles…