Roy Orbison was the voice of sorrow. But sorrow never sounded quite so sweet. For nearly 30 years, Orbison was the quintessential spokesman for the broken-hearted, with his trademark sunglasses hiding his eyes so all you would focus on was the voice. The Essential Roy Orbison, arriving in stores tomorrow, is the first "best of" collection to span the entirety of Orbison's career, and it's a soulful winner. It's divided into two discs containing 40 songs, one disc focusing on the early years of the '50s and '60s, one mostly focusing on his brief, brilliant comeback in the 1980s before his sudden early death.

Roy, a poor kid from Texas, began his career as a young, bopping singer in the rockabilly mode, ending up at Sam Phillips' Sun Records with such future stars as Elvis, Johnny Cash, and more. He started off crooning the silly early tunes found here like "Ooby Dooby" and "Rock House." But along comes track 5 on Disc 1, "Only The Lonely," and with those first few words - "There goes my baby/ There goes my heart" - Roy Orbison finds his voice.

And whoa, that voice — soaring, operatic, and unlike anything else in rock 'n' roll at the time, able to wring new realms of emotion out of even the sappiest lyrics, soaring over three octaves, even into falsetto. With "Only The Lonely," Orbison launched a series of hit lonely hearts tunes that carried through the 1960s with classics such as "Oh, Pretty Woman," "Dream Baby," "It's Over" and "Crying," all included here. He toured with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, hit both country and rock charts, and even starred in a movie, "The Fastest Guitar Alive."

Roy's sad, heartbroken voice still works today. There's several of these songs that come perilously close to going over the top, but they rarely do. A whole generation of Whitney and Mariah-worshipping "American Idol"-type singers get a lot of mileage out of over-singing their songs, bellowing until they wrench every note out of them, yet you never really believe a word they sing. It's all air and noise. You believe Roy Orbison when he sings that he's "Crying," that if there's anything you want, you got it. Orbison was often overwrought, but he never felt fake.