After dominating the charts throughout the 1960s with his wistful ballads “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” “Crying,” “Only the Lonely,” and “Blue Bayou,” Roy Orbison continued to have more hits in the ’70s and a devoted legion of fans. On October 3, 1972, Orbison performed at the Festival Hall in Melbourne, Australia, and delivered a set of his classics, including the aforementioned, along with “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream),” “In Dreams,” and more backed by a full orchestra.
Much like his albums, Orbison’s set featured a few covers peppered in, Elvis Presley‘s “Mean Woman Blues,” which he originally released as a B-Side to “Blue Bayou” in 1963, Simon & Garfunkel‘s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn-penned “The Morning After,” which was featured in the film The Poseidon Adventure and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Another cover on Milestones was a song that had come out three years earlier, Neil Diamond‘s anthemic hit “Sweet Caroline.”
Orbison’s sentimental cover of the song was a crowd-pleaser and a surprising addition that eventually made its way onto his 1973 album Milestones. Released September 24, 1973, Milestones features an original by Orbison, “Blue Rain (Coming Down),” which he co-wrote with Joe Melson—also his co-writer on “Only the Lonely” and “Crying”—and “The World You Live In,” penned solely by Melson for Orbison.
The album also features a cover of the Bee Gees‘ “Words” and Diamond’s classic, which became a baseball stadium anthem for the Boston Red Sox and told the story of a girl named Caroline.
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Diamond originally claimed that he wrote the song about his second wife, Marcia Murphey; the couple married in 1969 and later divorced in 1995. When Diamond needed a three-syllable name to fit the melody, “Sweet Marcia” didn’t gel, so Caroline was a name he had written down and fit perfectly.
Though speculation was that Diamond was singing about Caroline Kennedy, he initially said she had nothing to do with the inspiration behind the track. However, the real meaning behind the song was inspired by an innocent, “sweet” photograph Diamond saw of the then-president’s daughter as a child.
After Diamond’s 2007 performance of the song at Kennedy’s 50th birthday party, he revealed that the song was about the early photograph he saw of her in a magazine when he was a “young, broke songwriter” in the ’60s. “I’ve never discussed it with anybody before, intentionally,” revealed Diamond. “I thought maybe I would tell it to Caroline [Kennedy] when I met her someday. I’m happy to have gotten it off my chest and to have expressed it to Caroline.”
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He added, “I thought she might be embarrassed, but she seemed to be struck by it and really, really happy. It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony. It was such an innocent, wonderful picture. I immediately felt there was a song in there.”
While he was holed up in a Memphis hotel room, Diamond wrote all the lyrics to “Sweet Caroline” in less than an hour. “It was a No. 1 record and probably is the biggest, most important song of my career,” added Diamond, “and I have to thank her [Kennedy] for the inspiration.”
Released in May 1969, “Sweet Caroline” remained on the charts for 14 weeks and peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Though many people have covered the Diamond classic—Presley, Bob Dylan, Andy Williams, and more—Orbison’s rendition delivered a different yearning and a sweetly innocent love for a girl named “Caroline.”
In 1987, Orbison was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, a year before he died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at age 52.
Photo: Roy Orbison (1936 – 1988) in his room at the Westbury Hotel, London, 1st March 1967 by Clive Limpkin/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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