Roy Orbison's songs made him one of the founding fathers of the rock revolution. Orbison had a string of 27 chart hits in the early 1960s, and then his career and personal fortunes plummeted. Though he would remain active in the music field until his death, the personal and professional disasters that struck him in the mid-60s were so severe that he never relived the stardom that he knew as a young man. Roy Orbison died in 1988 at the age of 52.