The 1980s File Feature
Crying
Crying: Don McLean Finds the Wound Roy Orbison Left Open The Shadow of the Original Roy Orbison's "Crying" is one of those songs that seems to have been disc…
01 The Story
Crying: Don McLean Finds the Wound Roy Orbison Left Open
The Shadow of the Original
Roy Orbison's "Crying" is one of those songs that seems to have been discovered fully formed, as if it had always existed somewhere and Orbison simply found it. The 1961 original is a devastating piece of work: a vocal performance of operatic range, a melody that climbs and climbs until it seems to exceed what a human voice can do, an emotional directness that borders on unbearable. To cover "Crying" is to carry that original into the room with you. Don McLean, in 1981, decided to carry it anyway.
McLean's own relationship with the song dated back years. He had recorded an album in 1971 that included a version, but it did not make any significant commercial impact. A decade later, the song was re-released as a single, and this time the circumstances conspired to make it something much larger. McLean was already understood as a serious and somewhat melancholy artist, the man who had made "American Pie" and "Vincent" into understood major works of American pop songwriting. His emotional range was not in question. The only question was whether he could do justice to material of this caliber.
What McLean Brought to the Cover
McLean's approach to "Crying" is governed by restraint. He does not attempt to match or exceed the Orbison original's operatic climax; instead he brings the song into a slightly more intimate register while maintaining its emotional weight. The production surrounds the vocal with orchestral warmth that frames rather than competes, and McLean's guitar work gives the arrangement a personal quality that distinguishes it from the original without disrespecting it.
The key decision is tonal. Where Orbison's version feels like something happening in a spotlight, McLean's feels like something happening in a quiet room at night. The two versions are almost philosophically complementary: Orbison is heroic in his grief, McLean is private in his. Both are completely convincing.
An 18-Week Journey Up the Chart
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 24, 1981, at position 37, an unusually strong opening that reflected the commercial profile McLean had built over the previous decade. The subsequent climb was steady and eventually spectacular: 27, 20, 17, 15, and onward through February and into March. By March 21, 1981, the song had peaked at number 5, completing an 18-week chart run that confirmed McLean as a pop force independent of the "American Pie" phenomenon.
That Top 5 peak was McLean's highest since "Vincent" had reached number 12 back in 1972. It also demonstrated that a cover of a classic could succeed on its own terms in the contemporary market, neither living entirely in the shadow of the original nor pretending the original did not exist. McLean's version simply added another dimension to the song's documented emotional life.
Roy Orbison's Legacy Renewed
One element that added particular poignancy to McLean's success with the song was Orbison's own public reaction to it; Orbison was supportive, and the two maintained a warm professional relationship. This matters because it freed listeners from the obligation of choosing sides: the original's creator had extended his blessing, and that made room for both versions to coexist.
The early 1980s were a complicated period for artists of Orbison's generation. Many of the 1950s and 1960s giants were finding their commercial relevance diminished even as their artistic prestige remained high. McLean's success with "Crying" served as a form of advocacy for the older artist, a demonstration that the songs Orbison had written were still worth paying attention to. The Orbison revival that would arrive later in the decade, culminating in the Mystery Girl album and the Traveling Wilburys collaboration, was partly enabled by moments like this one.
Find a version with good audio and let McLean's voice carry you through it. Some songs simply find the truth.
"Crying" — Don McLean's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Crying: The Anatomy of a Feeling That Will Not End
Roy Orbison's Original Emotional Architecture
The emotional logic of "Crying" is precise: the narrator encounters a former love, believes for a moment that they have moved past the grief, and discovers in that encounter that the grief is entirely intact. The title word is both action and statement, both what is happening and what the song itself is doing. Roy Orbison constructed the song as a gradual revelation of an emotional truth the narrator has been trying to deny, and the melody mirrors that structure in the most literal way possible: it climbs toward a climax it cannot avoid, just as the narrator climbs toward an admission they cannot prevent.
Don McLean's version inherits all of this architecture. He changes the tempo slightly and shifts the sonic context, but the underlying emotional structure is preserved with care. Both versions are explorations of the same truth: that grief for a lost love does not follow a linear path, and that the conviction of recovery can be utterly dismantled by a single encounter.
Performance as Vulnerability
What makes both the original and McLean's cover emotionally powerful is the degree of vocal vulnerability they require and receive. Singing "Crying" without genuine commitment is not possible; the song refuses to be delivered at a safe emotional distance. The melody reaches into registers that cannot be accessed without genuine emotional investment, and both Orbison and McLean understood this and responded accordingly.
This is rare in pop music, where the convention is to perform emotion rather than display it. The great cover of a great song achieves something different: it finds the emotional truth the original discovered and arrives at it through a different route. McLean's route is quieter and more private than Orbison's, but the destination is the same uncomfortable place.
The Early 1980s Emotional Landscape
The song's arrival in 1981 places it in an interesting cultural moment. The early Reagan years had brought a certain optimistic public rhetoric into American life, an insistence on confidence and renewal that sat in uneasy relationship with the private realities of people's lives. A song about the impossibility of moving past grief, about the way love leaves wounds that remain open despite every effort to close them, offered a counter-narrative to the official mood.
Pop music has always served this function, providing emotional permission for feelings that the broader culture is discouraging. "Crying" in 1981 gave listeners space to acknowledge that recovery was neither simple nor linear, that the wounds of loss did not heal on schedule. The chart success suggests that this permission was welcome.
The Song as a Permanent Emotional Document
Songs about crying are among the most ancient in human culture, and their persistence reflects something true about music's specific usefulness: it provides a context in which the release of grief is socially sanctioned. Concerts where entire audiences weep, car rides where a song produces tears the driver cannot explain, late nights where a record becomes the only adequate companion: these are experiences of enormous value. "Crying" has occupied all of those spaces across the decades since Orbison wrote it and McLean renewed it.
The song endures because the experience it describes is universal and because both major versions of it are executed with complete honesty. Neither Orbison nor McLean flinches from what the song requires. That refusal to flinch is what emotional truth in music looks like.
→ More from the 1980s File
View all 1980s hits →
Keep digging