Roy Orbison - Crying (Monument Concert 1965)

"On September 14, 1968, Roy Orbison's house in Nashville burn ed down, his two eldest sons both died in the blaze. Orbison was on tour in the UK at the time of the accident."
From Wikipedia:

1965–69: Career decline and tragedies

Following "Oh, Pretty Woman", Orbison endured some upheavals. Claudette and he divorced in November 1964 over her infidelities, but the two reconciled 10 months later. His contract with Monument was expiring in June 1965. Wesley Rose, at this time acting as Orbison's agent, moved him from Monument Records to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (though in Europe he remained with Decca's London Records[63]) for $1 million, and the understanding that he would expand into television and films, as Elvis Presley had done. Orbison was a film enthusiast and, when not touring, writing or recording, would dedicate time to seeing up to three films a day.[64]

Rose also became Orbison's producer. Fred Foster later suggested that Rose's takeover was responsible for the commercial failure of Orbison's work at MGM. Engineer Bill Porter agreed that Orbison's best work could only be achieved with RCA Nashville's A-Team.[30] Orbison's first collection at MGM, an album titled There Is Only One Roy Orbison, sold fewer than 200,000 copies.[6] With the onset of the British Invasion in 1964–65, the direction of popular music shifted dramatically, and most performers of Orbison's generation were driven from the charts.[65]

While on tour again in the UK in 1966,[66] Orbison broke his foot falling off a motorcycle in front of thousands of screaming fans at a race track; he performed his show that evening in a cast. Claudette traveled to England to accompany Roy for the remainder of the tour. It was now made public that the couple had happily remarried and were back together (they had remarried in December 1965).[67]

Orbison was fascinated with machines. He was known to follow a car that he liked and make the driver an offer on the spot.[68] He had a large collection of cars by the late 1960s.[citation needed]

Orbison and Claudette shared a love for motorcycles; she had grown up around them, but he claimed Elvis Presley had introduced him to motorcycles.[69] Tragedy struck on June 6, 1966, however, when Orbison and Claudette were riding home from Bristol, Tennessee. She struck the door of a pickup truck which had pulled out in front of her on South Water Avenue in Gallatin, Tennessee, and died instantly.[70]

A grieving Orbison threw himself into his work, collaborating with Bill Dees to write music for The Fastest Guitar Alive, a film that MGM had scheduled for him to star in as well. It was initially planned as a dramatic Western but was rewritten as a comedy.[71] Orbison's character was a spy who stole, and had to protect and deliver, a cache of gold to the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and was outfitted with a guitar that turned into a rifle. The prop allowed him to deliver the line, "I could kill you with this and play your funeral march at the same time", with—according to biographer Colin Escott—"zero conviction".[6] Orbison was pleased with the film, although it proved to be a critical and box office flop. While MGM had included five films in his contract, no more were made.[72][73]

He recorded an album dedicated to the songs of Don Gibson and another of Hank Williams covers, but both sold poorly. During the counterculture era, with the charts dominated by artists like Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors, Orbison felt lost and directionless, later saying: "[I] didn't hear a lot I could relate to so I kind of stood there like a tree where the winds blow and the seasons change, and you're still there and you bloom again."[74]

During a tour of England and playing Bournemouth on Saturday, September 14, 1968,[75] he received the news that his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, had burned down, and his two eldest sons had died."