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Roy Hamilton was born on April 16, 1929 in Leesburg, Georgia to Evelyn and Albert Hamilton, where he began singing in church choirs at the age of six. The summer of 1943 he was fourteen and the family migrated north to Jersey City, New Jersey in search of a better life. There he sang with the Central Baptist Church Choir, and attended Lincoln High School where he studied commercial art. Being gifted, his paintings were placed with a number of New York City galleries.

In 1947 the seventeen-year-old Hamilton took his first big step into secular music, winning a talent contest at the Apollo Theater. But nothing came of it, so to support himself he worked as an electronics technician during the day, and an amateur heavyweight boxer at night, with a record of six wins and one defeat. The following year he joined the Searchlight Gospel Singers, studied light opera, and continued to perform gospel until 1953 when the group broke up. Then he headed back into pop music with something different to offer.

1953 saw Roy discovered by Bill Cook, the first Black radio disc jockey and television personality on the East Coast. As his manager, Cook made a demo tape, brought it to the attention of Columbia Records and got him signed to Okeh Records. His first session produced Rodgers and Hammerstein’s You’ll Never Walk Alone from the musical Carousel.  However Columbia released it on their pop label Epic and it topped the Billboard charts for eight weeks. He would go on to have hits with If I Love You, Ebb Tide and Unchained Melody and in 1955 was named Vocalist of the Year by Down Beat magazine. He would go on to record Great American Songbook singles Without a Song, Cuban Love Song, Everybody’s Got a Home But Me, and Somebody Somewhere.

Hamilton’s last hit record, You Can Have Her, came in 1961, and the Epic label treated him as a major star and issued sixteen albums by him. By the middle of the decade his career declined while recording with MGM and then RCA. In 1969 in Memphis, Tennessee, he made the final recordings of his career.

In early July 1969, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage at his home in New Rochelle, New York. He was taken to New Rochelle General Hospital where he lay in a coma for more than a week. On July 20, 1969 vocalist Roy Hamilton, who was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, was Epic Records first star, inspired Sam Cooke, and influenced Elvis Presley and the Righteous Brothers, died after being removed from life support. He was 40 years old.

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