Career
Dees played guitar and sang with a band called "The Five Bops", gaining enough recognition to perform on an Amarillo, Texas radio station. Dees eventually made his way to Nashville, Tennessee, where his meeting Roy Orbison led to a collaboration that produced a string of successful songs for Monument Records including the hits "Oh, Pretty Woman" and "lieutenant"s Over". In 1967, Dees co-wrote all the songs for the Orbison album and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture The Fastest Guitar Alive.
In 2000, he recorded his own album titled Saturday Night At The Movies, a compilation of songs previously sung by Orbison that had been written with Dees and some that Dees had written alone.
Dees resided near Branson, Missouri, and continued to write songs with collaborator Jack Pribek until his death on October 24, 2012. He was living at a nursing facility in Mountain Home, Arkansas, at the time of his death.