Musical Pioneers

Like many of the American musicians who helped create rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, The Everly Brothers were instantly influential, popular almost from the beginning of their careers, and doomed to be misunderstood in the light of 1960s rock. Their country-rock synthesis was partly a product of the technological and songwriting capacities of Nashville, but Don and Phil Everly invented a kind of rock ‘n’ roll that both predicted the music of The Beatles and the mid-‘60s British Invasion and partook of later inventions modeled after the Everlys’ style. Barry Mazor lines out the circular career of the duo in Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story, which tells the story of Phil and Don’s famously fraught relationship and their struggles with the music business; Mazor also gets the music right.

The Everly Brothers’ biggest hits came out of Nashville, where Don and Phil moved in 1955 after stints in Chicago, Iowa, and Knoxville. Cas Walker, a Knoxville businessman and politician, employed them on his radio and television programs at a moment when live radio shows were on their way out, superseded by television. As Mazor writes, “The Everly Brothers’ on-air appearances in Knoxville were just an extension of what they’d been doing on radio all along — quartets, solos, duets at times, some hymns and old-school hillbilly numbers, and commercials for cough medicine and seeds. It was designed to be a country show, but frictions were developing.”

The friction came from rock ‘n’ roll, in which Don and Phil developed an abiding interest. That was only natural — Don, born in Kentucky in 1937, and Phil, born in Chicago in 1939, were only a little older than John Lennon and Ringo Starr. They began listening to the harmonies of The Clovers and the R&B singing of Clyde McPhatter. What Phil called “that strange brand of country and some other things we’d been listening to” would become their version of rock ‘n’ roll, but it was too much for Cas Walker, who let them go in 1954.

The Everlys were already seasoned professionals by 1955. Nashville producer and guitarist Chet Atkins, who had met them in Knoxville the year before, was impressed by their intelligence and their attentive attitude toward the trends of the moment. After a period of struggle in Nashville, they auditioned for the head of Acuff-Rose Publications, Wesley Rose, who considered them perfect for Cadence Records. Cadence concentrated on pop, while Acuff-Rose provided Don and Phil the pop-country material that transformed the photogenic and charismatic brothers into stars.

The hits started with 1957’s “Bye Bye Love,” written by Nashville songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, and continued almost unabated until 1960, when Don’s song “Cathy’s Clown” became their biggest-selling single. After a period in the early ‘60s when the hits dried up and the Everlys briefly flirted with becoming movie stars, they entered into the most interesting phase of their career.

The recordings The Everly Brothers made for Warner Bros. Records in the ‘60s update the sound of a duo whose music always escaped classification. Mazor quotes Don Everly on the issue of genre:

Don would recall of this time [the late ‘50s], “I didn’t mind being called country too much; I like being called rock and roll, but when they called me rockabilly, well, in the South to be called a hillbilly is an insult…so I got really insulted…I used to hate the term.”

The Everlys released songs in the ‘60s that are still associated with them: “Bowling Green,” a hit single from 1967, as well as “Gone, Gone, Gone” (1964) and “The Price of Love” (1965) — performances that are both knowing and joyous, delivered with what writer Nik Cohn referred to in his 1969 book Rock From the Beginning as their “wild and clear and piercing” sound. These records take their close-harmony vocals into territory that was familiar to fans who were listening to rock albums like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul.

Still, their deepest music from the ‘60s didn’t hit. They cut 1966’s Two Yanks in England in England with members of The Hollies and in Los Angeles with crack studio musicians, and the album perfectly illustrates the circular nature of their career. Two Yanks in England transcends its rather expedient title. The music is as rich as anything on contemporaneous rock albums by Everly Brothers-influenced bands, including The Hollies, The Beatles, and The Byrds.

Don and Phil split up in 1973, with each pursuing solo careers. They reunited a decade later and enjoyed their rightful honors as pioneers, great singers, great country artists, and quintessential rock ‘n rollers. Their artistry helped transform pop into a form that harked back to the past without letting it get in the way of what the future might look like.