Phil Everly died in 2014. Now brother Don has followed. No one really expected to hear much from Don Everly after Phil’s death. And we didn’t. Each brother had recorded solo albums, but they were unremarkable compared with what the Everly Brothers could create together. What follows is a remembrance that I wrote about Phil in 2014. I think it is appropriate today, because in it I discuss Don more than his brother. The reason for this focus was a conversation I had with Don Everly some years earlier. I think it serves both brothers’ interests. I hope you agree:
“Those boys come from southern Iowa, you know.” Actually, “those boys” were from Kentucky. But I can still hear my father telling me this ‘fact’ with pride each time an Everly Brothers record played on a Des Moines radio station. And in truth, Iowa did have a legitimate claim to the brothers. The Everlys were on a morning radio program in Shenandoah, Iowa, during the early 1950s. This was the end of an era for radio, when live performers were being supplanted by records and disc jockeys.
“We played on station KMA every morning and then we’d go to school,” Don Everly recalled some years back. “Nobody in our class had any idea that we were on the radio.” In fact, the brothers themselves placed little importance on these dawn performances. At this time they were part of the Everly Family, with father Ike fronting the group. Many country performers have glowing comments about Ike Everly’s ability as a guitarist, but there are few recorded examples of his work.
The same cannot be said of his sons. Don and Phil Everly sold millions of records with a sound that became the touchstone for modern brother harmony. The sound created by these two voices is still universally acknowledged as a pinnacle in American music. From the Beatles’ “This Boy” to the 2013 Everly Brothers tribute album by Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, the influence of Don and Phil remains unmistakable and inescapable.
I attended an Everly Brothers concert in October 1998. Their presence on Top 40 radio was long gone by this point; even an attempted reboot of their recording career in the mid-1980s was now a distant memory. They still sounded great, though, with Don taking the role of front man, giving a bit of background on the selections and singing the lead lines. Don’s baritone and Phil’s harmony tenor vocals were as distinctive as they were flawless.
If the brothers felt any fraternal attachment to one another, it became evident only when they made music together. When Garrison Keillor welcomed them as guests on his A Prairie Home Companion radio show in 1987, he said: “Don and Phil Everly: they taught all of us how to sing and they taught us how to fight.” The Everly Brothers were standing right by Keillor at the time; they did not take issue with this assessment. It was an interesting broadcast in that many other performers on that night’s show seemed awestruck by the presence of the Everlys. Bluesman Taj Mahal takes a back seat to no one. But at the conclusion of his song “Paradise,” Mahal was quick to gleefully shout the names “Don and Phil” over the applause and then profusely thank the brothers for singing harmony behind him.
Country music historians’ genealogy charts for brother duos regularly cite a direct path from Rabon and Alton Delmore to Charlie and Ira Louvin to Don and Phil Everly. Various musical authorities, including Rolling Stone, affirm this Delmore to Louvin to Everly lineage as fact. Don Everly says otherwise. I had the opportunity to speak with Don in 1996 when I was working on a project about the Louvin Brothers. Don was happy to talk about how much he and Phil were big fans of Charlie and Ira Louvin’s tight harmonies. But Don was also quick to correct one common misconception: “Our sound was not influenced by the Louvins. We did not hear them until after we arrived in Nashville, and we already had our own style together by then.”
Wondering about possible common ground with previous brother duos, I asked Don if he and brother Phil had heard much Sacred Harp or Shape Note singing within their family background. These are forms of Southern music that were important in helping form the Louvins’ musical heritage. Don told me that he had never heard of the term Sacred Harp music and was unfamiliar with the genre.
Concerning the Everly Brothers’ influence on other performers, I asked what he and Phil thought of Bob Dylan’s 1970 version of their hit single “Take a Message to Mary.” Don told me he was unaware that Dylan had recorded it. That statement, I admit, surprised me more than his unfamiliarity with Shape Note singing.
When I heard the news of Phil Everly’s passing, another part of my conversation with his brother stuck in my mind. I had indicated how much I enjoyed the early country songs included on their 1958 LP Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. Don thanked me and said that he and Phil still had a much-delayed follow-up project planned. We talked a bit about older country music and some of the songs that the Everly Family performed on the radio. When Don learned that I was from Iowa, he seemed to grow nostalgic. “Oh! Then you know what a nice part of the country Shenandoah and that entire area is,” he said. I asked him if he or Phil had many recordings from those early morning radio programs. He lamented that very little had survived. “Pretty much all we had came out on that [1968] album Roots.”
A bit uncertain of how to frame the question, I tentatively asked Don about his and Phil’s attempts to be known as solo artists. Fortunately, he seemed pleased that I knew that both brothers had recorded separately. He laughed as he explained how they had each tried to replace the other on their own albums by double tracking the vocals. But then he became serious and said, “See, it takes two of us to make an Everly Brothers record. And there’s just no way around it.”
In interviews, the brothers were candid about the arc of their career. Both acknowledged that the hits became less frequent in the 1960s after they lost access to the songwriting team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Substance abuse also became an impediment. Don Everly candidly told me, “We got deep off into pills and alcohol. When we finally woke up, the Beatles were here!”
I first became aware of the Everlys after the brothers “woke up” but found themselves unable to reignite their career. This was during the time of their final Top 40 chart hit, “Bowling Green,” in 1967. Although not among their most successful singles, this record — like all of their singles — sounded to me like nothing else on the radio at that time. Even now, Everly Brothers records still sound like nothing else.
I intended to write this piece as a remembrance of Phil Everly. If this specific focus has been elusive, I think it is because one can’t think of Phil without thinking of Don, or of Don without Phil. I had a professor who once taught that a person isn’t able to understand the concept of up without simultaneously grasping the idea of down. And so it is with the Everly Brothers. They and their beautiful harmonies are forever joined as one in our minds and in our ears. And maybe most strongly in our hearts.
Tom Wilmeth is a freelance writer who lives in Grafton, Wisconsin – former home of the Paramount Records label. He has a podcast called The Vinyl Approach, available on Spotify, and is the author of the book ‘Sound Bites: A Lifetime of Listening’ (Muleshoe Press, 2016), available on Amazon.
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