On a balmy weekend early last fall, brothers Don
and Phil Everly pulled into western Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County—home
to several generations of Everlys—in preparation for an outdoor
evening concert. The setting: Central City Elementary School,
where the brothers have gathered for the past 12 years for the
Central City Music Festival and Everly Brothers Homecoming.
For Don Everly, the "Roast Your Own Hot Dog and Marshmallow"
notice that marks Homecoming XII—an effort by the Everly Brothers
Foundation to fund local educational needs—is a rustic reminder
of where it all began.
"It’s always a fairly loose show," he muses. "You
just have to hope it turns out OK. I like to do these civic
things. I don’t know exactly why. I just sing a few songs they’ve
probably heard, which I hope helps."
Those few songs Everly speaks of have been a part
of the popular music fabric for over 40 years now, from Muhlenberg
County all the way to London’s Royal Albert Hall and hundreds
of places in between. Though today the Everly Brothers—Don,
now 62, and Phil, 60—operate at a considerably slower pace than
in years past, their legacy of hits ("Bye Bye Love," "Bird Dog,"
"Claudette") and even stronger non-hits ("The Price of Love,"
"Gone, Gone, Gone") make up as influential a catalog as anything
in the pop-music pantheon.
Like the works of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly,
and other late ’50s icons, the Everly Brothers’ early music
represents one of the single biggest building blocks of the
entire rock era. From Don’s power-chord intros to the complex
harmony intervals to the country inflections of their songs,
echoes of the Everlys’ musical persona surface again and again.
Though he was hardly the first to use it, with
one swift stroke Don Everly did more to bring open-G tuning
into the rock era than nearly any other major artist. "Bye Bye
Love," "Wake Up Little Susie," "Hey, Doll Baby," and a host
of others are based on variations of that tuning and give the
songs their characteristic tone and style. The list of Everly
Brothers devotees is astonishing. Keith Richards names Don’s
open-G setup as the foundation of the Rolling Stones’
pivotal five-string tuning (G D G B D, with the sixth string
removed). Paul McCartney repeatedly refers to the Everlys’ vocal
intervals as an influence on early Lennon-McCartney harmonic
structure. Paul Simon’s rhythm style is a direct descendent
of the Everly acoustic guitar method (not to mention that Tom
and Jerry, Simon and Garfunkel’s late-’50s alter ego, was an
unabashed Everlys tribute). Try to imagine the Byrds, CSN&Y,
the Eagles, or any other country-based guitar rock group without
the foundation built by the Everlys. Even today’s diluted "new
country" market would not be alive were it not for the Everlys’
early crossover conquests.
Much of this influence is based on a relatively
brief five-year chart reign, beginning in 1957 with "Bye Bye
Love" and ending (with a whimper, not a bang) in 1962 with the
stodgy "That’s Old Fashioned." But the handful of hits that
today’s oldies stations dwell on is just a dent in a vast song
inventory. Beautiful though it may be, "All I Have to Do Is
Dream" often obscures the infinitely more countrified Everly
originals "Maybe Tomorrow" and "I Wonder If I Care as Much."
In the years since the drive-in theme "Wake Up Little Susie,"
the Everly Brothers have recorded an entire album with the Hollies,
were covered by the Who, and even graced Paul Simon’s Graceland.
YOUNGER BROTHERS
It was 50 years ago that pop Ike Everly, having
relocated the family north from the tiny town of Brownie, Kentucky,
to Shenandoah, Iowa, began regularly incorporating the singing
talent of young sons Phil (then 12) and Don (a ripe old 14)
on his Everly Family Radio Show over station KFNF. Showcasing
a mix of C&W, gospel, and Appalachian folk melodies, the
brothers Everly delivered their material with an instinctual
sense of timing and tone that only siblings could master. The
fact that they began performing so young would give them a leg
up on the competition in the years to come.
Though Ike Everly—a renowned guitarist who’d developed
the essential Travis picking method with cohort Merle Travis—helped
mold the Everlys’ playing style, there were other familial influences
as well. "Dad had showed us this open-G tuning," recalls Phil,
"but we also had an aunt—Aunt Hattie—who used to play this song
called ‘The Drum Piece’ in the same kind of tuning. So it was
around us a lot, and we just started using it. The thing about
tunings—there’s so many of them—is that you have to create your
own thing once you get them open; you have to know where to
go once the guitar’s set up like that. Fortunately, Donald became
quite good at it at an early age."
In fact, Don had begun writing songs as a young
teen—scoring in the early ’50s for Kitty Wells, among others—and
often employed the open-G configuration (from the sixth string
to the first, D G D G B D). One tune that used it was "Give
Me a Future," which Don had conceived after a first encounter
with the herky-jerky style of Bo Diddley.
"I heard ‘Bo Diddley’ back in ’55," says Don.
"I put it on and I’ll never forget it—it just nailed
me. And I was immediately hit with the thought, ‘I’ll never
be able to incorporate this type of rhythm into any kind
of country music.’" But by laying that brisk Diddley rhythm
over a country-based acoustic arrangement, Everly inadvertently
stumbled upon something closer to the excitement of rock and
R&B than the stiff rhythms he’d been used to playing. "Lo
and behold, it happened," he recalls. "I just tried it on my
open-G acoustic one afternoon, and there it was."
Not only would Don’s discovery become the backbone
for the impending Everly hit parade, it would surface again
and again in future rock staples such as the Who’s "I Can See
for Miles," the Stones’ "Wild Horses," and Deep Purple’s "Smoke
on the Water." Even Bonnie Raitt’s recent "Blue for No Reason"
can be linked to the Don Everly method.
HELLO, SWEET SUCCESS
Felice and Boudleaux Bryant were Nashville-based
professional songwriters who’d already scored several successful
hits on both the country and pop charts for the likes of Little
Jimmy Dickens and Tony Bennett. As regular contributors to the
Acuff-Rose publishing catalog, the husband-and-wife team were
constantly dishing up country-flavored material for Wesley Rose’s
stable of artists. Writing songs with continuous two-part harmony
had been in their blood for years.
"Everything we were writing in the beginning was
duet-able," says Felice Bryant. "Boudleaux was a harmony freak—he
loved it. He came up with the idea for ‘Bye Bye Love,’ thinking
it would be great for Johnnie and Jack, this country duet at
the time. We had no idea about the Everlys at that point. It
just went off to Wesley like the others."
Though it would eventually become one of the most
successful tunes in the entire Bryant catalog (even finding
a place on Simon and Garfunkel’s multiplatinum Bridge over
Trouble Water 13 years later), "Bye Bye Love" was initially
turned down by some 30 artists. Without a taker in sight, the
song was offered to the Everly Brothers on the eve of a Chet
Atkins–arranged recording session.
The brothers had already failed once as a recording
act. Columbia Records had hastily cut a few traditional C&W
sides with the boys a year and a half earlier but opted not
to follow up. Down on their luck and low on cash, Don and Phil,
still just 17 and 19, were considering dumping the Nashville
pursuit altogether when Atkins, a longtime acquaintance of Ike
Everly, intervened. Atkins had been helping to keep the boys
afloat, plugging their songs at every opportunity and offering
advice and support along the way.
Flexing his Music City muscle, Atkins eventually
was able to persuade Wesley Rose to give the boys a shot in
the studio by way of a publishing agreement. An Everly Brothers
audition tape was delivered to the comparatively small Cadence
label, and its owner/producer Archie Bleyer agreed to let the
Everlys record. Bleyer scheduled a session for the first day
of March 1957 to be held inside RCA’s original facility located
in a rented space at 1525 McGavock Street in Nashville. To ensure
that the boys got the most mileage out of their date, Atkins
called upon the services of drumming ace Buddy Harman and bass
man Floyd Chance, with Atkins himself filling in on Gretsch
electric. Also present was Ray Edenton—future accompanist for
Patsy Cline, Neil Young, and hundreds in between—who would ultimately
spend the next several years as Don’s acoustic rhythm sidekick.
"Don came in with that Gibson jumbo in open-G
tuning," remembers Edenton, "and I had my Martin D-18—which
I preferred for recording because it didn’t have a booming bass—with
a high third [tuning the third string up an octave using a banjo
A string]. Later on I would just double those licks he was playing,
only I was playing them with regular chords. Don was very innovative.
He came in and just opened up with that riff."
With Don aching to experiment and Rose willing
to try anything to get his clients’ tune cut, the jolting
intro to "Give Me a Future" finally made its debut as the opening
six seconds to "Bye Bye Love."
It’s impossible to overestimate the significance
of Don’s lick (played as a one-finger barre in open-G tuning,
capo II, beginning 12 frets above the capo). Though "Bye Bye
Love" was country music for all intents and purposes, the energy
coming off Don’s Southern Jumbo gave it the verve of rock ’n’
roll, and its impact was immediate. The once-scorned song took
off like a rocket, becoming a major smash not only on the country
charts (No. 1) but in pop (No. 2) and R&B (No. 5) as well.
"Without that intro," notes Phil, "who knows what would have
happened? Once Don came up with that, we were off."
Phil is quick to stress the impact of Everly Brothers
guitar work on future generations. "I know our harmonies influenced
a lot of people, but when you take Donald’s intros to ‘Bye Bye
Love,’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie,’ ‘Bird Dog,’ or any of the others,
that was the first time those kinds of incongruous chords were
used. Bo had the beat, but those chords were Don’s creation.
If you take them, and you electrify them with a lyric on top,
you have the essence of heavy rock, which is essentially a song
written around a riff. Keith [Richards] alluded to that—but
I think it’s ironic that Don doesn’t get more credit. Because
that was the seed, right there."
After the initial shock wave of "Bye Bye Love,"
life under the Bryants’ roof became a bit more accelerated.
"We’d just moved into our new house, and it hadn’t been carpeted
yet," recalls Felice. "And the acoustics were fantastic in that
living room. Boudleaux was sitting there with a guitar and was
going for a gimmick, like the one Don had come up with at the
front of ‘Bye Bye Love.’ So he started playing that brisk rhythm
and then just came out with, ‘Wake up, little Susie, wake up.
. . .’ And I just burst out of the bedroom and said, ‘That is
great!’ And we finished it."
