FEBRUARY, 2026
HERITAGE MUSIC REVIEW
ELECTRONIC EDITION: Now free to email subscribers and supported by tasteful, music-oriented advertising with a unique news-format approach.
A monthly guide to early rock, blues, country, folk, and traditional jazz in the Seattle area and beyond.
Editor and Publisher: Doug Bright
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CONTENTS—February, 2026
Part 1:
NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
CHECKIN' OUT THE SOUNDS: February Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 1: NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
By Doug Bright
"The
Everly Brothers
have long mattered to me," biographer Barry Mazor writes in the introduction to his new book. "Their music has been part of my life at every stage. We didn't have much, and we were living in an ancient, tenement-like apartment building in that old coal mining town, Scranton, Pennsylvania. We didn't have a TV at the time, since the one we'd owned had conked out and we couldn't afford to have it fixed, but I'd been given an early transistor radio by my grandfather that became central in my young life. I recall hanging out in the alley behind the place, listening to "Bird Dog" and laughing in appreciation, because it was funny."
By age twenty, Mazor was hosting a roots music show on a college radio station in Washington, DC, and the Everly Brothers were an important part of his playlist. The year 2009 found him in Nashville working on a book about the legacy of "Mississippi Blue Yodeler"
Jimmie Rodgers,
long cited as the father of country music. "Phil Everly and I had a conversation about their use and interpretation of "T For Texas"," he elaborates. "His comments would be among the most quoted." Mazor's new work from long-respected book publisher Da Capo is entitled
Blood Harmony:
The Everly Brothers Story.
Ike Everly, Don and Phil's father, had grown up laboring in the coal mines of his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. The work was hard and dangerous, and the pay was subsistence level. "I never did like it," he recalls in Mazor's book. "My daddy always told me, You should do something else; ain't nothing to this mining."
Fortunately, the "something else" turned out to be picking guitar and singing with his brother Charlie, who sang high harmony. "These were the Charleston years, and danceable numbers were in the air," Mazor points out. "You could go places with that kind of music."
In 1929 Ike, Charlie, and a third Everly sibling and guitar ace, Leonard, formed a working trio and took off for Chicago to see if they could get anywhere. They briefly appeared on a small radio station but didn't accomplish much more, so Ike returned, feeling homesick. "Each of the three brothers, family members would recall, wanted to be in charge, tensions that never were resolved, and the first formal "Everly Brothers" act didn't last," Mazor summarizes.
Ike's next chance at success came in 1932 with a five-piece country band called the Knox County Knockabouts, yielding a regular radio spot on WGBF in Evansville, Indiana. He considered it his first real job, but it forced an adjustment of his musical orientation. "Such family-oriented Midwestern radio shows wanted down-home rural music in the mix," Mazor explains, "so he began to learn the repertoire of old-time country songs and breakdowns he needed to have ready, music that people would later associate with him and with his sons, too."
The most significant aspect of his subsequent return home was a relationship with Margaret Eva Embry who, like him, came from a coal-mining family. Eleven years younger than he, she was literally the girl next door in his hometown of Brownie, Kentucky. "I kind of watched her grow up," he recalls in Mazor's book. "I had my eye on her."
"Musician Ike proposed to her from a distance—in a letter sent from the road," Mazor relates. "She was fifteen and he was twenty-six when they married on August 31, 1935—her age eyebrow-raising later, but not uncommon then and there."
"On February 1, 1937," Mazor writes, "the Everlys greeted the birth of their first son, Isaac Donald—Don. Far from Kentucky being where he'd be raised, they all left Brownie just six weeks later for a dramatically different home in Chicago."
The Windy City was the home of the National Barn Dance, a country music show emanating from 50,000-watt WLS. like its rival Grand Ole Opry, it was heard over a wide range of territory. Although Ike Everly was never a part of the regular cast of artists like
Gene Autry,
he had appeared on the station's affiliated road show, and his more sophisticated, pop-oriented brand of country was a good match for the Barn Dance's style. "It would be his appearances in the rowdy honky-tonks along Madison Street in the Chicago Loop that began to bring him attention," Mazor elaborates.
"I had the first electric guitar on Madison Street," Everly declares in the book. It had cost him $35, equivalent to about $775 today.
"He played two nights a week on Madison Street in the nightclubs," Margaret Everly later recalled. "You could hear him a block away; they'd open up the doors."
"They lived just that close," Barry Mazor points out, "in what was an Italian section."
"By summer 1938," Mazor recounts, "Baby Don was already showing signs of being musical. He was about to get virtually permanent musical company. On January 19, 1939, the second Everly son, Philip, was born at Cook County Hospital. The Everlys' Chicago reality improved around the same time when Ike landed a regular radio stand with the city's much-followed country music station, WJJD."
At first he aired as a soloist for a half-hour sunrise spot and was occasionally featured on a mid-morning country show called Sunshine Jubilee. The following year the station hooked him up with Thomas "Red" Greene, whose family band, The Oklahoma Drifters, also performed locally. They appeared on their own new radio show as the Carolina Boys. Obviously, as Mazor is quick to observe, "these alleged state origins were highly malleable."
"Red was a very, very good singer," Margaret Everly recalled, "and they blended. Ike and Red Greene would do like "Barbara Allen" and "Rocking Alone In An Old Rocking Chair", so Don and Phil heard all that even when just cutting their teeth in the Forties." The brothers would eventually record the latter song, a poignant ballad about a mother neglected by her grown children, for their landmark 1958 album
In 1942, five-year-old Don Everly cut his first record, such as it was. His father had begun taking him along to gigs, exposing him to the most popular hits of the day. "I remember learning to sing "Paper Doll", the
Mills Brothers
song,” Don elaborated. "I remember my dad taking me down to one of those little record booths where you could make spoken records to send home. He took me down there with his guitar, and we recorded that song."
Another important component of the young Everlys' musical education developed when their dad took his guitar to Maxwell Street, the famous public market where many a significant bluesman got discovered. "Dad was very aware of black blues and gospel," Don recalls, "and he'd listen on the radio in Chicago. I remember going down to Maxwell Street with him, with the little flea markets and people playing, passing the hat for money—all kinds of people playing."
"By 1943, with the boys reaching school age," Mazor relates, "Margaret and Ike made a joint decision that Chicago's tough Uptown neighborhood was not where they wanted their boys to grow up and go to school." Consequently, the family moved three hundred miles west to Waterloo, Iowa, where Ike had been offered a gig at local station KASL with a country quartet called the Blackhoff Boys. The little town of Waterloo was a good start, but according to Margaret Everly, "it wasn't the right place."
The right place turned out to be Shenandoah, a small but prosperous community in southwestern Iowa not far from Kansas City, Omaha, and Lincoln, Nebraska. They had traveled there on recommendations from some of Ike's musical contacts, and as a result, he was hired as a staff musician by the area's most prominent radio station, KMA.
When the whole family appeared on the station's Christmas show in 1946, Nine-year-old Don sang "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" with a swinging clarinetist playing behind him, and seven-year-old Phil sang "Silent Night". "And thus," Mazor summarizes, "two careers of performing—and of being interviewed—began. They would go on for some sixty years."
The income from Ike's job at KMA was low, and the Everlys lived in a trailer until they located a house in the countryside. By 1949, however, Ike had his own fifteen-minute daily show, enabling him to buy his first car, a used Ford, and move his family back into town.
He would sometimes bring his oldest son, now age twelve, onto the show for spot appearances, but eventually Don was given his own Saturday-morning time slot. "It was just a ten- or fifteen-minute show," he later recalled, "part of another show actually. Dad was the instigator. He and a fellow on accordion and another on clarinet backed me up. I'd sing three or four songs, read a commercial, and go home." It paid him $5 a show.
"The Ike Everly Family show was born in late summer 1950," Mazor writes, "with Don and Phil as regulars along with Ike and Margaret. Their 1950 family pay reached the neighborhood of some $60 a week—the equivalent of a very nice $750 a week in today's dollars, and they would make more by doing live shows in small towns around the area from the back of a flatbed truck."
Close-harmonizing brother duets had been an important part of country music since the
Blue Sky Boys
and
Delmore Brothers
emerged in the 1930's, and as Barry Mazor points out, the Everlys were very specific about which of those acts influenced them most. Of these three, the Delmores were the most famous, but the
York Brothers
and
Milo Twins,
all but forgotten today, also had a strong impact. In fact, Phil Everly played mandolin in the tradition of the Blue Sky Boys and Yorks as well as the more famous
Louvin Brothers
who would soon follow.
Reporting on how they sounded at the time, Mazor observes, "A full half-hour Ike Everly Family show from 1950, preserved on audio transcript at the Everly Brothers Childhood Home museum, illustrates how far things had come along for Don at thirteen and Phil at eleven. Their voices and their singing had clearly grown together, more squawky declarative and higher-pitched than they will sound five years later on records, but the basic duet elements are in place."
Although the Everlys lived fairly comfortably most of the year, summers were difficult. Daytime performers at KMA experienced seasonal layoffs since the farmers who constituted their primary audience were busy working their fields, not sitting indoors listening to the radio. Consequently, the Everlys found it necessary to travel from town to town, auditioning for county fairs and sleeping in parks. To make matters worse, KMA, like many local broadcasters, was increasingly focused on growing a TV audience and replacing live radio acts with disc jockeys. "Around '52 and '53 it was pretty rough," Ike Everly recalls in Mazor's book. "there were no bookings and the ones you got were on a percentage, so you didn't make any money anyway."
The Everlys' next home, at least for a while, turned out to be Evansville, Indiana, where Ike had gained his first professional experience. Sponsored by the Nunn-Better flour company, their new family show aired daily from 12:30 to 1 PM. "The flour company would send them out to regional fairs to promote the brand in their booths," Mazor elaborates.
By this time Knoxville, Tennessee, about 550 miles from Evansville, was becoming a Mecca for country music talent under the auspices of supermarket owner Cas Walker and the chain of stores he promoted over a number of regional stations on his Farm and Home Hour show. "We put everything on the roof of a Chevrolet," Margaret Everly remembered, "and we drove into Knoxville and went up to ask Cas Walker for a job, and he hired us. It was a beautiful place and I felt like I made the right decision."
"As of the summer of 1953," Barry Mazor summarizes, "it was to be home for the Everly family, on and off the air, until events of 1955 changed their lives again—dramatically."
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(This article will be continued in the next issue of Heritage Music Review. Your copy of Barry Mazor's book BLOOD HARMONY: The Everly Brothers Story is waiting for you at Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Avenue North in Seattle.
Phone: 206/297-2665. Web: www.phinneybooks.com).
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WHAT's IN STORE: News From The MUSICAL Marketplace
Find New Everly Brotheos Biography At Phinney Books
"The Everly Brothers have long mattered to me," biographer Barry Mazor writes in the introduction to his new book. "Their music has been part of my life at every stage." The book is entitled BLOIND HARMONY: The Ely Roxrs Story, and Your copy is waiting for you at Phinney Books in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.
Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Avenue North
Web: www.phinneybooks.com
Phone: 206/297-2665
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Learn Fiddle Tune Fbbatpicking At Dusty Strings
Dusty Strings Music Store and School in Seattle's Fremont district, long known for its array of fine stringed instruments and instructional workshops, is hosting instructor Eric Skye in a flatmicking guitar workshop focused on classic fiddle tunes at 11 AM on Saturday, February 28thw "All are welcome," the website decls, "but some knowledge of basic chords and open scales would be a plus."
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, amps, and accessories, has recently acquired a 1962 Fender Stratocaster electric in very good condition. "The overall feel of this guitar is fantastic," the website proclaims, "with a super comfortable medium neck that is perfectly broken in, providing a strong sonic connection to the body. The pickups sound fantastic, with a vintage quality that many have tried to replicate; however, there is no substitute for the real deal!"
Emerald City Guitars
83 South Washington Street
Phone: 206/382-0231
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
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On The Newsstand: Heritage Music Review
The print edition of Heritage Music Review is available by subscription for $15 per year plus $5 postage and on sale at the following Seattle newsstands and music venues:
FREMONT:
American Music: 4450 Fremont Avenue North
Dusty Strings Acoustic Music Shop: 3406 Fremont Avenue North
UNIVERSITY DISTRICT:
Bulldog News: 4208 University Way Northeast
GREENWOOD:
Phinney Books: 7405 Greenwood Avenue North
CAPITOL HILL:
Elliott Bay Book Company: 1521 10th Avenue
PIONEER SQUARE:
Emerald City Guitars: 83 South Washington Street
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For a free sample copy of the print edition, just reply to this message or, if this issue was forwarded to you, send your mailing address or email subscription request to subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com.
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