June, 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—june, 2026
Part 5:
NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN' OUT THE SOUNDS: June Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 5: NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-4:
"The Everly Brothers have long mattered to me," biographer Barry Mazor writes in the introduction to is new book. "Their music has been part of my life at every stage." Mazor's new work from long-respected book publisher Da Capo is entitled
Blood Harmony:
The Everly Brothers Story.
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, but fortunately, he found an alternative, picking guitar and singing with his brother Charlie. In 1929 Ike, Charlie, and a third Everly
formed a working trio and took off for Chicago but didn't accomplish much there, so Ike returned home. His next chance at success came in 1932 with a five-piece country band, yielding a radio spot on WGBF in Evansville, Indiana. He considered it his first real job.
The most significant aspect of his subsequent return home was a relationship with Margaret Eva Embry, whom he married on August 15, 1935. Don was born February 1, 1937, and only six weeks later, Ike moved his family to Chicago. "It would be his appearances in the rowdy honky-tonks along Madison Street that began to bring him attention," Mazor elaborates.
Phil Everly was born in 1939, and in 1943 the family found a new home in Shenandoah, Iowa. 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" and seven-year-old Phil sang "Silent Night". By 1949 Ike had his own daily show, and a year later the Ike Everly Family Show was born.
⠦⠠⠁ full half-hour show illustrates how far things had come along for Don at thirteen and Phil at eleven," Mazor reports. "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."
By 1953 Knoxville, Tennessee 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 drove into Knoxville and went up to ask Cas Walker for a job," Margaret Everly recalled, "and he hired us."
Their musical orientation was still country, but by this time Don and Phil were taking an interest in the sound of black vocal groups like the
Clovers
and the
Drifters
with impassioned lead vocalists, close background harmony, and an infectious backbeat. "Sometimes it didn't please the sponsor," Ike recalled in a 1958 interview.
The conflict finally came to a head in mid-1954 when Cas Walker fired the Everlys and canceled their show. With regard to his two sons, Ike reflects, a parting of the ways was inevitable. "Rock and roll was just coming in," he elaborates, "and we saw the writing on the wall. We knew it was time for them to be on their own."
With their musical career abruptly ended, Ike and Margaret Everly were forced to reinvent themselves, and both became hair stylists. Nevertheless, a radical change came about through Ike's continued correspondence with his old friend from Kentucky,
who was by now a regular on the Grand Ole Opry.
Travis had begun talking up Ike's fingerpicking skills to a rising young guitar phenomenon named
Chet Atkins,
who was running a song publishing company in Nashville called Athens Music. They met in person when Atkins came to Knoxville to play the Tennessee Valley Fair, and Ike said, "Chet, I got two boys that I think are pretty good. Do you think you could do anything for them?"
Impressed by the two teenagers' intelligence and sophistication, Atkins gave them his phone number in Nashville and promised to listen to the songs Don was writing. Of all the songs Don sent him over the course of a year, Atkins was particularly impressed with one called "Thou Shalt Not Steal", which he successfully submitted to the reigning "Queen of Country Music,"
Kitty Wells.
Wells' heartfelt delivery and steel-guitar-driven backup gained the record all the success it deserved, lifting it to Number 14 on Billboard magazine's country chart. Its success was all the evidence its young songwriter needed to prove he was on the right career path. Upon graduating from high school the following year, the principal asked him if he planned to go to college, and he immediately replied, "No, I'm going to Nashville."
The development that cemented the family's decision to relocate was a letter that Margaret received from Mrs. Chet Atkins, informing her that he had managed to place another of Don's songs, "Here We Are Again", with
on RCA victor, but it didn't fare nearly as well as its predecessor had done.
Relocated to Nashville, the boys and their mother moved into an apartment in the nearby town of Madison, where Margaret quickly found a job cutting hair at a Nashville department store managed by a former neighbor from Kentucky. Ike continued in the same line of work back in Knoxville before coming to Madison, but eventually, Barry Mazor writes, "he and Margaret went off to Hammond, Indiana, where she cut more hair and he worked construction again. The boys lived alone in Madison now."
Through Chet Atkins, the Everlys met talent scout Troy Martin, and he, in turn, hooked them up with Don Law, who had launched such country superstars as
Lefty Frizzell,
Carl Smith,
and
at Columbia Records. A hastily assembled recording session yielded four of Don's songs, two of which were released on a single in February 1956, but as Mazor points out, "nerves, hurry, and minimal care seemed to have ruled the day. They took a dub home from the session and played it and, heartbroken, knew instinctively it wasn't going to click. When the first single tanked, the option on the Everlys' contract was not picked up."
With their recording contract amounting to nothing and checks from the song publisher spent, the Everlys found themselves in bare survival mode for a while. "By all accounts," Mazor summarizes, "they were ready to pack it all in and look for construction work alongside Ike."
Fortunately, their last stop on their way out of town was a visit to song publisher Hal Smith, and it turned out to be their big break. They had already been recommended to him, so he put them in touch with Wesley Rose, who managed the biggest publishing house in Nashville, Acuff-Rose. Rose was impressed with their audition demo and contacted Archie Bleyer at Cadence Records in New York, for whom he was starting a country label. "They signed a three-year contract with Cadence on February 21, 1957," Mazor relates. "Wesley Rose became not just their working publisher, but their manager as well."
The Everly Brothers' first recording session took place in Nashville on March 1, 1957. "The Everlys and Wesley Rose were already thinking "country," and it would be another Acuff-Rose song that they recorded in that first Cadence session that put the brothers on the map," Mazor elaborates. "It had been written by Nashville's first full-time professional songwriting duo, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the previous year."
With their record,
"Bye Bye Love",
already gaining traction, the Everlys took part in a national country hitmaker package tour with
George Jones
Mel Tillis,
Patsy Patsy Cline,
and 13-year-old
Brenda Lee.
⠠⠃⠽ mid-May "Bye Bye Love" was on the Billboard charts, resulting in an invitation to appear on the Friday Night Frollics edition of the Grand Ole Opry. "We'd auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry the year before that, and we didn't fit," Phil noted ironically. As Barry Mazor observes, "Funny what a hit can do. Now they were there." Two weeks later they were Opry regulars.
With "Bye Bye Love" climbing to Number 1 on the country chart and Number 2 on the pop survey, the Everlys and the songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant were looking for a follow-up hit. Recalling how it came about, Felice said, "I was upstairs; I hadn't gotten out of bed yet. Boud was on the main floor, and I hear this, "Wake up, little Susie, wake up," and I thought, That sounds great. I'd better jump in there. I put these two kids in a drive-in theater, bored out of their minds and they fall asleep. Now what are we going to tell everybody?" It was only the first instance of the Bryants' expertise in giving the Everlys a story line that was sure to resonate with a teenage audience.
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"It would, of course, be a massive hit," Barry Mazor observes, "bigger even than "Bye Bye", though in some towns, such as Boston, it was said, radio wouldn't play it. Chuck Berry always referred to
"Wake Up, Little Susie"
as the song by someone else he'd most wished he'd written."
Predictably, the record's huge success brought wonderful consequences for Don and Phil Everly. With the money it generated, they were able to buy their parents a house in Nashville. Phil, still single, occupied it with them, enabling Don and the bride he'd married out of necessity the previous year to have a place of their own nearby.
The Everlys' next big hit, Boudleaux Bryant's
"All I Have To Do Is Dream",
was a romantic ballad that contrasted effectively with its upbeat predecessors. Phil first heard it with Archie Bleyer on a demo sung by Bryant and knew it was headed for the top. Don, on the other hand, was initially skeptical. "I was worried about us pulling a ballad off," he admits in Mazor's book, "but it was a good song."
Phil's prediction proved correct, and the record made Number 1 on all three Billboard charts: pop, country, and rhythm-and-blues. and, just as "Wake Up, Little Susie" had done, maintained that position for weeks. It was followed up with another romantic ballad from the Bryants,
"Devoted To You”.
⠠⠚ as beautifully harmonized and accompanied as "Dream" had been, it reached the Top Ten on both pop and country charts. "There was an innocence about it," Felice Bryant cogently observed. "It was so fresh it was like slicing a spring tomato."
The Everlys' next hit, a teen novelty from Boudleaux Bryant called
"Bird Dog",
returned them to rock mode. The villain in the piece is a sneaky dude named Johnny who uses every trick in the book to try to steal the protagonist's girl. Utilizing a hunting analogy that took them all the way back to their Kentucky roots, their character warns, "Hey, bird dog, get away from my quail. Hey, bird dog, you're on the wrong trail." It went to Number 2.
The next single, released in October, was
"Problems",
another teen song written by the Bryants. "My baby don't like anything I do," the protagonist complains. "My teacher seems to feel the same way, too." It reached Number 20 on the Billboard pop survey, but given their Top 10 track record, the Everlys were actually disappointed. "I felt like we had failed, somehow," Phil recalled. "We all had this sense of people looking at us with that open eye: Maybe you're losing it."
As Barry Mazor surmises, perhaps the Everlys' teen formula was "starting to be too predictable in mood. It was time for another change-up. And they all saw where it might come from."
The popular folk revival that the Weavers had started ten years earlier had absolutely exploded with the
Kingston Trio’s
⠗⠑⠧⠊⠧⠁⠇ of "Tom Dooley", a North Carolina ballad about a mountain boy condemned to hang for the murder of his girlfriend. At the same time, Westerns had become the next big thing on Prime Time TV. It was the perfect time for the Brothers' next hit,
"Take A Message To Mary",
written by the Bryants and recorded early in March 1959. "Take a message to Mary," the imprisoned character begs his friend, "but don't tell her what I've done. Please don't mention the stagecoach, and the shot from a careless gun."
It reached Number 16 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, and its flipside,
"Poor Jenny",
another imprisonment scenario that returned the focus to modern times, did almost as well, rising to Number 22. The narrator for this gem of Bryant storytelling is a kid who takes his new date to a teen party that ends in a brawl and the girl is knocked out cold. When the cops are summoned, kids scatter in all directions, and the one who brought her admits to an action—or inaction—that he would certainly regret after having had time to think clearly: "I couldn't carry Jenny so I left her alone."
Adding one more stupidity to the mix, a newspaper story the following morning misidentifies Jenny as "the leader of a teenage gang." With juvenile delinquency one of the hottest scare topics of the day, the story is a very plausible one, reflecting the Bryants' uncommon skill as social observers.
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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 Brothers 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 BLOOD HARMONY: The Everly Brothers 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 Celtic Fiddle With Allan MacDonald 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 well-known Scottish fiddler Allan MacDonald in a continuation of his Beginning Fiddle workshop. Students need to have taken Beginning Fiddle 1 or be able to play a simple tune and scales on the G and D strings. The class runs four Wednesday sessions beginning June 24th, and the registration deadline is June 20.
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
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1956 Les Paul Jo. At Emerald City Guitars
Emerald City Guitars in Seattle's Pioneer Square, well known for its fascinating selection of new and vintage acoustic and electric guitars, has recently acquired a 1956 Gibson Les Paul Jr. electric with minor updates and replacements. "This is a clean example displaying expected wear with dings and worn edges with a remaining sticker from Akron Music Center on the back of the headstock," the website elaborates. "This guitar now has a lot of life left to give. A vintage Les Paul Jr. never disappoints."
Emerald City Guitars 83 South Washington Street
Web: www.emeraldcityguitars.com
Phone: 206/382-0231
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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