AUGUST, 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—august, 2026
Part 6:
NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN' OUT THE SOUNDS: August Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 6: NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-5:
"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
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, but fortunately, he found an alternative, picking guitar and singing with his brother Charlie. In 1929 Ike, Charlie, and a third Everly sibling 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 15th, 1935. Don was born February 1st, 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 ⠓⠕⠍⠑ 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.
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 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,
Merle Travis,
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 composer needed to prove he was on the right career path. The development that cemented the family's decision to move to Nashville 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
Anita Carter
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
Marty Robbins
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. 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.
The Everly Brothers' first recording session took place in Nashville on March 1st, 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
"Bye Bye Love"
climbing to Number 1 on the country chart and Number 2 on the pop survey, the Everlys and the Bryants 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.
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. It was followed up with another romantic ballad from the Bryants,
"Devoted To You".
Just as beautifully harmonized and accompanied as "Dream" had been, it reached the Top Ten on both pop and country charts.
The Everlys' next hit, a teen novelty from Boudleaux Bryant called
"Bird Dog",
returned them to rock mode, and it reached Number 20 on the Billboard pop survey. They began 1959 with an Old West-style ballad,
"Take A Message To Mary".
It reached Number 16 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, and its flipside,
"Poor Jenny",
another teen scenario that returned the focus to modern times, did almost as well, rising to Number 22.
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The Everly Brothers' next single,
"(til) I Kissed You",
written by Don and recorded in July 1959, was a country-flavored pop-rocker that incorporated a captivating tom-tom riff contributed by Crickets drummer Jerry Allison and placed strategically throughout the song. The result was a return to the Top Ten, reaching Number 8 on the Billboard country survey and 4 on the pop chart.
However dramatic that drum riff was, its intensity posed a problem for the studio engineer, who had just installed a peak-limiting device designed to balance out the sounds it captured, but in this case it yielded distortion that proved hard to eliminate. "This particular technical problem was worked out," Barry Mazor summarizes, "but there would be increasing episodes where what Archie Bleyer demanded, Wesley Rose preferred, the engineers needed, and the Everly Brothers wanted to create musically would clash. This was the final year of the Everly Brothers contract with Cadence, which increased tensions. Wesley was quietly looking into other label possibilities for them now; substantial dollars were on the table and egos were roaming through the house."
"There got to be a lot of jealousy between Archie Bleyer, the producer, and Wesley Rose, the publisher," Chet Atkins explains in Mazor's book. "It was no fun to work anymore, because they weren't getting along, and this was infectious to the musicians."
"Archie was pushing for more outright pop in their mix as much as Wesley stressed, even now, that they should stay close to Nashville country," Mazor elaborates. "It was about power over them more than about the music, and it was getting to be an uncomfortable squeeze."
The clash intensified later in the year over one of the most memorable songs in the Everlys' repertoire,
"Let It Be Me".
Originating as a French song called "Je T'appartiens" (I belong to you) in 1955, it was recorded in 1957 by pop vocalist
Jill Corey
with a new English title and set of lyrics. Two years later it appeared as a richly orchestrated instrumental on the album
Chet Atkins In Hollywood,
where Don Everly discovered it. "I love that melody," he told Atkins. "Is there a lyric?"
"Yes," Atkins replied, "and it's a great one."
The Everlys recorded it on December 15th in New York with Archie Bleyer conducting the string section. It was not only their first number recorded away from Nashville, but also the first one outside the Acuff-Rose song catalog, and Wesley Rose wasn't at all happy about it, warning them that the record would ruin their career. Recalling the Manhattan recording session, Don recalls, "He just sat there and pouted like a kid."
The Everlys' last Cadence session took place on February 18th, 1960, yielding Boudleaux Bryant's plaintive ballad "Like Strangers”
and their next big hit, Phil's
"When Will I Be Loved".
"That one would be the most celebrated song Phil would write alone," Mazor summarizes, "and it wet top-ten pop when released in May."
Meanwhile, three days before it was recorded, the Everly Brothers were officially signed to the two-year-old Warner Bros. label with an unprecedented ten-year, million-dollar contract. "The payments were split into ten $100,000 pieces," Barry Mazor explains, "and not as simple paydays, but as annual advances against royalties. Don and Phil wouldn't see any more than that from sales until they recouped that amount in profits each year. That was not an issue at first, with things going so well, but it also explains why so many singles were released, thrown at the wall to see if they'd stick, when things got thinner later."
"On the bright side," he continues, "they were theoretically handed nearly complete artistic control over what they would write, produce and record. Don and Phil were excited to work for a firm that could, just maybe, put them in the movies, too."
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Amazon Links:
Blood Harmony: https://amzn.to/4kECqqo
Clovers: https://amzn.to/40ZOUjs
Drifters: https://amzn.to/40ZOUjs
Merle Travis: https://amzn.to/40ZOUjs
Chet Atkins: https://amzn.to/4buFdOX
Kitty Wells: https://amzn.to/4buFdOX
Anita Carter: https://amzn.to/47Z1SC6
Lefty Frizzell: https://amzn.to/4vqhngo
Carl Smith: https://amzn.to/4c7BW9K
Marty Rolins: https://amzn.to/4dIjkyo
"Bye Bye Love": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"Wake Up, Little Susie": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"All I Have To Do Is Dream" https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"Devoted To You": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"Bird Dog": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"Take A Message To Mary": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"Poor Jenny": httpsccamznddto/42u4jt7
("Til) I Kissed You" httpsccamznddto/42u4jt7
Jill Corey: https://amzn.to/4wGHJuC
Chet Atkins In Hollywood: https://amzn.to/4fHtY95
"Like Strangers": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
"When Will I Be Loved": https://amzn.to/42u4jt7
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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 Guitar Improvisation 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 blues guitarist and teacher Eric Madis on Saturday, August 15th, at 11 AM for a workshop on the basics of single-note guitar improvisation for any style of music. Registration deadline is Wednesday, August 12th.
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.com
――――――――――――――――― 1964 Gibson Firebird V 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 1964 Gibson Firebird V electric. "This closet classic '64 Firebird V came to us 100% stock, complete with its original case and paperwork," the website proclaims. "A true time capsule and a fantastic instrument from early '64! The neck is nice and full, delivering a rich acoustic voice, tons of sustain, and a lively, vibrant feel that pairs beautifully with the stock mini humbuckers. These are undeniably iconic in both presence and design."
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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