⠠⠠⠍⠜⠡⠂ 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—March, 2026
Part 2:
NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
CHECKIN' OUT THE SOUNDS: March Music CALENDAR (next message)
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PART 2: NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
By Doug Bright
Summary of Part 1:
"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. We didn't have much, and we were living in an ancient, tenement-like apartment building in that old coal mining town, Scranton, Pennsylvania. 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,
and he considers Phil Everly's comments an important contribution. 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. 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 with their ambitions. They briefly appeared on a small radio station but didn't accomplish much more, so Ike returned, feeling homesick.
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.
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, and they married on August 15, 1935. "On February 1, 1937," Mazor writes, "the Everlys greeted the birth of their first son, Isaac Donald—Don." Only six weeks later, they moved to 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.
Phil Everly was born in 1939, and his father's career took a step forward that year with a regular spot on another Chicago station, WJJD. He started out as a soloist, but the following year the station paired him with Thomas "Red" Greene, whose family band, The Oklahoma Drifters, also appeared locally.
"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 of a mother neglected by her grown children, for their landmark 1958 album
Songs Our Daddy Taught U.
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, and with his father accompanying him on guitar, he recorded the
Mills Brothers’
"Paper Doll" at a little recording booth designed for people to send spoken records to their families back home.
"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 found a new home in Shenandoah, Iowa, a small but prosperous community 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" and seven-year-old Phil sang "Silent Night". "And thus," Mazor summarizes, "two careers began."
By 1949 Ike had his own daily show. 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 and a fellow on accordion 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. A full half-hour show from 1950 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.
The Everlys' next home, at least for a while, turned out to be Evansville, Indiana, where Ike had gained his first professional experience, but by this time 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 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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"The Everly Family's on-air appearances in Knoxville were just an extension of what they'd been doing all along," Barry Mazor observes. "It was designed to be a country show, but frictions were developing." Don and Phil were listening to Nashville's 50,000-watt rhythm-and-blues station, WLAC, and taking an increased 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. "Sometimes Don or Phil would say, "I'd like to play something with more of a beat to it." Our sponsor called the boys bobbysoxers."
"Rock and roll started while I was in high school," Phil recollected in 1971. "It was so close to what we'd been doing that we picked it up."
Unsurprisingly, as Mazor points out, Phil didn't last long in the school choir. "I'd always had trouble with music teachers," he confides in the book. "I was singing professionally and maybe the teachers resented it; I had a different attitude about what we were doing."
The conflict finally came to a head in mid-1954 when Cas Walker fired the Everlys and canceled their show. "The sponsor liked the "real country" with the banjo," Ike later explained. "We realized that the real country music sold groceries to the older people, while the beat-type music appealed more to the younger folks."
With regard to his two sons, he continues, a professional parting of the ways was inevitable. "Rock and roll was just coming in, and I guess they started growing away from us, musically and otherwise. We saw the writing on the wall. We didn't think we'd make it, and we thought they would, so we just kind of stepped out. We knew it was time for them to be on their own."
With their musical career abruptly ended, at least for the time being, Ike and Margaret Everly were forced to reinvent themselves, going back to the classroom right along with their sons. "Their parents both attended school, too," Barry Mazor elaborates, "Margaret a business school, learning to be a beautician, and Ike a barber's college. Both Margaret and Ike found work as hair stylists."
"Business was meager," Mazor summarizes, "but they wanted to hold on in town at at least until Don graduated. Ike did some time working construction in Indiana, sending cash home monthly. None of them could see that everything was about to change."
"Ike's old friend and de facto student
Merle Travis,
⠃⠽ now a fairly established star, had been talking about Ike's fingerpicking wizardry with an emerging, younger guitar whiz,
Chet Atkins,”
Mazor explains. "They'd begun corresponding."
Though not the powerful record producer he later became, Atkins was now a regular on the Grand Ole Opry and was running a small song publishing company in Nashville called Athens Music. "When he returned to Knoxville to perform at the Tennessee Valley Fair," Mazor relates, "the hard-up Everlys didn't have the cash to get in, but Ike, spurred on by Margaret to go anyhow, brought his sons to meet him."
Legend has it that their first conversation took place through a chain-link fence near the backstage area. "Chet," Ike said, "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, he 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", and in a July 1955 letter he wrote, "It looks like we will get a record on "Thou Shalt Not Steal".
Kitty Wells
likes it very much and says she will cut it in two or three weeks. Also, we'll be trying to get you a record. Keep writing."
"Enclosed with the letter was a check for $600 from the publishing company,” Mazor summarizes. "Don, at sixteen, was a professional songwriter, and that check was a short-term family lifesaver."
The song was just the kind of well-constructed cautionary tale that perfectly suited the reigning "Queen of Country Music", whose most memorable hit had been "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels". It also demonstrated the phenomenal maturity of a teenage songwriter whose experience of the subject was limited to the "cheatin' songs" he heard on the radio. "To steal a love is wrong, you'll find," the guilty protagonist concludes. "You end up with the faithless kind, too late to heed the warning, the law, Thou shalt not steal."
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. The 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."
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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 Electric Blues Essentials 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 bluesmaster Eric Madis on Saturday, march 14th, In a workshop called "Essential Licks For Electric Blues Guitar". At this writing, signups are closed, but you can call or stop by to see if a last-minute spot might be available.
Dusty Strings Music Store and School
3406 Fremont Avenue North
Phone: 206/634-1662
Web: www.dustystrings.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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