SEPTEMBER, 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
Web: httpwhheritagemusicreview_com
Email: subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com
Editor's Note: Links to the books and albums mentioned in this issue come from my participation in the Amazon Associates affiliate program, which enables me to earn commissions on the products I recommend when readers buy them through this website. The links represent my judgment of the most relevant and reasonably priced musical packages available. Heritage Music Review does not collect, store, or share confidential information generated by its readers' purchases. Enjoy!
CONTENTS—september, 2026
Part 7:
NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE EVERLY BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
WHAT's IN STORE: News From The Musical Marketplace
CHECKIN' OUT THE SOUNDS: September Music CALENDAR (next message)
――――――――――
PART 7: NEW BIOGRAPHY EXAMINES THE FACTORS BEHIND THE Everly BROTHERS' "BLOOD HARMONY"
By Doug Bright
Summary of Parts 1-6
"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.
Ike Everly, Don and Phil's father, had grown up laboring in the coal mines of his native Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, 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, 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 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.
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 Atkins, the Everlys met talent scout Troy Martin, and he, in turn, hooked them up with 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. 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, the last stop on their way out of town 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 three years the Everlys spent with Cadence and the songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant produced such unforgettable
hits
as "Bye Bye Love", "Wake Up, Little Susie", "All I Have to Do Is Dream", "Devoted To You", "Bird Dog", "Problems", "Take A Message To Mary", "Poor Jenny" and "Let It Be Me".
The Everlys' last Cadence session took place on February 18th, 1960, yielding their next big hit, Phil's
"When Will I Be Loved".
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 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."
―――――――――――――――――—-
Given the huge bet that Warner Bros. had made on them, the Everlys were well aware that they needed to come up with a hit record right away. Surprisingly enough, Don's melodic inspiration came from the "On The Trail" movement of Ferde Grof`e's 1930 semiclassical
Grand Canyon Suite.
"That walking thing with the drums and stuff," he later elaborated.
As for the lyric, he explained, "My father was telling me a story about how when he was a boy he had a girl named Mary, and everywhere he went his friends would say, Mary had a little lamb." He also recalled a high school girlfriend of his own named Cathy, and the result was the scenario about a boy who suffers painful humiliation as
"Cathy's Clown".
"Phil came over and we hashed it out and we went into the studio," Don summarized. "We wrote "Cathy's Clown" one night, and recorded it the next. We knew it was going to be a hit."
His prediction proved spectacularly accurate, with the record selling over two million copies during its reign on the charts and many millions more over time. It was the Everly Brothers' biggest hit so far.
"A flood of astonishingly strong, memorable releases buttressed the sense that the Everlys had arrived on top of everything," Mazor continues. "Warners rushed out
It's Everly Time,
their first album on the new label, just two weeks after "Cathy's Clown" was locked, bearing every track they'd recorded for them save that single." It opened with Don's heartbreaker "So Sad (to watch good love go bad)", often regarded as his finest composition. The song was released as a single in May, and by July it was sharing the Top Twenty with "Cathy's Clown" and eventually reached Number 7.
Although Barry Mazor doesn't have much else to say about it in his book, the album was a pop-rock masterpiece. The fact that six of the album's twelve songs came from the Bryants was auspicious indeed, and most of them are stand-outs. Their melodically intricate "Sleepless Nights", evocatively delivered by the Everlys and sensitively accompanied with acoustic guitars, is one of the most achingly beautiful ballads in the whole Everly catalog. The slow-grooving "Nashville Blues" is sung with smooth, down-home conviction and graced with an accompaniment that features a bluesy pedal steel guitar, a real rock 'n' roll innovation at the time.
"That's What You Do To Me" was a buoyant pop-rocker characterized by a catchy melody and the quintessentially teenage line, "Since our first date I can't think straight." With all this going for it, it should have been a hit, but the company apparently chose not to exploit it. Another up-tempo rocker, Boudleaux Bryant's "Just In Case", touches with uncommon accuracy on the tenuousness of young love in an uncertain world where the military draft was firmly in place. "You know that the future's many dreams away," the protagonist concedes, "but I want to laugh and live and love today." Among songwriters, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant obviously understood American youth in the 1950's better than anyone except
Chuck Berry
and the team of Leiber and Stoller.
As this album demonstrates, the Everlys were adventurous samplers of hits and obscurities alike from the top artists of the day. Their treatment of
Dean Martin's
"Memories Are Made of This" is pleasant enough, but a couple of rhythm-and-blues numbers, "I Want You To Know" and "What Kind of Girl Are You", are so skillfully adapted to the duo's pop-rockabilly style that they sound as if they had been made to order. The former comes from
Fats Domino,
and the latter was written by Ray Charles and recorded by his
Raylettes
as "What Kind of Man Are You".
Buoyed by the increased artistic freedom that came with their Warner contract, the Everlys experimented even more boldly as time went on. "Over the summer of 1960," Mazor elaborates, "they became fascinated with fast-evolving studio technology, turning to it especially on songs by others they wanted to customize." Although it isn't at all obvious to the listener, their take on
Little Richard's
1957 hit "Lucille" from their second album,
A Date With The Everly Brothers,
is a prime example. "We had eight different guitars doing the same riff," Phil explains in Mazor's book. "That's eight electric guitar players that sound like one guitar, Jimmy Day on steel. That large guitar approach was Donald's idea, which had really never been explored. We kept trying to do innovations, because the basic element of rock and roll was change."
"When Don started producing some of the Warner Brothers sessions," adds recording engineer Bill Porter, "he really challenged you. He basically had me trying to do things that were three or four years ahead of their time—what you'd do with multitrack recording."
Like the album that preceded it, A DATE WITH THE EVERLY BROTHERS drew heavily on Felice and Boudleaux Bryants' songwriting skills. A particularly powerful example of Bryant balladry is "A Change of Heart", harmonized by the Everlys with all the sensitivity it deserved. The Bryants' most famous ballad on this album is unquestionably "Love Hurts", which appeared on the flip of
Roy Orbison's
"Running Scared". In contrast to Orbison's somewhat melodramatic treatment, the Everlys' original is delivered in a relatively understated, matterer-of-fact manner that simply lets the song speak for itself.
The Everlys' well-harmonized original of "So How Come (no one loves Me") was the obvious inspiration for the Beatles, who recorded it for the BBC in July 1963. After circulating on bootleg albums for decades, the Beatles' version finally got an authorized pressing around 1993 on a CD compilation called
Live At The BBC.
Consequently, it's probably better known than the record that inspired it.
"A Date With the Everly Brothers was to be the highest-selling album of their lifetimes," Mazor concludes.
―――――――――――――――――—-
Product Links
Blood Harmony: https://amzn.to/4A0sm2f
Clovers: https://amzn.to/4ctYQrJ
Drifters: https://amzn.to/4gBK9Fu
Merle Travis: https://amzn.to/3SPAXEq
Chet Atkins: https://amzn.to/4drezrP
Anita Carter: https://amzn.to/4Aazo4S
Hits: https://amzn.to/4ilnAWZ
"When Will I Be Loved": https://amzn.to/4ilnAWZ
Grand Canyon Suite: https://amzn.to/4gLF5hQ
"Cathy's Clown": https://amzn.to/46dSqcL
It's Everly Time: https://amzn.to/4yvlFDR
Chuck Berry: https://amzn.to/3Vrc9mT
Dean Martin: https://amzn.to/4xoejRJ
Fats Domino: https://amzn.to/46rzPtN
Raylettes: https://amzn.to/4xlIVmZ
Roy Orbison: https://amzn.to/4dEBNLb
Live At The BBC: https://amzn.to/4ha9FR7
(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).
―—'――――――――――――――――
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
――――――――――――――――—-
Learn "Bottleneck" Blues Guitar 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, September 12th, at 11 AM for a workshop on the "bottleneck" slide guitar style exemplified by such legendary bluesmen as Robert Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Registration deadline is Wednesday, September 9th
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
―――――――――――――――――—-
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.
Forwarding of this Electronic Edition is strongly encouraged. If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe, simply send your request to editor Doug Bright: subscribe@heritagemusicreview.com.
--------------------
--------------------