![]() Paul Simon called them “the most beautiful-sounding duo I ever heard”, Bob Dylan claimed “we owe these guys everything – they started it all”, while Neil Young suggested his entire career was based on trying and failing to sound like them. Quite aside from the Beatles, the Everly Brothers were feted by everyone from the Rolling Stones – Keith Richards hailed Don as “one of the best rhythm guitar players I’ve ever heard” and called their voices “almost mystical” – to the Beach Boys. It was a sound that seemed to leave an indelible imprint on the subsequent generation of musicians. If you want to hear how eerie they could sound, turn to Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, their 1958 album of traditional country – a remarkably bold move at the height of rock’n’roll – and their five-minute-long version of the 19th-century song Lightning Express, its starkness cutting through the song’s tearjerking sentimentality: “The best friend I have in this world, sir, is waiting for me in pain, expected to die any moment.” If you want to hear the unadorned power of their singing, their minor 1959 hit Take a Message to Mary strips down the musical backing until it’s barely there at all: the acoustic guitars are low in the mix, someone clinks a bottle in lieu of drums and everything is focused on the vocals. Often heartbroken even when the music was upbeat, as on Bye Bye Love, they excelled at ballads: the otherworldly All I Have to Do Is Dream the dejected, self-penned Cathy’s Clown. A deep and affecting vein of melancholy runs through most of their biggest hits. It was a sound they could use to conjure up exuberant joy – as on 1959’s (Till) I Kissed You, written by Don – but more often turned to evoking sadness. Photograph: Michael Levin Photography/Alamy ‘They started it all’: the Everly Brothers in 1959. You can’t let your mind wander for a nanosecond.” “It’s like playing tennis with someone who is really great. “He’s so good, I have to pay attention every second with my harmonies,” he said shortly before his death in 2014. For all the apparent ease with which their voices blended together and the talk of the ineffable power and artlessness of fraternal harmonising, Phil said their singing was a complex, intricate, high-wire act based around diatonic thirds, with his older brother – who tended to sing the leads – very much in charge. ![]() ![]() The lyrics centre around the rock’n’roll topics of teenage romance and high-school life, but the Everly family had roots in Kentucky, and the brothers’ vocals were similarly rooted in the harmonies of Appalachian folk music. Throughout it all, McCartney later wrote, “their music echoed through my mind”.īut then, who wouldn’t want to sound like the Everly Brothers, at least when it came to harmony vocals? Listen to their run of hits from 1957 to 1962 and you hear music that’s both airy and haunting, simultaneously modern and centuries old. At the end of a decade in which they had done more than anyone to alter rock music entirely, shifting its parameters until it was occasionally unrecognisable from the state in which it had started the 60s – and rendering the likes of Don and Phil Everly old news in the process – John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wanted to sound like the Everly Brothers. It’s both oddly sweet – a fleeting moment where the ill-tempered sessions actually achieved their aim of returning the Beatles to their roots – and oddly telling. Shortly afterwards, the pair temporarily stopped working on the song entirely and began performing a ragged cover of Bye Bye Love instead. On an early holiday, Lennon and McCartney attempted to impress local girls by telling them they had a band back home and they were “the British Everly Brothers”. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney harmonise, the latter says to the former: “Take it, Phil”, a reference to Phil and Don Everly, the duo upon whom the pair had originally attempted to model themselves. A mong the hundreds of hours of outtakes from the recording sessions that eventually became the Beatles’ Let It Be album, there is a version of Two of Us, taped on 25 January 1969.
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