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| Remembering Don Everly with Burton Cummings and Domenic Troiano at CHCH-TV in Hamilton from 1983. |
Terry Staunton remembers Don Everly
Don Everly died on Saturday, seven years after kid brother Phil, but one of their bitterest feuds almost outlived both of them. A decades-long dispute over authorship of the million-selling smash Cathy’s Clown was finally settled by a Tennessee court in May 2021, the judge ruling in favour of the elder man, whose sole name has appeared in brackets after the title since it was first released in 1960.
The animosity between them was legendary. On their initial 1980s reunion concerts, stories persist of them stepping into the spotlight from different sides of the stage each night, having not exchanged a single word in the preceding 22-and-a-half hours. During the recording of their ’84 comeback album, producer Dave Edmunds claims he stepped in to break up a fist fight triggered by muddied memories of “something one of them said to the other in 1973.”
But when they were (literally) in tune with each other, such sweet and wonderful music was made. At the ages of eight and six respectively, Isaac Donald and Philip Everly made their professional debut on the KMA radio station out of Shenandoah, Iowa, singing traditional, country and novelty songs on a weekly show hosted by their parents, Ike and Margaret.
Ten years later, in 1956, the brothers (no longer billed as “Little Donnie and Baby Boy Phil”) were based in Nashville, where their crisp country harmonies found favour in the soon to be seismic world of rock ’n’ roll. Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Susie, All I Have To Do Is Dream, Bird Dog, Take A Message To Mary and ‘Til I Kissed You all hit big before the decade’s end, while covers of This Little Girl Of Mine and Lucille helped introduce Ray Charles and Little Richard to wider, whiter audiences.
It was perhaps inevitable that once rock ’n’ roll was no longer the genre making the most impact, like Louisiana-born Jerry Lee Lewis, they would pivot to the indigenous music of the Southern states. They’d never fully abandoned country music (their most notable early LP was the traditional treasure trove Songs Our Daddy Taught Us); it was in their blood, but so was rock, although the music biz had yet to hit on the umbrella term that would confidently bring the two worlds together.
The very roots of country rock can be found in a triptych of albums the Everlys made in ’68 and ’69 (compiled into one box set entitled Down In The Bottom in 2020), recordings that became touchstones for future generations of performers like Gram Parsons, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams and Jason Isbell. It wasn’t an especially lengthy rebirth, though, and the ‘70s saw them raise estrangement to an art form. But when the dust had partially settled a few years on, the likes of Paul McCartney and Jeff Lynne were at the head of the queue to offer them new material.
Yet, for millions of fans it’s the blend of those beautiful voices on their first few years as stars that keeps them alive. The comic teenage high-jinx of Poor Jenny, the desolate heartbreak of The Ferris Wheel, the airport-set doom ballad Ebony Eyes, the yearning Walk Right Back, the gimme-something-good stomp of When Will I Be Loved?, the solitary sorrow of Crying In The Rain.
I never got to meet either of them, but on assignment for NME in Nashville in 1988 I ended a particularly lubricated evening in the apartment of one of the city’s most in-demand studio engineers, the two of us playing guitars and howling in what we drunkenly thought was to-die-for harmony. Halfway through a heroically shoddy rendition of Let It Be Me, a pounding on the door by the guy resident one storey up pointedly suggested we call it a night; it wasn’t until the following afternoon that I learned the angry neighbor was none other than Don Everly, rudely awoken by the beer-soaked murder of one of his biggest hits.
While it might have been cool to come face-to-face with a man whose music I’d love since a little kid, perhaps it’s just as well we sauced-up carousers were too chicken-shit to actually open the door that night. By all accounts, Don relished a good row. – Terry Staunton
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