Episode 56: “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers

Speaker 1 A history of folk music and 500 songs

Speaker 1 by Andrew Hickey.

Speaker 2 Episode 56.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye Love by the Everly Brothers.

Speaker 3 Well, a great big howdy-doo to all of our good friends and neighbors. This is Dad Everly talking for the Everly family.

Speaker 3 And we're going to play and sing you some songs, neighbors, family style, also country style. And we got the whole gang on deck, Mom, Don, Baby Boy Phil.

Speaker 2 We've talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the 50s and 60s.

Speaker 2 But what we've not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period.

Speaker 2 One, which we've already seen is the vocal group sound, the sound of doo-wop.

Speaker 2 There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine.

Speaker 2 One singer will be taking a bass melody, another will be singing a falsetto line, and so on. It's the sound of a collection of individual personalities working together.
but to their own agendas.

Speaker 2 Another style which we're going to look at soon is the girl group sound.

Speaker 2 There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus.

Speaker 2 It's the sound of a couple of friends providing support for someone who's in trouble. The lead singer will sing her problems and the friends will respond with something supportive.

Speaker 2 Then there's the style which Elvis used.

Speaker 2 A single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing oohs and R's.

Speaker 2 The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture.

Speaker 2 But there's one style which would be as influential as any of these and which was brought into rock and roll by a single act:

Speaker 2 a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony.

Speaker 1 Hello loneliness I think I'm a gonna cry

Speaker 1 Bye-bye love

Speaker 1 Bye-bye sweet chorus

Speaker 1 Hello emptiness I feel like I could die

Speaker 1 Bye bye bye love goodbye

Speaker 1 There goes my baby

Speaker 2 with someone new Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music.

Speaker 2 Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coal miner in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, but decided to quit coal mining and become a professional musician when he was trapped in his second cave-in, deciding he wasn't ever going to go through that a third time.

Speaker 2 He had learned a particular guitar style, which would later become known as Travis picking, after its most famous exponent, Merle Travis, though Travis himself usually referred to it as Muhlenberg picking.

Speaker 2 Travis and Ike Everly knew each other, and it was Ike Everly and Ike's friend Mose Rager who taught Travis how to play in that style, which they had learned from another friend, Kennedy Jones, who in turn learned it from a black country blues player named Arnold Schultz, who had invented the style.

Speaker 2 Ike Everly was widely regarded as one of the greatest country guitarists of all time, and his Ike Everly's Rag was later recorded by Merle Travis and Joe Maphis.

Speaker 2 But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man.

Speaker 2 He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues.

Speaker 2 But even when playing country, he wasn't just playing the kind of music that was becoming popular at the time, but he was also playing the old Appalachian folk songs. and teaching them to his sons.

Speaker 2 He would play songs like Who's Going to Shoe your pretty little feet? which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie.

Speaker 1 Mama's gonna glove my hand.

Speaker 1 Sister gonna kiss my red ruby

Speaker 2 The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows.

Speaker 2 As they grew old enough, his two sons, Don and Phil, would join him, as would his wife, though Margaret Everly was more of a manager than a performer.

Speaker 2 Don soon became good enough that he got his own 15-minute show, performing as Little Donnie, as well as performing with his family.

Speaker 2 The Everly family would perform their show live first thing in the morning. They were playing country music, and so they were supposed to be playing for the farmers, and their show began at five AM,

Speaker 2 with the young boys heading off to school still in the dark, after the show had finished.

Speaker 2 The radio show continued for many years, and the boys developed all sorts of tricks for keeping an audience entertained, which would stand them in good stead in future years.

Speaker 2 One thing they used to do was to have both brothers and their father play the same guitar simultaneously, with Phil fretting the bass notes, Ike Everly playing those notes, and Don playing lead on the top strings.

Speaker 2 I have not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his T V show.

Speaker 2 Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Averley's old friend, Merle Travis.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Papa knows this.

Speaker 1 I'm a rattlesnake daddy, and a

Speaker 2 That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time.

Speaker 2 Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s and like the Everleys would play fairly straightforward blueslicks while doing it.

Speaker 2 But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers.

Speaker 2 People often, incorrectly, describe the Everly brothers as singing bluegrass harmonies. This is understandable, as bluegrass music comes from Kentucky, and does often have close harmonies in it.

Speaker 2 But the Everleys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Munro started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass.

Speaker 2 There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s.

Speaker 2 The first people people to really popularize it were a duo who were known as Mac and Bob, Lester MacFarland and Robert Gardner.

Speaker 2 The two men met in Kentucky at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music in 1916.

Speaker 2 They started singing close harmony together in the early 1920s, and while they sang in the overly enunciated way that was popular at the time, you can hear the roots of the Everly's style in their harmonies.

Speaker 2 If God would but grant me the pleasure of the style is known as close harmony because the singers are singing notes that are close to each other in the scale, and it was the foundation of country vocal harmonies.

Speaker 2 Usually in this style, there are two singers singing about a third apart.

Speaker 2 The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise following the melody line closely.

Speaker 2 This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices.

Speaker 2 And if done well, it can sound like one voice harmonizing with itself.

Speaker 2 And so, from the 1930s on, there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo, who the Evelyns would often point to as a particular influence, was the Bales Brothers.

Speaker 2 loved you, no one has ever known,

Speaker 2 no one has ever known but you alone.

Speaker 2 I've kept in love inside my heart and smiled through all my tears.

Speaker 2 My darling, I have loved you

Speaker 2 all so many years. But at the time the Everly Brothers were coming up, there was one duo, more than any other, who were immensely popular in the close harmony style.
The Louvin Brothers.

Speaker 1 The only colour I can see is green. Let the midnight special

Speaker 1 shine down on me.

Speaker 1 Let the midnight special

Speaker 2 shed its ever loving light. The Louvin brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John Deal Outermilk, whose sitting in the balcony we heard in the Eddie Cochrane episode a few weeks ago.

Speaker 2 They were country and gospel singers, who are nowadays probably sadly best known for the cover of their album Satan is Real, which often makes those internet listicles about the most ridiculous album covers.

Speaker 2 But in the mid-fifties they were one of the most popular groups in country music and influenced every one. They were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry.

Speaker 2 Their style was a model for the Everleys, but sadly so was their personal relationship.

Speaker 2 Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly brothers.

Speaker 2 In nineteen seventy, Phil Everly said, We've only ever had one argument, it's lasted twenty five years, and that argument would continue for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 2 There were various explanations offered for their enmity over the years, ranging from them vying to be their father's favourite, to Don resenting Phil's sweeter voice upstaging him.

Speaker 2 He was once quoted as saying, I've been a has-been since I was ten.

Speaker 2 But fundamentally, the two brothers were just too different in everything from temperament to politics, Don is a Liberal Democrat, while Phil was a conservative Republican, and their views on how life should be lived.

Speaker 2 It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it.

Speaker 2 And so the Everlies became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history.

Speaker 2 But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that's possible.

Speaker 2 But talent on its own doesn't necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everleys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens.

Speaker 2 While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio.

Speaker 2 It was much cheaper for the radio stations to employ DJs to play records, now that the legal ban on broadcasting recordings had been lifted.

Speaker 2 The Everly family's radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair while encouraging their sons in their music career.

Speaker 2 After a few months of this, Margaret decided she was going to move the boys to Nashville to try to get them a record deal, while Ike remained in nearby Knoxville, working as a barber.

Speaker 2 While the family had not had much success in the music industry, they had made contacts with several people, and Chet Atkins, in particular, was an admirer not only of Ike Everly's guitar playing, but of his barbering skills as well.

Speaker 2 According to at least one account I've read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike's.

Speaker 2 Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter, and maybe a solo performer.

Speaker 2 He carried out some correspondence with Don while Don was still in school, and got Kitty Wells, one of the biggest country stars of the fifties, to record one of Don's songs, Thou Shalt Not Steal, when Don was only 16.

Speaker 2 I found him in my best friend's arms.

Speaker 2 I stole him though I meant no harm.

Speaker 1 I found myself a sweetheart and lost myself a free.

Speaker 2 That became a top 20 country hit, and Don looked like he might be on his way to a successful career, especially after another of his songs, Here We Are Again, was recorded by Anita Carter of the famous Carter family.

Speaker 2 Just when I think

Speaker 2 I've forgotten you

Speaker 2 and our

Speaker 2 cheating love's at an end.

Speaker 2 I bow to myself,

Speaker 2 I'll see you no more,

Speaker 2 but here

Speaker 2 we are

Speaker 2 again.

Speaker 2 But Margaret Everly, the Everly's mother, and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn't want Don to be a solo star.

Speaker 2 She wanted the two brothers to be equal in every way, and would make sure they wore the same clothes, had the same toys growing up, and so on.

Speaker 2 She took Don's royalties from songwriting and used them to get both brothers musicians union cards.

Speaker 2 In the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee.

Speaker 2 So solo stardom was never going to be in Don Everly's future. Margaret wanted the Everly brothers to be a successful duo, and that was that.
Chet Atkins was going to help both her sons.

Speaker 2 Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, Keep a Love in Me, written by Don.

Speaker 2 if

Speaker 2 you

Speaker 2 just give me a chance here's the secret to make our love last

Speaker 2 keep loving me keep a loving me keep a lovin' me the way i love you

Speaker 2 that record flopped and the everleys were later very dismissive of it Phil said of the two songs on that single, they were Stinko Boy, Really Stingo.

Speaker 2 Columbia weren't interested in putting out anything else by the Everlies, and quickly dropped them.

Speaker 2 Part of the reason was that they were signed as a country act, but they already wanted to do more, and in particular, to incorporate more influence from the rhythm and blues music they were listening to.

Speaker 2 Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizelle, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style.

Speaker 2 Don, in particular, who was the more accomplished instrumentalist of the two, and who unlike Phil would play rhythm guitar on their records, wanted to learn how Diddley played guitar, and would spend a lot of time with Chet Atkins, who taught him how to play in the open tunings Diddley used, and some of the rhythms he was playing with.

Speaker 2 Despite the brothers' lack of success on Columbia, Atkins still had faith in them, and he got in touch with his friend Wesley Rose, who was the president of Acough Rose Publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time.

Speaker 2 Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff Rose as songwriters, and if they'd agreed to record only Acough Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal.

Speaker 2 They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records. a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams.

Speaker 2 The first single they recorded for cadence was a song that had been rejected by 30 other artists before it was passed on to the Everlies as a last resort.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye, Love was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boodlow Bryant, who had been writing for a decade for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mulliken.

Speaker 2 Their first hit had come in 1948 with Country Boy, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts.

Speaker 2 But they had not had much chart success after that, though they placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers.

Speaker 2 They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, Bye Bye, Love, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack.

Speaker 2 They hadn't been interested, so the Bryants had passed the song along to their friend Chet Atkins, who had tried to record it with Porter Wagoner, who had recorded other songs by the Bryants, like Trying to Forget the Blues.

Speaker 1 The song they're singing makes me want to cry.

Speaker 1 Cause it reminds me that you've gone and left me.

Speaker 1 I feel a teardrop coming to my eye.

Speaker 1 I'm having a hard time

Speaker 1 trying to forget the blues.

Speaker 2 But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn't strong enough for Waggoner.

Speaker 2 Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boodlow Bryant told him that if the song wasn't strong enough as it was, he just shouldn't record it at all.

Speaker 2 But while the song might not have been strong enough for a big country star like Porter Wagoner, it was strong enough for Chet Atkins' new protégés, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit.

Speaker 2 So Atkins took the multiply rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for cadence.

Speaker 2 In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boodlow Bryant's barber and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were.

Speaker 2 But Bryant had just dismissed this. Around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son, or daughter, or husband, or wife is.

Speaker 2 Two things happened happened to change the rather mediocre song into a classic that would change the face of popular music. The first was, simply, the brothers' harmonies.

Speaker 2 They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other's voices and a superb musicality.

Speaker 2 It's interesting to listen to the very first take of the song.

Speaker 1 I'm a gonna cry.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye, love,

Speaker 1 bye-bye, sweet chorus.

Speaker 1 Hello, emptiness. I feel like I could die.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye, my love, goodbye.

Speaker 1 I'm through with the romance.

Speaker 1 I'm a through with the love.

Speaker 2 That's Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony.

Speaker 2 Now, if you're familiar with the finished record, you can tell that what Phil's singing there isn't the closer harmony part he ended up singing on the final version.

Speaker 2 There are some note choices there that he decided against for the final record, but what you can tell is that they are instinctively great harmony singers.

Speaker 2 It's not the harmony part that would become famous, but it's a good one in its own right.

Speaker 2 The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it.

Speaker 2 Don had written a song called Give Me a Future, which he'd intended to be in the Bo Diddley style, and one can hear something of Diddley's rhythm in the stop-start guitar part.

Speaker 1 that it rose my chances with you.

Speaker 1 The years of dead holds nothing but the thought that maybe I won't have you.

Speaker 2 Don took that guitar part and attached it to the Bryant song, and with the help of Chet Atkins' lead guitar fills, turned it into something quite new.

Speaker 2 A record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals.

Speaker 1 I feel like I could die.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye, my love, Goodbye.

Speaker 2 The brothers were at first worried because almost as soon as it came out, a cover version by Webb Pierce, one of the biggest names in country music, came out.

Speaker 2 She was my baby

Speaker 2 till he stepped in.

Speaker 2 Goodbye to

Speaker 2 But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce's version did chart, reaching the top 10 in the country charts, it was nowhere near as successful as their own version, which went to number one on the country charts and number two in pop, and charted on the RB charts as well.

Speaker 2 After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with Wake Up Little Susie, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety.

Speaker 2 Even though, listening to the lyrics, it very clearly states that no impropriety has gone on, and indeed that the protagonist is horrified at the suggestion that it might have.

Speaker 2 These records would usually incorporate some of Don's Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll.

Speaker 2 The Bryants also started to give the brothers ballads like Devoted to You and All I Have to Do Is Dream, which, while they still deal with adolescent concerns, have a sweetness and melody to them quite unlike anything else that was being recorded by rock and roll artists of the time.

Speaker 2 After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlies was tailored specifically to them.

Speaker 2 Boodlow Bryant, who would attend more of the sessions, would have long conversations with the brothers, and try to write songs that fit with their lives and musical tastes, as well as fitting them to their voices.

Speaker 2 One of the things that's very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Budlow alone with having written the songs that he co-wrote with his wife, even though everything suggests that the Bryants were a true partnership, and both have solo credits for songs songs that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team.

Speaker 2 Whether this is pure sexism, or it's just because Budlow is the one who used to demo the songs for them, and so they think of him as the primary author, is hard to tell. Probably a combination.

Speaker 2 This was also a perception that Budlow Bryant encouraged.

Speaker 2 While Felice was the person who had originally decided to go into songwriting, and was the one who came up with most of the ideas, ideas, Budlow was only interested in making money, and he'd often sneak off to write songs by himself so he would get all the money rather than have to share it with his wife.

Speaker 2 Boodlow would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins and finish them up with Felice, but only Budlow and the original writer would get their names on it.

Speaker 2 The result was that Budlow got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better.

Speaker 2 One of my sources for this episode is an interview with the Bryants' son, Dane, and at one point in that interview he says, Now, lots of times I will say my father. I mean dad and mum.

Speaker 2 As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them.

Speaker 2 Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants' songs were some of the best songs ever written.

Speaker 2 Don, on the other hand, while he definitely appreciated material like All I Have to Do is Dream, wasn't so keen on their writing in general, mostly because it dealt primarily with adolescent concerns.

Speaker 2 He thought that the material the brothers were writing for themselves, though still immature, as one would expect from people who were still in their teens at the start of their career, was aiming at a greater emotional maturity than the material the Bryants wrote.

Speaker 2 And on the evidence of their first album, that's certainly true. The first album is, like many albums of the time, a patchy affair.

Speaker 2 It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits.

Speaker 2 Those cover versions tend to support Don's repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R and B and Blues as in country. Apart from a version

Speaker 2 the memory of the light before.

Speaker 2 I wonder if I'll suffer more.

Speaker 2 I wonder

Speaker 2 if

Speaker 2 I did

Speaker 2 as much

Speaker 2 as

Speaker 2 I did

Speaker 2 before.

Speaker 2 Don's songs were offered B-sides.

Speaker 2 That one was the B-side to buy by Love, and to my mind, they're often rather more interesting than the A sides.

Speaker 2 While that first album is rather patchy, the second album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, is a minor revelation, and one of the pillars on which the Everly Brothers' artistic reputation rests.

Speaker 2 It's been suggested that the album was done as a way of getting back at the record company for some slight or other, by making a record that was completely uncommercial.

Speaker 2 That might be the case, but I don't think so. And if it was, it was a gesture that backfired magnificently, as it's still, sixty years on, a consistent seller.

Speaker 2 Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like: an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father.

Speaker 2 It's a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don's acoustic guitar and Floyd Chants on upright bass.

Speaker 1 Who's

Speaker 1 Who's gonna kiss

Speaker 1 your ruby red lips?

Speaker 2 It's quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the 50s by a rock and roll act, and it's had such an influence that as recently as 2013, Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz pop singer Nora Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that's just a cover version of the whole album.

Speaker 2 glove your little hands.

Speaker 2 And I'm gonna

Speaker 2 kiss

Speaker 2 your ruby red lips.

Speaker 2 So as the 1950s drew to a close, the Everly brothers were on top of the world. They'd had a run of classic singles, and they'd just released one of the greatest albums of all time.

Speaker 2 But there was trouble ahead, and when we pick up on their career again, we'll see exactly how wrong things could go for them.

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Speaker 2 This podcast is written, narrated, and produced by me, Andrew Hickey.

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