BLOOD HARMONY: The Everly Brothers Story by Barry Mazor

A picture speaks a thousand words. They are not smiling. Phil, on the left, looks apprehensive, his eyes focused on something in the distance that troubles him, an approaching threat. Don, on the right, looks resigned, as if whatever is upsetting his younger brother is to his mind inevitable. Their pompadour quiffs, of course, are immaculate. 

The picture on the cover of Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story by Barry Mazor was taken by an unknown photographer in January of 1965, just as the duo’s career had reached a crossroads. Live, things were fine, even if Don and Phil weren’t getting along too well, not that they ever had, not really. Later that same year, during a tour of the Far East, they would perform eight sold-out shows at a 25,000-seater arena in Manila, the largest audience of their almost 60-year career. Their records, however, had stopped selling regardless of their quality, ingenuity or whatever musical direction they chose to follow. Trouble was indeed ahead.

Somewhat surprisingly in light of their fame, cultural importance and longevity, Blood Harmony is the first substantial, rigorously-researched and objective biography of The Everly Brothers I have read. There have been a handful of others but they were slight. This book is not, largely because, although clearly an admirer of their work, US roots music specialist Mazor doesn’t hold back on the many issues that impacted destructively on their lives and career: sibling rivalry, often intense, business wrangles with management, record labels and song publishers, drug and alcohol addiction, unstable marriages leading to onerous alimony obligations and, perhaps most importantly, that enduring but ultimately exasperating – to them anyway – image of two almost identical brothers, besuited and quiffed, eyeball to eyeball, strumming their matching black acoustic guitars with white pickguards, and singing songs in perfect harmony about teenagers falling in and out of love. 

        As the key bridge, both chronological and musical, between Elvis and The Beatles, Don and Phil Everly found themselves in a trap from which they could never escape. While Elvis, for better or worse, became a film star and Vegas icon, and The Beatles, with safety in numbers, matured every step of the way, The Everly Brothers suffered from an insurmountable image problem: their fans simply wouldn’t allow them to be anything more, or anything less, than the duo that recorded ‘Bye Bye Love’ in 1957, forever locked together, side by side singing that first major hit and all those that followed, a deluge of glorious songs that changed the face of pop music but resolutely prohibited them from ever transforming into anything beyond that illustrious beginning.  

        In a five-year span, between 1957 and 1962, the Everlys had 15 top ten hits in the US (and 12 in the UK), and lesser hits too numerous to mention, all of them hummed on the unconscious breath by everyone who took an interest in popular music during those years. (I still own an Everlys vinyl LP and EP on the London American label.) Furthermore, their sound, an innovative cross between country, rockabilly and R&B, sweetened or soured with keening balladry – Mazor is particularly good at tracing its roots – influenced just about every singing act that followed, from The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel on downwards. What’s more, all who followed in that vein, right up into the 21st century, no matter how famous they became, tipped their hat to them – not that it did Don and Phil much good in the long term.

        In many ways, Blood Harmony is a sad book. The Everly Brothers became pop stars in an era when magazines required them not only to look photogenic but to offer little else but cheerful, fairly anodyne, quotes about themselves. They became adept at maintaining a professional showbiz façade that was unusually successful in hiding the reality of their lives, this despite occasional attempts on their part – most especially by the more outspoken Don – to offer glimpses into it. 

        The veneer began early, with PR suggestions that they were Kentucky born and bred. They weren’t: although Don was born in the Bluegrass State, Phil was born in Chicago where the brothers were raised before the family moved to Shenandoah, Iowa, then Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a musical household, earning its living on stage and local radio as best it could through performing close-harmony country music accompanied for the most part by Ike, their guitar-playing dad. His two sons were apprenticed at an early age and knew nothing else; alienated from schoolfriends and accustomed to a life they could share only with others in the same trade from similar backgrounds. 

        Landing in Nashville in 1954, they tried at first to sell themselves as songwriters but once they were introduced – by the music publisher who became their manager – to the crack songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant they entered their imperial phase. Though vastly more talented, during this early stage of their career they found themselves bracketed alongside the vacuous teen idols promoted by a record industry staffed by middle-aged men alienated by rock and roll and bent on suppressing it. This would have long-term negative consequences. 

        There is a lazy assumption that Don was the more spirited, like John in The Beatles, and that Phil was the traditionalist, like Paul. While there’s a scintilla of truth in this, Mazor delves much deeper into the contrasting personalities of the brothers, their likes and dislikes from food, cars and interior decoration to politics, music and where it could be performed: Don liked folksy clubs, Phil preferred Vegas. Both, however, pursued girls enthusiastically but if Phil suffered an inferiority complex through being two years younger, Don often found his senior role a burden. Fights, some physical, were commonplace. With little in common, they didn’t socialise apart from when they were touring which, perhaps regrettably, was most of the time.

        Blood Harmony follows their serpentine career closely and in linear fashion, from the 1950s package show tours with fellow travellers like Buddy Holly, who became a close friend, Paul Anka, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino (though not Elvis), to their final show together at the Regent Theatre in Ipswich in November, 2005. The decade long interregnum between July 1973, when they dramatically severed their relationship on stage at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, only to re-emerge triumphantly at London’s Royal Albert Hall ten years later, is covered in two separate chapters, each dealing with a single brother. Thereafter, though shaky, the partnership continues until that final show, and it is pleasing to note that in their final years fraternal harmony was restored. Phil died in 2014. Don was too broken-hearted to attend his funeral. He died in 2021, outliving his younger brother by seven years. 

        Along the way, Barry Mazor delivers all manner of fascinating observations. Among the many are how session guitarist Ray Edenton replaced the wound G-string on his guitar with one an octave higher to play alongside Don and produce the distinctive opening strum on ‘Bye Bye Love’; how the Crickets became the Everly’s backing band after the death of Holly; the input of so many noted musicians, Chet Atkins, James Burton, Jim Gordon, Warren Zevon, Albert Lee and many more; how the drug Ritalin affected Don and how he was weaned off it; how the draft impacted on them (the photo of them shorn for service in the US Marines still has the power to shock); how in the UK they were loved beyond measure; the countless awards bestowed on them but how, apart, they were frustratingly unable to create the magic they could together. Throughout, Mazor analyses their music in depth with great insight. 

        Blood Harmony is 412 pages long, with a 16-page b&w photo section, copious reference notes and an index. Published by Da Capo, now an imprint of Hachette, it costs £22.66 on Amazon; RRP is the US $32. Anyone who, like me, loved the music of The Everly Brothers, needs to read this definitive biography.