Podcast appearances and mentions of John D Loudermilk

Even a rainy winter's night can be fun at one of Huntington's hottest venues, the remarkable Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten on 7th Avenue.The band hit the Bahnhof stage early Thursday evening, a dozen hours after a night of torrential storms that soaked and raked the entire tri-state from midnight onward.“Listening to The Flood after a flood?” mused by hardy fan at a ringside table. “Well, I can't decide if that's appropriate behavior … or whether we're just poking the eye of the storm gods!”Hard to tell. However, the fact is that it did start raining again before the band's set was finished.Weather TunesThe weather had an impact on the guys' song selection. For instance, Pamela's video from the evening opens with a highly hum-able hymn for any deluge — “Wade in the Water” — and the guys even invited the assembled flood victims to sing along.Then the musical weather forecast turned a bit more optimistic. In the hey-just-six-more-weeks-of-winter mindset, the band offered “Windy and Warm” — the John D. Loudermilk classic made famous by Doc Watson — which in Floodom is a Danny Cox specialty. The song wasn't originally on the set list, but when the band mates saw Flood friends Andrea and Scott Austin in the audience, they edited in the addition. Scott, a big Watson fan, often asks for the tune whenever he drops by The Flood rehearsal.The Dancing DoctorsSpeaking of docs, a perfect Floodish evening also includes a visit with the band's favorite prancing professors, Bonita Lawrence and Clayton “Doc” Brooks. Faculty stars of Marshall University's mathematics department, Doc and Bonnie started dancing to Flood tunes more than a dozen years ago. Initially they favored the late Joe Dobbs' Irish gigs and Doug Chaffin's waltz tunes, but lately, the dancing doctors have revealed a much broader repertoire. Pamela's video closes out featuring the pair hoofing it to the 1920s rocker, “If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Like I've mentioned before, my dad liked his cowboy music too. So, we'll go back to a box set where we'll pull out the fourth of its seven records. The title of each of these sides is Deep in the Heart of Texas and Western Landscapes, hence the mashup title of this episode.   Four songs from side one were all big hits and reference our second biggest state. The selections from side two are lesser known but paint a beautiful picture of the old west.  So get ready to hear what is really Tumbling Tumbleweeds part 4 in Volume 187: Texas Landscapes. More information about this album, see the Discogs webpage for it.  Credits and copyrights Various – Tumbling Tumbleweeds Label: Reader's Digest – RDA-229 / A Format: 7 x Vinyl, LP, Compilation Box Set Released: 1982 Genre: Folk, World, & Country Style: Country We will be listening to record 4, sides 1 and 2. We will hear 7 of the 11 tunes from this disk. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Deep In The Heart Of Texas written by Don Swander, June Hershey George Hamilton IV - Abilene written by John D. Loudermilk, Bob Gibson and Lester Brown Gene Autry - The Yellow Rose Of Texas It's a traditional song with lyrics added by Don George Jerry Reed - El Paso  written by Marty Robbins The Sons Of The Pioneers - Moonlight On The Colorado written by Billy Moll, Robert King Jimmy Wakely - The Call Of The Canyon written by Billy Hill Hank Snow - Cross The Brazos At Waco written by Kay Arnold I do not own the rights to this music. ASCAP, BMI licenses provided by third-party platforms for music that is not under Public Domain.

Nueva entrega del coleccionable "Aquellos maravillosos años", una serie de episodios esporádicos en donde rescatamos algunas de las grandes canciones que dieron forma a la música popular de la primera mitad de los años 60. Playlist; (sintonía) THE REVELS “Intóxica” THE BEATLES “I feel fine” THE SEARCHERS “Love potion nº 9” TONY JACKSON GROUP “Watch your step” THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP “I can’t stand it” JACKIE EDWARDS “Keep on runnin’” THEM “Gloria” JOHN D. LOUDERMILK “Road hog” DORIS TROY “Just one look” MARTHA REEVES and THE VANDELLAS “Quicksand” THE EXCITERS “It’s so exciting” BOBBY DARIN “Not for me” ROBERTO CARLOS “Splish Splash” THE VELVETS “Tonight (could be the night)” DICKEY LEE “I saw Linda yesterday” THE JELLY BEANS “I wanna love him so bad” LESLEY GORE “If that’s the way you want it” LITTLE RICHARD “You better stop” SOLOMON BURKE “You can’t love em all” THE JOHN BARRY ORCHESTRA “Time out” Escuchar audio

Composed more than 60 years ago by the great John D. Loudermilk, “Windy and Warm” is a one of the late 20th century's most loved virtuoso pieces for fingerstyle guitar players.It was first recorded and released in the spring of 1961 by legendary guitarist Chet Atkins. In fact, the story goes that the tune came into being specifically because Chet wanted something that sounded old-fashioned, something in the old Merle Travis tradition."I'm getting too deeply into jazz,” Chet was reported to have said at the time. “I need to get back to my roots.”"I played this song for him,” Loudermilk mused many years later, “and he picked up the guitar and … he finished the damn thing before I finished it. And I wrote it!"The piece quickly became a signature tune for Chet, who continued to perform it throughout his lengthy career. It wasn't long after that thousands of guitarists — shoot, over the past six decades, perhaps millions — were learning it. Recordings came from everyone from The Country Gentlemen and Tony Rice to Tommy Emmanuel and David Grisman.Along Comes DocOf those also-rans who recorded “Windy and Warm” in tribute to Chet Atkins' original treatment, the most influential probably was Doc Watson's performance on his massively successful 1966 “Southbound” album. Doc recorded it again in 1970 in a popular “live” rendition with his son, Merle. The Watsons played it so well, in fact, that listeners who didn't pay attention to the album's credits might have assumed they wrote it themselves.Tommy EmmanuelThe day after John D. Loudermilk's death in September 2016 at 82, famed guitarist Tommy Emmanuel posted on Facebook that “Windy and Warm” was the first song “to come along and change my life.”Emmanuel added, “It was played by Chet Atkins and written especially for him by a great songwriter, storyteller, history-maker and all-round genius! … My love and sympathies go out to all the Loudermilk Family today. John, thanks for your humor, your passion for music, people and songwriting. We will never forget your beautiful blue eyes and your warmth for us all. Love you, Big Daddy.”Our Take on the TuneWhen the incomparable Dan Cox joined The Flood Fold last year, one of the first tunes he and his buddy, veteran Floodster Randy Hamilton, brought to the mix was “Windy and Warm.”While most of this take is all about Danny's pitch-perfect picking, it also features Randy and Dan vocalizing at one point, a moment that you can hear being happily applauded by Charlie. Check it out!Want More Danny? If that Dan Cox picking only whets your appetite for more, you're in good company. For another helping or two, check out The Danny Cox Channel in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to hear Danny playing in a randomizes playlist of several dozen especially cool tunes in all kinds of styles and moods. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

One FM presenter Josh Revens and Steve Dowers present 'Whatever Happened To?' This week's topic is songwriter & singer John D. Loudermilk. This program originally aired on Monday the 4th of July, 2022. Contact the station on admin@fm985.com.au or (+613) 58313131 The ONE FM 98.5 Community Radio podcast page operates under the license of Goulburn Valley Community Radio Inc. (ONE FM) Number 1385226/1. PRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association Limited and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) that covers Simulcasting and Online content including podcasts with musical content, that we pay every year. This licence number is 1385226/1.

We've got ourselves a blend of free form sounds from the Deeper Roots archives with themes of midnight runs, trains, and happiness spiced with instrumental punch. Tune in on a Friday morning on KOWS Community Radio for some oddball tunes from John D. Loudermilk, Bob Gibson, and Chip Taylor and The New Ukrainians. We're already halfway through the month and we'll find ourselves with a brighter eclectic blend of sounds from the past century. The antenna is installed and now the volunteers who pedal the wheels to churn those dynamos will soon have our signal spreading it's joy throughout the county. Go volunteers!!  Tune in why don't you...

Kim Landmark loves traveling around and getting to know her native California - but definitely not like a regular tourist. An urban explorer, Kim loves to visit off-the-beaten-path, really unusual places - especially abandoned buildings. In this conversation, we talk creepy abandoned hospitals; ghost hunting; forgotten histories; freaky Google Maps experiences; a 30-year-old murder mystery; and so much more. So find out why Kim loves urban exploration - and why you might learn to love it, too. Find Kim https://instagram.com/cali_rediscovered https://www.tiktok.com/@thrillchickas  Kim's favorite nonprofit: California Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of California's diverse cultural and architectural heritage https://californiapreservation.org  The closing music for today's episode is "Where Have They Gone" by John D. Loudermilk https://youtu.be/NS8EqnL1bZw *** My favorite nonprofits: Humane Society Silicon Valley https://hssv.org Southern Poverty Law Center https://www.splcenter.org  Town Cats of Morgan Hill https://towncats.org  World Central Kitchen https://wck.org  *** We're on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/lovewhatyoulovepod  Hang out with me at https://instagram.com/lovewhatyoulovepod  or https://twitter.com/whatyoulovepod  LWYL merch! https://society6.com/lovewhatyoulovepod Need transcripts? Contact Emily White at The Wordary Emily@TheWordary.com  Check out my books at https://juliekrose.com  LWYL Music: Inspiring Hope by Pink-Sounds https://audiojungle.net/user/pink-sounds

"THE CASINOS- WAY BACK ATTACK":https://www.waybackattack.com/casinos.html "JOHN CACKETT ON JOHN D. LOUDERMILK":https://www.alancackett.com/john-d-loudermilk-obituary

 Singer/songwrirer Bob Gibson was a very early arrival on the folk music scene in the late 1950s. In fact, Bob was already so well established by the time of the 1959 Newport Folk Festival that it was he who introduced the crowd to a then-unknown Joan Baez. His songs were recorded by everybody from Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon & Garfunkel to the Byrds and Bob Dylan. Perhaps Gibson's best-known song is “Abilene,” which he wrote with Lester Brown and John D. Loudermilk in the early 1960s. Bob always said he was inspired to write the song after watching cowboy star Randolph Scott's film “Abilene Town,” which was set in Abilene, Kansas, the railhead town at the end of the Chisholm Trail. The Flood's been doing some version of this tune for at least a decade now. Here's the 2021 rendition, with Randy rocking the vocal harmonies, supported by sweet solos from Veezy, Doug and Sam.

As 1961 drew to a close, it wasn't a particularly high-achieving time for Australian Music. Bryan Davies' Five Foot Two/Ladder of Love achieved the highest national chart position, 16 - lasting 15 weeks, with Patsy Ann Noble's Good Looking Boy just behind, 17 - lasted 23 weeks. One notable first chart entry was Betty McQuade's, Midnight Bus (29-19), the John D. Loudermilk song. Beyond those notables, we'll hear a 'bit of sunshine' from Warren Carr, Barry Stanton gets 'down on his knees' and Ernie Sigley returns with a Christmas song. Merry Christmas for 1961!

This morning’s show takes a free form journey across that long grey ribbon of America’s roots highways. We’ll be sharing a coast-to-coast collection of sounds including surf sounds, a tincture of Mose Allison, swamp gold from Cookie and the Cupcakes, folk sounds of Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds, forties pop sounds of Johnny Mercer, and highlights from a songwriter you may never have heard of but who made a profound impact across the board: John D. Loudermilk. dusty digital bins. Join Dave Stroud for an eclectic blend of classic soul, folk, rock, jazz, blues, and country on a Friday morning brought to you live from the KOWS studios in the heart of downtown Santa Rosa.

"Tobacco Road" NEW weekly Live Show! with Dj DLONZ Every Wednesday at 8:30 PM EST on Cowboy's Juke Joint Radio www.cowboysjukejoint.com “Take a ride down Tobacco Road for the best in dirty cowpunk & whiskey soaked blues. Take the ride and keep the music alive!” 01. John D. Loudermilk - Tobacco Road 02. Gallows Bound - Black Widow Woman 03. Moonshine Wagon - Ghost 04. The Black Rose Phantoms - Cocaine Covered Hills (feat Mikey Classic) 05. Black Eyed Vermillion - Box of Pine 06. Soda Gardocki - Bad Luck Trouble 07. Andrea Colburn & Mud Moseley - Shirley 08. Pat Reedy and the Longtime Goners - Rose 09. Joshua Black Wilkins - Woman Like This 10. Jeremy Pinnell - The Way Country Sounds 11. Hang Rounders - Texas 12. Powder Mill - Worth (Live) 13. Rattlesnake - The Reason Why 14. The Georgia Thunderbolts - Lend A Hand 15. Mount Carmel - Real Women 16. Psychic Ills - Love Me Two Times 17. Night Beats - Playing Dead 18. Asteroid - Pale Moon 19. Electric Citizen - Higher Time 20. Bourbon Train - Whiskey Litch 21. Goatsnake - El Coyote 22. Sleep - Dragonaut 23. Black Cat Bone - Get Your Kicks 24. Southbound Snake Charmers - Spaghetti Western Trilogy 25. The Grizzled Mighty - I Don't Really Mind It 26. The Dead Show Dealers - Stained

George Jones - "Taggin' Along" Music behind DJ: Joe Maphis - "Green Valley Waltz" - The New Sounds Of Joe Maphis Paul Johnson - "Like An Echo" Doye O'Dell - "Goin' To Do Some Walkin'" Darryl Jacobs and the Dixie Revelers - "It's Been Like Heaven" Larry Logan and the Western Echos - "She's Just On Your Mind" Moon Mullican - "Good Deal, Lucille" Music behind DJ: Joe Maphis - "Durango" - The New Sounds Of Joe Maphis Roy Orbison - "Only With You" Pete Jackson and Rockin-Robins - "Now That I've Got You" Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old) - "Jambalaya (On The Bayou)" James O'Gwynn - "My Name Is Mud" John D. Loudermilk - "Road Hog" Music behind DJ: Joe Maphis - "Buckaroo" - The New Sounds Of Joe Maphis Wayne Kemp & Opaline Bacon - "Loneliest Lonely Heart In Town" Willie Nelson - "What A Way To Live" Orion - "It Ain't No Mystery" Mary Kay James - "I'm Not That Good At Goodbye" Eddie Noack - "Beer Drinking Blues" Music behind DJ: Joe Maphis - "Spanish Dobro" - The New Sounds Of Joe Maphis Peewee King - "Slowpoke" Bill Lamm - "Warm Red Wine" Ellis Kuhn - "The New Wears Off Too Soon" https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/101739

En 1965, un joven Roberto Carlos grababa en español una canción que sería todo un éxito en América Latina: “Mi cacharrito”. Así la escuché yo… La canción de Roberto Carlos era una versión de un éxito de John D. Loudermilk que tres años antes, en 1962, la había grabado como “Road hog“. - Autores: John D. Loudermilk & Gwen Loudermilk - Versión al español y al portugués: Erasmo Carlos Mi cacharrito - Roberto Carlos (1965) Roberto Carlos canta a la juventud álbum (1965) en español O calhambeque (Road hog) - Roberto Carlos (1964) É proibido fumar álbum (1964) Road Hog - John D. Loudermilk (1962) single Road Hog/Angela Jones (1962) “Así la escuché yo…” Temporada: 1 Episodio: 5 Sergio Productions Cali – Colombia

Rockin' Eddy playing the Golden Age of American Rock & Roll featuring Jimmy Beasley - "Don't Feel Sorry For Me", Del Shannon - "Cry Myself To Sleep", The Cashmeres - "Daddy Can I Go To The Hop", The Quaker City Boys - "Teasin", Stan Robinson - "Boom A Dip Dip", (Twin Spin) The Miracles - "Happy Landing" (A-side) / "You Really Got A Hold On Me" (B-side), Rick Lyons - "Shim Sham Shuffle", Jackie Lee - "Happy Vacation", Shirley Gunter - "Just Got Rid Of A Heartache", The Laddins - "I'll Kiss Your Teardrops Away", The Federals - "Dear Lorraine", Neil Scott - "Bobby", Bob & Earl - "That's My Desire", John D. Loudermilk - "The Language Of Love", Earl Grant - "Swinging Gently", Ray Adams - "I Hear My Song Violetta", Gino Parks & The Hi-Fidelities - "Last Night I Cried", The Vocaleers - "Is It A Dream"

Esta vez queremos mostrar la faceta más tradicional, la más apegada a las raíces. En muchos casos, es la cara menos conocida de una mujer que ha sido capaz de hacer de su versatilidad una de sus características fundamentales. El pasado miércoles fue el cumpleaños número 74 de Linda Ronstadt. A lo largo de su carrera, ha cantado temas de todos los estilos musicales imaginables, desde country a opera y comedia musical, pasando por folk, rhythm and blues, rock'n'roll, pop o música latina. En todos los casos, su voz ha brillado tanto que se ha convertido en una de las vocalistas femeninas de mayor prestigio. No busques la perfección en una voz que no sea la de Linda Ronstadt. Trístemente, el Parkinson la ha obligado a dejar de hacerlo. Pero hoy estamos dispuestos a rescatar esa voz insuperable seleccionando algunas de sus canciones más cercanas a la tradición. La mayor parte de ellas no son las que suenan habitualmente cuando se recuerda su carrera. Así, hemos abierto el programa con esta versión inédita de marzo de 1973 a “Lighting Bar Blues”, un tema de Hoyt Axton que Commander Cody cantaron de forma extraordinaria. La mayor sorpresa está en el hecho de que Linda Ronstadt tocaba el fiddle junto al también violinista Gib Guilbeau,que hizo también los coros vocales junto a Herb Pedersen. En 1956, Wanda Jackson grabó por primera vez una canción compuesta por Dick Reynolds y Jack Rhodes, que fue un éxito en el 62 por los Springfields, la banda familiar londinense en la que militaba Dusty Springfield. Era “Silver Threads And Golden Needles”, grabada más tarde por artistas de country como Skeeter Davis, Hawkshaw Hawkins, los Everly Brothers, Rose Maddox, Jody Miller o los Pozo-Seco Singers de Don Williams. En 1969, Linda Ronstadt la incluiría de esta forma en su LP de debut en solitario, Hand Snow… Home Grown. Decimos “de esta forma”, porque cuatro años más tarde, en el 73, realizaría una nueva versión, mucho menos enraizada, en su álbum Don't Cry Now. John D. Loudermilk fue bien conocido como compositor en los 50 y 60 dejando canciones para la historia como “Break My Mind”, que George Hamilton IV cantó por primera vez en el 67 y que Linda Ronstadt llevó a su disco de debut, Hand Snow… Home Grown, dos años más tarde. Al margen de un sinfín de artistas que echaron mano en alguna ocasión del tema, los Flying Burrito Brothers, con Gram Parsons al frente, también la cantaron, aunque quedó fue de sus álbumes oficiales. De aquel binomio mítico formado por Lester Flatt y Earl Scruggs resultaba evidente que este último estaba dispuesto a ampliar sus horizontes desde la separación de la pareja en 1969. Tres años después editó I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends junto a sus tres hijos, Gary, Randy y Steve, y una pléyade de invitados como la Dirt Band, Tracy Nelson o Linda Ronstadt, con quien realizó una versión sublime del clásico de Merle Haggard “Silver Wings”. Tras la publicación en 1968 del tercer disco de los Stone Poneys, Kenny Edwards dejó el grupo tras una gira y Linda Ronstadt se quedó sola con la obligación de grabar un nuevo Lp para el Capitol. Así, al año siguiente vió la luz Hand Sown… Home Grown, un trabajo de muy escasa repercusión. Pero las cosas parecieron cambiar con su siguiente trabajo. Linda consiguió la nominación para el Grammy con "Long Long Time", incluida en el álbum Silk Purse de 1970. Pero hoy hemos preferido escuchar la versión en directo que realizó en el Troubadour de Los Angeles por aquellas fechas. Su compositor, Gary White, es un tejano al que conocimos como bajista de Circus Maximus, una banda de Austin de la segunda mitad de los 60, en la que militaba Jerry Jeff Walker. Cuando Linda Ronstadt se lanzó a la aventura en solitario, comenzó a reclutar músicos del Troubadour para formar su propia banda de acompañamiento. Instrumentistas como Bernie Leadon, Glenn Frey, Don Henley y Randy Meisner pasaron a ser sus nuevos compañeros, de tal forma que a su alrededor se estaban gestando los Eagles. En Silk Purse había una versión de “He Darked the Sun”, una canción de Gene Clark y Bernie Leadon en el álbum The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark de dos años antes. Pero Linda realizó una llamada Nashville version, con un sonido más propio de la versión original que hoy hemos querido recuperar. Ha pasado medio siglo desde la publicación de Silk Purse, en 1970, su segundo disco en solitario. Su apertura era esta versión de “Lovesick Blues”, un tema aparecido en los años 20 en un musical al que Hank Williams puso en el mapa sonoro cuando empezó a actuar en el Louisiana Hayride y lo llevó al primer lugar de las listas en el 49. Grabado en los Cinderella Studios de Nashville, fue la única vez en su carrera que la artista de Arizona se acercó a la Music City para grabar sus canciones. En aquella ocasión, Linda contó con músicos de la altura de Bernie Leadon, Weldon Myrick, Buddy Spicher, Troy Seals o Kenny Buttrey. El legendario Troubadour de Los Angeles fue la cuna de un buen número de artistas convertidos en referentes de la música popular con el paso del tiempo. Aquel local de West Hollywood del que James Taylor decía que era “como un cenicero puesto boca abajo”, vio nacer al artista de Boston, además de a Buffalo Springfield, los Byrds, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt o los Eagles, cuyos primitivos miembros estaban en la banda de acompañamiento de Linda Ronstadt. Con ellos editó su tercer álbum, de título homónimo en 1972, con un claro sonido country‑rock grabado entre California y Alabama con la producción de John Boylan. Como muestra de su versatilidad, Linda se acercó al honky tonk con una versión de “Crazy Arms”, el primer No.1 de Ray Price en 1956. La producción de John Boylan permitió también que otros músicos como Herb Pedersen, Gib Guilbeau, Sneaky Pete, Buddy Emmons, Jimmy Fadden de la Nitty Gritty Dirt Band o John David Souther participaran en el proyecto. Aquel disco fue, en cierta forma, la puerta para conocer también a nuevos compositores como Eric Kaz, Jackson Browne, Livingston Taylor o Eric Andersen, pero también recurrió a mitos de la categoría de Woody Guthrie, Harland Howard, Hank Cochran o Johnny Cash. Del Hombre de Negro, que llevó a la vocalista a su programa de televisión en sus comienzos, eligió “I Still Miss Someone”, una pieza de finales de los 50 que había compuesto con su sobrino, Roy Cash, Jr. y que conocimos cuando grabó en la prisión de Folsom. Una de las vocalistas favoritas de Linda Ronstadt es Patsy Cline, cuya primera grabación en el sello Decca, "I Fall To Pieces", pasaría a ser el mayor de sus éxitos, consiguiendo llegar por primera vez a la cima de las listas de country poco antes de sufrir un tremendo accidente de coche cerca de su casa de Madison, un barrio de Nashville. La explosiva facilidad de Linda en sus años de Capitol Records para interpretar clásicos como este sorprendió a muchos. En su tercer disco en solitario, con su nombre en el título y editado en 1972, dejó constancia de su respeto por la tradición y de su sensibilidad extrema. Linda Ronstadt comenzó a trabajar con John Boylan en un nuevo disco para el sello Asylum Records, al que se unió John David Souther, con el que mantenía una estrecha relación, antes de encontrar a Peter Asher -antiguo miembro de Peter & Gordon- en el Bitter End de New York. El álbum Don't Cry Now salió al mercado en 1973 tras un año de sesiones, 150.000 dólares invertidos y tres productores. Aquel disco era fantástico, pero nosotros hoy estamos centrados en canciones más tradicionales. Linda había fichado por Asylum, pero debía un álbum a Capitol por contrato. Ese disco que se tituló Heart Like A Wheel y fue publicado en el 74, mezclando antiguas canciones con nuevos temas, incorporando country, rock y rhythm and blues. De todos es recordada su versión al clásico de Hank Williams "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)", donde Emmylou Harris hacía las armonías vocales, la llevó al segundo lugar de las de country y a conseguir un Grammy. Pero esta versión de “Honky Tonk Blues”, también de Hank Williams, que contaba la historia de un joven granjero que deja la granja familiar para irse a la ciudad, fue grabada en octubre de 1974 de nuevo junto a Emmylou y quedó inédita durante 25 años. Es muy posible que Linda Ronstadt y Patsy Cline sean las dos vocalistas más sobresalientes de la historia de la música, con una versatilidad incomparable. Patsy sufrió un tremendo accidente de coche cerca de su casa de Madison, un barrio de Nashville, se fracturó la cadera y tuvo importantes heridas en la cabeza al salir despedida por el parabrisas. Fue hospitalizada durante varios meses y, apoyada aún en sus muletas, grabó una composición de Willie Nelson llamada "Crazy", que pasaría a ser su canción más vendida. Linda Ronstadt la recordó de esta forma en Hasten Down The Wind, un trabajo de 1976 que llegó tras publicar Prisoner In Disguise Ronstadt un año antes y donde eligió canciones de amigos y compositores cercanos. No olvidemos que la madre de Linda era alemana y, sobre todo que su padre era mejicano. Este último, Gilbert, cantaba con ella y sus otros dos hijos canciones de su tierra natal en los pocos ratos de ocio que les permitía la ferretería que regentaban. Nuestra invitada de hoy nunca olvidó aquellas raíces, no solo en los distintos álbumes dedicados íntegramente a canciones hispanas, sino a lo largo de toda su carrera. Como ejemplo, hemos escogido “Lo siento mi vida”, un tema propio, creado junto a su compañero en los Stone Poneys, Kenny Edwards, y a su padre Gilbert, para el álbum Hasten Down The Wind de 1976. En 1977, Linda Ronstadt publicaba su octavo álbum de estudio, Simple Dreams, convertido en una de las más altas cotas de su carrera y vendiendo más de tres millones de copias. Es el último de los discos en los que nos vamos a detener hoy para celebrar el cumpleaños número 74 de su protagonista. Aquel registro, además, fue el encargado de desplazar del No.1 de las listas de pop al mítico Rumours de Fleetwood Mac… y a Elvis Presley de la cabecera de las de country. Producido por Peter Asher, la fórmula fue sencilla: recoger algunas de las grandes canciones interpretadas por una de las voces más distinguida, arropada por los músicos más relevantes del momento, incluidos los Eagles. Para conmemorar los 40 años desde su lanzamiento, se reeditó el disco original con tres temas de bonificación grabados en directo en un concierto especial realizado por la cadena HBO en 1980. Entre ellas estaba "Blue Bayou", un tema de Roy Orbison que la vocalista de Arizona cantó en directo en inglés y castellano. Escuchar audio

Alex Battles - "Honky Tonk Radio Girl" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "The Happy-Go-Lucky Guitar" - America's Most Wanted Band Hank Locklin - "Please Help Me, I'm Falling" Joey Long - "The Lights Have Gone Out" Lonzo and Oscar - "Country Music Time" John D. Loudermilk - "Road Hog" Luke the Drifter, Jr. - "Book Of Memories" Loretta Lynn - "I Wanna Be Free" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Neosho Waltz" - America's Most Wanted Band Maddox Bros. & Rose - "Honky Tonkin'" - Go Honky Tonkin! Pete Mann - "I Followed My Heart" Grady Martin and His Winging Strings - "Pork Chop Stomp" Leon McAuliffe - "Juke Box" Delbert McClinton - "Please Help Me I'm Falling" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "The Way That I Love You" - America's Most Wanted Band Chuck Miller - "Lookout Mountain" Johnny Moore and His New Blazers - "San Antonio Rose" Roy Moss with Cliff Allen's Band - "Wiggle Walkin' Baby" Moon Mullican - "Good Deal, Lucille" Willie Nelson - "What A Way To Live" Jim Nesbitt - "(Go On And) Cry Me A River" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Steel Guitar Polka" - America's Most Wanted Band Eddie Noack - "Beer Drinking Blues" James O'Gwynn - "You're Getting All Over Me" Zephaniah O'Hora and The 18 Wheelers - "I Do Believe I've Had Enough" - This Highway Buck Owens - "Cryin' Time" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Seven Come Eleven" - America's Most Wanted Band https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/94338

Alex Battles - "Honky Tonk Radio Girl" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "The Happy-Go-Lucky Guitar" - America's Most Wanted Band Hank Locklin - "Please Help Me, I'm Falling" Joey Long - "The Lights Have Gone Out" Lonzo and Oscar - "Country Music Time" John D. Loudermilk - "Road Hog" Luke the Drifter, Jr. - "Book Of Memories" Loretta Lynn - "I Wanna Be Free" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Neosho Waltz" - America's Most Wanted Band Maddox Bros. & Rose - "Honky Tonkin'" - Go Honky Tonkin! Pete Mann - "I Followed My Heart" Grady Martin and His Winging Strings - "Pork Chop Stomp" Leon McAuliffe - "Juke Box" Delbert McClinton - "Please Help Me I'm Falling" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "The Way That I Love You" - America's Most Wanted Band Chuck Miller - "Lookout Mountain" Johnny Moore and His New Blazers - "San Antonio Rose" Roy Moss with Cliff Allen's Band - "Wiggle Walkin' Baby" Moon Mullican - "Good Deal, Lucille" Willie Nelson - "What A Way To Live" Jim Nesbitt - "(Go On And) Cry Me A River" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Steel Guitar Polka" - America's Most Wanted Band Eddie Noack - "Beer Drinking Blues" James O'Gwynn - "You're Getting All Over Me" Zephaniah O'Hora and The 18 Wheelers - "I Do Believe I've Had Enough" - This Highway Buck Owens - "Cryin' Time" Music behind DJ: Buck Owens' Buckaroos - "Seven Come Eleven" - America's Most Wanted Band http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/94338

To all my Rage Cage rebels, forever raise HELL! m/Playlist: Skymir - The Cactus CeremonySkymir - OutlawStriker - OutlawRiot - OutlawManowar - OutlawMotorhead - OutlawJudas Priest - Hell Bent For LeatherSaxon - Denim and LeatherY & T - Lipstick and LeatherW.A.S.P. - Wild ChildGrave Digger - Wild and DangerousDiemonds - Wild at HeartHelix - Young and WrecklessAccept - Restless and WildU.D.O. - I'm a RebelPowerwolf - Nighttime RebelWhite Wizzard - Live Free or DieRiot City - Livin FastHammerfall - RenegadeStyx - RenegadeDamn Yankees - Bad ReputationKick Axe - HellraisersHellrazer - HellrazerHammercult - Raise Some HellLynyrd Skynyrd - The Last RebelLynyrd Skynyrd - Double Trouble38 Special - Rough Housin'Pride and Glory - Machine Gun ManBlack Label Society - The Blessed HellrideOzzy Osbourne - Rock 'n' Roll RebelObituary - Redneck StompLamb of God - RedneckJackyl - Red Neck PunkJackyl - DixielandMolly Hatchet - Sweet DixieMolly Hatchet - Gator CountryMolly Hatchet - Flirtin' With Disaster (live)Molly Hatchet - One Man's Pleasure (live)Molly Hatchet - Cross Road BluesMetal Church - Highway Star (Deep Purple cover)Trooper - Gypsy WheelerAC/DC - Ride OnDavid Lee Roth - Tobacco Road (John D. Loudermilk cover)Waylon Jennings - Good Ol' Boys (Dukes of Hazzard theme)The Honeydrippers - Rockin' at Midnight

It was 1775 and Paul Revere rode his horse yelling “The British are coming!” In the 1960's another Paul Revere noticed that the British Invasion was starting all over again. He rode the charts and was successful while many bands collapsed during the invasion. The band was discovered by jock Roger Hart of Portland's KISN. In 1962 they had just experienced breakout success thanks to their regional hit "Louie Louie" (written by Rchard Berry in 1955, and covered by The Kingsmen in 1963). We flew them in to Vancouver to entertain at the annual C-FUN Night at Kits Showboat, an outdoor theatre that has showcased local and international talent for over eighty years. That night the streets were so choked with traffic we had to bring the band onto the beach by barge. Paul never forgot that incident. Paul Revere and the Raiders were the first rock group signed to Columbia Records. Their first national hit was "Steppin' Out" in September 1965. Lead singer Mark Lindsay and the Raiders brought about some of America's hardest Rock to be heard in a decade.The visual effect of the group was enhanced by their American revolutionary war uniforms. TV exposure was helpful in pushing their image across to the young. Dick Clark's TV show "Where The Action Is!" gave them the added advantage. For the next six years they forged ahead with some very strong material: "Kicks", "Hungry", "Good Thing", Him or Me – What's It Gonna Be?" and their biggest hit, their cover of John D. Loudermilk's "Indian Reservation", in 1971. In August 1986, Paul Revere and the Raiders appeared at the Legends of Rock'n'Roll show at EXPO 86 in Vancouver with fellow Northwest music favourites the Ventures and Merrilee Rush. That's where we sat down to record this interview. I also saw Paul in 2010, when I took a busload of listeners to Dick Clark's American Bandstand Theater in Branson, Missouri. Ever gracious, Paul invited the whole group backstage for autographs and photos. Paul's last appearance in Vancouver was in March 2013 at the Red Robinson Show Theatre, where he signed the celebrity wall downstairs. He had previously appeared with Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers during the theatre's grand opening in 2008. Ace photographer Steve Pesant captured Paul performing in this outstanding image. Thanks, Steve! My last encounter with Paul came during a 2013 trip on the Where the Action Is! Rock & Roll Cruise, a Caribbean travel excursion organized by Concerts at Sea. He performed well but struggled noticeably here and there; his manager later disclosed to me the sad news that he had brain cancer. Paul was an unforgettable character, always having fun onstage and off. He died October 15, 2014. One glaring omission in this story: Paul Revere and the Raiders have yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite scoring seven chart hits between 1965 and 1967. Paul Revere and the Raiders sold nearly 50 million records over the course of their career. They had 15 consecutive hit singles, 6 of which were top 10, four RIAA certified gold albums, one gold single ("Let Me") and one platinum single ("Indian Reservation"). The Raiders appeared on over 500 episodes of ABC's Where the Action Is. They hosted It's Happening, Happening '68 and Happening 69, also on ABC. They appeared on many other TV shows including Ed Sullivan, The Smothers Brothers, Hollywood Palace, and as themselves in a Batman episode "Hizzonner the Penguin", making Paul Revere and The Raiders the most televised musical group in the world. Three Raiders songs were included in Quentin Tarantino's blockbuster 2019 movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". According to the RRHF, "Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. Criteria include the influence and significance of the artists' contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll." Let's hope they recognize the tremendous contribution Paul Revere and the Raiders made, and soon!

Bob Dylan w/Earl Scruggs - "Nashville Skyline Rag" - Travelin' Thru, 1967-1969: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 15 Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton - "Milwaukee Here I Come" - Always, Always Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn - "As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone" - 7" Homer & Jethro - "The Gal From Possum Holler" - 7" Connie Francis - "Fallin'" - 7" Clint Miller - "Bertha Lou" - 7" Mel Tillis - "Loco Weed" - 7" John D. Loudermilk - "Road Hog" - 12 Sides of John D. Loudermilk Ferlin Husky - "Slow Down Brother" - That'll Flat Git It! Volume 3 Connie Smith - "I Love Charley Brown" - I Love Charley Brown Doug Sahm - "They'll Never Take Her Love from Me" - The Return of Wayne Douglas Nat Stuckey - "Mississippi Hippie" - Michael Shelley Presents Thirty Three Vintage #1 Hit Country Songs About Guns, Drinking, Cheating, Crime, Pre-Marital Sex, Martians, Insanity, Jail, Cursing, Murder, Hippies, Fighting, Communism, Jimmy Dobro - "Swamp Surfer" - 7" Carl Perkins - "Dixie Fried" - 7" The Balfa Brothers - "Dying In Misery" - 7" The Louvin Brothers - "In the Middle of Nowhere" - 7" Roger Miller - "The Wrong Kind of Girl" - King Of The Road: The Genius of Roger Miller (box set) Johnny Paycheck - "Colorado Cool Aid" - 7" Dean Martin - "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" - At The Movies Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant - "The Rolling Sky" - Swingin' On The Strings https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/90834

Bob Dylan w/Earl Scruggs - "Nashville Skyline Rag" - Travelin' Thru, 1967-1969: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 15 Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton - "Milwaukee Here I Come" - Always, Always Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn - "As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone" - 7" Homer & Jethro - "The Gal From Possum Holler" - 7" Connie Francis - "Fallin'" - 7" Clint Miller - "Bertha Lou" - 7" Mel Tillis - "Loco Weed" - 7" John D. Loudermilk - "Road Hog" - 12 Sides of John D. Loudermilk Ferlin Husky - "Slow Down Brother" - That'll Flat Git It! Volume 3 Connie Smith - "I Love Charley Brown" - I Love Charley Brown Doug Sahm - "They'll Never Take Her Love from Me" - The Return of Wayne Douglas Nat Stuckey - "Mississippi Hippie" - Michael Shelley Presents Thirty Three Vintage #1 Hit Country Songs About Guns, Drinking, Cheating, Crime, Pre-Marital Sex, Martians, Insanity, Jail, Cursing, Murder, Hippies, Fighting, Communism, Jimmy Dobro - "Swamp Surfer" - 7" Carl Perkins - "Dixie Fried" - 7" The Balfa Brothers - "Dying In Misery" - 7" The Louvin Brothers - "In the Middle of Nowhere" - 7" Roger Miller - "The Wrong Kind of Girl" - King Of The Road: The Genius of Roger Miller (box set) Johnny Paycheck - "Colorado Cool Aid" - 7" Dean Martin - "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" - At The Movies Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant - "The Rolling Sky" - Swingin' On The Strings http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/90834

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Bye Bye Love” by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Fat Fannie” by Larry Williams.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers’ early material available. I’d recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We’ve talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we’ve not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we’ve already seen, is the vocal group sound — the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. 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. Another style which we’re going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus — 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. Then there’s the style which Elvis used — a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing “oohs” and “aahs”. The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. 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 — a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer 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. 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”. 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: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, “Blue Smoke”] 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: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, “Ike Everly’s Rag”] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. 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. He would play songs like “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”, which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. 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. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as “Little Donnie”, as well as performing with his family. 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 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. 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. 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. I’ve not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show — Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly’s old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, “Rattlesnake Daddy”] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time — Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. 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. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as “Mac and Bob” — Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. 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 Everlys’ style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine”] 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. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices — and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, “Oh 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: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “Midnight Special”] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose “Sittin’ in the Balcony” we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. 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. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone — they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, 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. 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 — he was once quoted as saying “I’ve been a has-been since I was ten”. 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. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that’s possible. But talent on its own doesn’t necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio — 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. The Everly family’s radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. 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. 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 — according to at least one account I’ve read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike’s. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer — 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 sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”] That became a top twenty 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: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, “Here We Are Again”] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys’ mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn’t want Don to be a solo star — 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. She took Don’s royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians’ union cards — in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. 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. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”, written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it — Phil said of the two songs on that single “they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!” Columbia weren’t interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. 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. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. 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. 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 Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they’d agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with “Country Boy”, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy”] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they’d placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, “Bye Bye Love”, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. 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 “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”: [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn’t strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn’t strong enough as it was, he just shouldn’t record it at all. 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 proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant’s barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this — around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things 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. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s voices, and a superb musicality. It’s interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love (take 1)”] That’s Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. 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. 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. It’s not the harmony part that would become famous, but it’s a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Give Me a Future”] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants’ song, and with the help of Chet Atkins’ lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new — a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] 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: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Bye Bye Love”] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce’s version did chart — reaching the top ten 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 R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with “Wake Up Little Suzie”, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety — 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Suzie”] These records would usually incorporate some of Don’s Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. 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. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them — Boudleaux 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. One of the things that’s very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux 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 that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it’s just because Boudleaux 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. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. 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, Boudleaux 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. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice — but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. 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 Mom”. As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants’ songs were some of the best songs ever written. 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. 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. 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. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don’s repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country — apart from a version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, all the covers are of R&B hits of the time — two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, “I Wonder if I Care as Much”, is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “I Wonder If I Care As Much”] Don’s songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they’re often rather more interesting than the A-sides. 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. 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. 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. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like — an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don’s acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It’s quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it’s had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that’s just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] 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. 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.  

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Bye Bye Love” by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Short Fat Fannie” by Larry Williams.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers’ early material available. I’d recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We’ve talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we’ve not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we’ve already seen, is the vocal group sound — the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. 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. Another style which we’re going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus — 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. Then there’s the style which Elvis used — a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing “oohs” and “aahs”. The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. 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 — a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer 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. 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”. 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: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, “Blue Smoke”] 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: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, “Ike Everly’s Rag”] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. 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. He would play songs like “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”, which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. 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. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as “Little Donnie”, as well as performing with his family. 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 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. 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. 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. I’ve not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show — Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly’s old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, “Rattlesnake Daddy”] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time — Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. 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. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as “Mac and Bob” — Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. 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 Everlys’ style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine”] 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. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices — and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, “Oh 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: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “Midnight Special”] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose “Sittin’ in the Balcony” we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. 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. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone — they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, 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. 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 — he was once quoted as saying “I’ve been a has-been since I was ten”. 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. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that’s possible. But talent on its own doesn’t necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio — 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. The Everly family’s radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. 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. 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 — according to at least one account I’ve read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike’s. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer — 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 sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, “Thou Shalt Not Steal”] That became a top twenty 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: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, “Here We Are Again”] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys’ mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn’t want Don to be a solo star — 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. She took Don’s royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians’ union cards — in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. 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. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”, written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Keep A-Lovin’ Me”] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it — Phil said of the two songs on that single “they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!” Columbia weren’t interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. 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. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. 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. 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 Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they’d agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with “Country Boy”, a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, “Country Boy”] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they’d placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, “Bye Bye Love”, had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. 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 “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”: [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, “Tryin’ to Forget the Blues”] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn’t strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn’t strong enough as it was, he just shouldn’t record it at all. 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 proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant’s barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this — around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things 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. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other’s voices, and a superb musicality. It’s interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love (take 1)”] That’s Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. 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. 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. It’s not the harmony part that would become famous, but it’s a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Give Me a Future”] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants’ song, and with the help of Chet Atkins’ lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new — a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”] 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: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Bye Bye Love”] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce’s version did chart — reaching the top ten 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 R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with “Wake Up Little Suzie”, a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety — 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Suzie”] These records would usually incorporate some of Don’s Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. 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. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them — Boudleaux 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. One of the things that’s very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux 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 that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it’s just because Boudleaux 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. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. 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, Boudleaux 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. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice — but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. 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 Mom”. As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants’ songs were some of the best songs ever written. 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. 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. 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. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don’s repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country — apart from a version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, all the covers are of R&B hits of the time — two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, “I Wonder if I Care as Much”, is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “I Wonder If I Care As Much”] Don’s songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they’re often rather more interesting than the A-sides. 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. 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. 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. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like — an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don’s acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It’s quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it’s had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that’s just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] 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. 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.  

Episode fifty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Bye Bye Love" by The Everly Brotherss, and at the history of country close harmony. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Short Fat Fannie" by Larry Williams.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. How Nashville Became Music City by Michael Kosser has a good amount of information on the Bryants. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. There are many, many cheap compilations of the Everly Brothers' early material available. I'd recommend this one, because as well as all the hits up to 1962 it has the complete Songs our Daddy Taught Us.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript [Intro: Ike Everly introducing the Everly Brothers] We've talked before about how vocal harmonies are no longer a big part of rock music, but were essential to it in the fifties and sixties. But what we've not discussed is that there are multiple different types of harmony that we see in the music of that period. One, which we've already seen, is the vocal group sound -- the sound of doo-wop. There, there might be a lead singer, but everyone involved has their own important role to play, singing separate backing vocal lines that intertwine. 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. Another style which we're going to look at soon is the girl group sound. There you have a lead singer singing a line on her own, and two or three backing vocalists echoing lines on the chorus -- 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. Then there's the style which Elvis used -- a single lead vocalist over a group of backing vocalists, mostly providing "oohs" and "aahs". The backing vocals here just work as another instrumental texture. 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 -- a duo who, more than anyone else in rock music, epitomised vocal harmony: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Don and Phil Everly were brought up in music. Their father, Ike Everly, had been a coalminer 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. 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". 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: [Excerpt, Ike Everly, "Blue Smoke"] 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: [Excerpt: Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, "Ike Everly's Rag"] But while Ike Everly was known as a country player, Don Everly would always later claim that deep down Ike was a blues man. He played country because that was what the audiences wanted to hear, but his first love was the blues. 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. He would play songs like "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?", which was most famously recorded by Woody Guthrie: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?"] The Everly family travelled all over the South and Midwest, moving between radio stations on which Ike Everly would get himself shows. 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. Don soon became good enough that he got his own fifteen-minute show, performing as "Little Donnie", as well as performing with his family. 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 5AM, with the young boys heading off to school, still in the dark, after the show had finished. 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. 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. I've not found a recording of them doing that together, but some footage does exist of them doing this with Tennessee Ernie Ford on his TV show -- Ford, of course, being someone whose biggest hit had been written by Ike Everly's old friend Merle Travis: [Excerpt: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Everly Brothers, "Rattlesnake Daddy"] That kind of trick was fairly common among country acts at the time -- Buck Owens and Don Rich would do pretty much the same act together in the 1960s, and like the Everlys would play fairly straightforward blues licks while doing it. But while Ike Everly was primarily an instrumentalist, his sons would become known mostly as singers. 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. But the Everlys were actually singing in a style that was around for years before Bill Monroe started performing the music that would become known as bluegrass. There was a whole tradition of close harmony in country music that is usually dated back to the 1920s. The first people to really popularise it were a duo who were known as "Mac and Bob" -- Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner. The two men met in Kentucky, at the Kentucky School for the Blind, where they were both studying music, in 1916. 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 Everlys' style in their harmonies: [Excerpt: McFarland and Gardner, "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine"] 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. Usually in this style, there are two singers, singing about a third apart. The lower singer will sing the melody, while the higher singer will harmonise, following the melody line closely. This style of harmony was particularly suited to the vocal blend you can get from siblings, who tend to have extremely similar voices -- and if done well it can sound like one voice harmonising with itself. And so from the 1930s on there were a lot of brother acts who performed this kind of music. One duo who the Everlys would often point to as a particular influence was the Bailes Brothers: [Excerpt: the Bailes Brothers, "Oh 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: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "Midnight Special"] The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, were cousins of John D. Loudermilk, whose "Sittin' in the Balcony" we heard in the Eddie Cochran episode a few weeks ago. 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. But in the mid fifties, they were one of the most popular groups in country music, and influenced everyone -- they were particular favourites of Elvis, and regular performers on the Grand Ole Opry. Their style was a model for the Everlys, but sadly so was their personal relationship. Ira and Charlie never got on, and would often get into fights on stage, and the same was true of the Everly Brothers. In 1970, 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. 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 -- he was once quoted as saying "I've been a has-been since I was ten". 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. It seems most likely that two such different people resented being forced into constant proximity with each other, and reacted against it. And so the Everlys became another of those sibling rivalries that have recurred throughout rock and roll history. But despite their personal differences, they had a vocal blend that was possibly even better than that of the Louvins, if that's possible. But talent on its own doesn't necessarily bring success, and for a while it looked like the Everlys were going to be washed up before the brothers got out of their teens. While they had some success with their radio show, by 1955 there was much less of a market for live music on the radio -- 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. The Everly family's radio show ended, and both Ike and Margaret got jobs cutting hair, while encouraging their sons in their music career. 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. 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 -- according to at least one account I've read, Atkins was a regular customer of Ike's. Atkins seems to have been, at first, mostly interested in Don Everly as a songwriter and maybe a solo performer -- 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 sixteen: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Thou Shalt Not Steal"] That became a top twenty 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: [Excerpt: Anita Carter, "Here We Are Again"] But Margaret Everly, the Everlys' mother and the person who seemed to have the ambition that drove them, didn't want Don to be a solo star -- 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. She took Don's royalties from songwriting, and used them to get both brothers Musicians' union cards -- in the same way, when Don had had his own radio show, Margaret had made Don give Phil half of his five-dollar fee. 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. Atkins got them a deal with Columbia Records in 1956 for a single, "Keep A-Lovin' Me", written by Don: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Keep A-Lovin' Me"] That record flopped, and the Everlys were later very dismissive of it -- Phil said of the two songs on that single "they were stinko, boy! Really stinko!" Columbia weren't interested in putting out anything else by the Everlys, and quickly dropped them. 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. Don worshipped Hank Williams, and Phil loved Lefty Frizzell, but they both also adored Bo Diddley, and were obsessed with his style. 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. 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 Acuff-Rose publishing, the biggest music publishing company in Nashville at the time. Rose made a deal with the brothers. If they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, and if they'd agree to record only Acuff-Rose songs, he would look after their career and get them a record deal. They agreed, and Rose got them signed to Cadence Records, a mid-sized indie label whose biggest star at the time was Andy Williams. The first single they recorded for Cadence was a song that had been rejected by thirty other artists before it was passed on to the Everlys as a last resort. "Bye Bye Love" was written by the husband and wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who had been writing for a decade, for people such as Carl Smith and Moon Mullican. Their first hit had come in 1948, with "Country Boy", a song which Little Jimmy Dickens took to number seven on the country charts: [Excerpt: Little Jimmy Dickens, "Country Boy"] But they had not had much chart success after that, though they'd placed songs with various Nashville-based country singers. They were virtual unknowns, and their most recent song, "Bye Bye Love", had been written for a duo called Johnny and Jack. 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 "Tryin' to Forget the Blues": [Excerpt: Porter Wagoner, "Tryin' to Forget the Blues"] But when Atkins took the song into the studio, he decided it wasn't strong enough for Wagoner. Atkins wanted to change a few chords, and Boudleaux Bryant told him that if the song wasn't strong enough as it was, he just shouldn't record it at all. 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 proteges, who were, after all, hardly going to have a big hit. So Atkins took the multiply-rejected song in for the duo to record as their first single for Cadence. In one of those coincidences that seems too good to be true, Ike Everly was Boudleaux Bryant's barber, and had been bragging to him for years about how talented his sons were, but Bryant had just dismissed this -- around Nashville, everyone is a major talent, or their son or daughter or husband or wife is. Two things 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. They had by this point developed an intuitive understanding of each other's voices, and a superb musicality. It's interesting to listen to the very first take of the song: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love (take 1)"] That's Don singing the low lead and Phil taking the high harmony. 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. 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. It's not the harmony part that would become famous, but it's a *good* one in its own right. The second thing is that they changed the song from the rather sedate country song the Bryants had come up with, radically rearranging it. 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Give Me a Future"] Don took that guitar part, and attached it to the Bryants' song, and with the help of Chet Atkins' lead guitar fills turned it into something quite new -- a record with a rockabilly feel, but with country close harmony vocals: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] 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: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, "Bye Bye Love"] But they were surprised to discover that while Pierce's version did chart -- reaching the top ten 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 R&B charts as well. After that success, the Bryants wrote a string of hits for the brothers, a run of classics starting with "Wake Up Little Suzie", a song which was banned on many stations because it suggested impropriety -- 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: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Suzie"] These records would usually incorporate some of Don's Bo Diddley influence, while remaining firmly in the country end of rock and roll. 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. After the first single, everything else that the Bryants wrote for the Everlys was tailored specifically to them -- Boudleaux 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. One of the things that's very noticeable about interviews with the brothers is that they both tend to credit Boudleaux 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 that are stylistically indistinguishable from those written as a team. Whether this is pure sexism, or it's just because Boudleaux 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. This was also a perception that Boudleaux Bryant encouraged. 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, Boudleaux 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. Boudleaux would also on occasion be given incomplete songs by friends like Atkins, and finish them up with Felice -- but only Boudleaux and the original writer would get their names on it. The result was that Boudleaux got the credit from people around him, even when they knew better. 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 Mom". As the Everly brothers disagreed about almost everything, they of course disagreed about the quality of the material that the Bryants were bringing them. Phil Everly was always utterly unstinting in his praise of them, saying that the Bryants' songs were some of the best songs ever written. 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. 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. 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. It pulls together the hit singles the brothers had already released, together with a bunch of rather mediocre cover versions of then-current hits. Those cover versions tend to support Don's repeated claims that the brothers were as interested in R&B and blues as in country -- apart from a version of "Be-Bop-A-Lula", all the covers are of R&B hits of the time -- two by Little Richard, two by Ray Charles, and one by the relatively obscure blues singer Titus Turner. But among those songs, there are also a handful of Don Everly originals, and one in particular, "I Wonder if I Care as Much", is quite an astonishing piece of songwriting: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "I Wonder If I Care As Much"] Don's songs were often B-sides – that one was the B-side to “Bye Bye Love” – and to my mind they're often rather more interesting than the A-sides. 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. 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. 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. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us is precisely what it sounds like -- an album consisting of songs the brothers had been taught by their father. It's a mixture of Appalachian folk songs and country standards, performed by the brothers accompanied just by Don's acoustic guitar and Floyd Chance on upright bass: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] It's quite possibly the most artistically satisfying album made in the fifties by a rock and roll act, and it's had such an influence that as recently as 2013 Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and the jazz-pop singer Norah Jones recorded an album, Foreverly, that's just a cover version of the whole album: [Excerpt: Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?”] 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. 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.  

It's a Mother's Day Double Feature on Pod Sematary as Chris and Kelsey watch one of the greatest horror films of all time! ...and it's entirely superfluous remake... The Classic Film: Psycho (1960) "A Phoenix secretary embezzles forty thousand dollars from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother" (IMDb.com). Alfred Hitchcock's horror masterpiece not only helped define his legacy but also the legacy of horror films as quality cinema. The Modern Film: Psycho (1998) "A young female embezzler arrives at the Bates Motel, which has terrible secrets of its own" (IMDb.com). Gus Van Sant's remake may tell you a lot about the unreplicable je ne sais quoi of great filmmaking, but it's a bad look for the director himself. Get more at podsematary.com! Read our afterthoughts for this episode at https://twitter.com/PodSematary/status/1124780950875824128 Audio Sources: "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" produced by Dreamworks, et al. "Bernard Herrmann - Psycho Suite - BBC Proms 2011 (HD)" via BeachMonstr @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQwzJ6VvUD0 "Episode #2.6" (Chappelle's Show, S02E06) produced by Marobru Inc. "Get Low" written by Deongelo Holmes, Vinay Rao, Eric Jackson, and Jonathan Smith & performed by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz featuring Ying Yang Twins "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" produced by Dimension Films & View Askew Productions "The Making of 'Psycho'" produced by Universal Studios Home Video "Norman" written by John D. Loudermilk and performed by Sue Thompson "Pet Sematary" written by Dee Dee Ramone & Daniel Rey and performed by The Ramones "Psycho" (1960) produced by Shamley Productions "Psycho" (1998) produced by Universal Pictures & Imagine Entertainment "Science Fiction/Double Feature" written by Richard O'Brien & Richard Hartley and performed by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts "Scream" produced by Dimension Films & Woods Entertainment "SLC Punk" produced by Beyond Films, et al.

John D. Loudermilk was a legendary songwriter who lived from 1934 and passed away in 2016. I was interested in interviewing him and was told by one of the foremost experts on Loudermilk that he does not give interviews and that's all there is to it. A letter sent to his home was replied to by telephone and he agreed to be interviewed. Although he did make records under his own name, Loudermilk's songs were most known by the versions other bands and recording artists made of them. One of his most successful songs, "Indian Reservation" was a number one hit for Paul Revere and the Raiders. His song "Ebony Eyes" was recorded by the Everly Brothers and "A Rose and a Baby Ruth" and "Abilene" were two of the most well known songs recorded by George Hamilton IV. Then there was David Lee Roth, stepping away from Van Halen to record the Loudermilk song "Tobacco Road." The songs of John D. Loudermilk were recorded by countless prominent artists including Johnny Cash, Marianne Faithful, Mose Allison, Stonewall Jackson, Chet Atkins, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Lee Lewis, Norah Jones, Connie Francis, Roy Orbison and countless others. Although John D. Loudermilk has passed away, it's my hope that this rare, in-depth interview is of interest to you. Furthermore, I hope it creates a greater interest in his very different and clever songs. It's here for the listening on this episode of The Paul Leslie Hour. Support The Paul Leslie Hour by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/the-paul-leslie-hour

Turn Me On” was written by Nashville hall of fame songwriter, John D. Loudermilk. The song was first recorded by Mark Dinning in 1961 and then recorded by Nina Simone, who I’ve always loved for her sultry sound and unique delivery. I really like the rhythm of the music and lyrics. Just a great reminder that simple can be so effective. https://jacquelinejax.com/2011/11/17/turn-me-on-recording-studio-session/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jacquelinejax/message

This hour, a tale of two Johns. My guest is John Jorgenson, one of the most well-rounded and admired guitar players of the last 40 years. His life and career have carried him from the country music hot spots in his native California to the studios of Nashville to world tours with Elton John and on to a global reputation as a master of gypsy style jazz guitar. We'll touch on all of that. But our main topic when we sat down was the other John, the songwriter John D. Loudermilk. Jorgenson helped produce a tribute concert that brought together some of Nashville's elite artists for a loving look at an under-appreciated master. John D, as his friends called him, was in attendance that night in March of 2016 at the Franklin Theater in nearby Franklin, TN. He died a few months later at the age of 82. The show has been released as an album. And as a concert film that's airing now on various public television stations around the country, including Nashville.

Vanavond in Muziek Voor Volwassenen met Johan Derksen muziek van John D. Loudermilk, Barry McGuire, Fred Neil, Lucky Peterson en Bo Diddley. Het album van de week is Collected van Roy Orbison.

Vanavond in Muziek Voor Volwassenen met Johan Derksen muziek van John D. Loudermilk, Barry McGuire, Fred Neil, Lucky Peterson en Bo Diddley. Het album van de week is Collected van Roy Orbison.

Vanavond in Muziek Voor Volwassenen met Johan Derksen muziek van John D. Loudermilk, Barry McGuire, Fred Neil, Lucky Peterson en Bo Diddley. Het album van de week is Collected van Roy Orbison.

So many years have passed,” sing the Blues Magoos on the title track to Psychedelic Resurrection, their first new studio album in four decades. “But now we’re back and on this journey. ” The legendary psychedelic band from the Bronx, have returned with the release scheduled for October 14 on Kayos. Original members, lead vocalist/keyboardist Ralph Scala and vocalist/guitarist Peppy Castro, along with drummer Geoff Daking, who joined prior to the recording of the band’s hit debut album, Psychedelic Lollipop, were joined by newest additions, Mike Ciliberto on guitar and Peter Stuart Kohman on bass. The album also features cameos by original bassist Ronnie Gilbert and lead guitarist Mike Esposito, who also became part of the band before releasing their debut album, which went to #21 on the Billboard Top 200, thanks to the massive Top 5 single, “(We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet),” re-recorded for the new album.“Being a Blues Magoo is like taping into my childhood. Rock till we Drop!” states Castro. “This is what we do/We’ll take you in a new direction,” Scala promises on Psychedelic Resurrection, and it is both a reminder of where they came from and a bold step into reclaiming a classic garage-punk-rock sound that has been imitated by everyone from the White Stripes and the Black Keys to Ty Segall and Parquet Courts. The Blues Magoos’ November 1966 debut album represented a landmark of the kind of garage punk that anticipated bands like Television and the Ramones, with the band’s cover of John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road” included on Lenny Kaye’s original, influential 1972 Nuggets album, and their “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” as part of the 1998 re-issue.