Long time gone

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Today Don Everly — the oldest of the Everly Brothers — turns 70. If you love the Cosmic American Music, you know the Everly Brothers have a constellation all to themselves. They brought the close harmony singing of traditional country music into the mainstream of American popular music. More than a few great musicians learned harmony singing by listening to their records. Paul McCartney acknowledged his debt to them in “Let ‘Em In” and wrote “On the Wings of a Nightingale” for their first post-reunion recording in 1984.
After tearing through a succession of great songs written for them by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant at the end of the 1950’s, they struck out on their own with Warner Brothers in 1960. Some of their most brilliant work followed, including their monster 1960 Warner Brothers hit “Cathy’s Clown.” Even as their audience in the United States dwindled in the wake of the British Invasion, they continued deepening and updating their work on albums such as “The Everly Brothers Sing,” “Roots” and “Stories We Could Tell” with songs that stand with their best work.

Their British fans never really left them. After performing together with their faces a few inches apart from each other for about 20 years, the brothers broke up in public onstage at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California in 1973. When they reunited ten years later, they repaid their debt to their British fans by debuting the reunion in a concert at Albert Hall. (Rhino Records has now released a two-disc recording of that concert.) The video above captures Don and Phil in an outstanding performance of “Down In the Willow Garden” at the September 1983 Albert Hall reunion concert. It’s a song that goes back to 1958’s “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us” and brings their career full circle.
We saw the Everly Brothers when their reunion tour took them through Minneapolis in June 1984, and again in the fall of 2003 when two of their most attentive students — Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel — brought them to St. Paul as part of their own version of a reunion tour. Seeing them all together gave me the occasion to meditate on the emotional pull of the brothers’ close harmony singing in “The deep meaning of Simon and Garfunkel.”
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