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Don Everly (1937-2021)
Photo: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns
Unreally tight suits, hair gobs magically thrown towards the sky and vocal harmonies that seemed to rise directly to the star firmament: So the Everly Brothers appeared on the scene at the end of the 1950s and represented the prototype of a white boy band that seemed to be freed from all gravity.
In view of the two-part flattery of the Everly Brothers, the girls who attended their concerts were just as delighted as the mothers who actually wanted to protect their daughters from the seductions of pop music that was just building a new branch of industry. In contrast to their rock'n'roll contemporaries Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis, the songs of the Everly Brothers were free of blunt requests for intercourse, their voices sounded like stardust.
That didn't stop the authorities from working their way through the seductive power of their singing skills.
The Everly Brothers had their first number 1 hit in 1957 with the song "Wake Up Little Susie," which was about two teenagers falling asleep watching a boring movie and then waking up early in the morning and being scared of it explain to the strict parents.
Actually harmless - on the other hand: How do we listeners know what really happened up to four in the morning.
In parts of the United States, the suggestive song has therefore been banned from the radio.
Singing as an aphrodisiac
What could Don and Phil Everly do anyway?
With these aphrodisiac voices, they had to become suspected cases of moral unreliability in prudish America of the fifties, despite their suitability for son-in-law.
"All I Have to Do is Dream" or "Take a Message to Mary" were of similar dreamlike voice security and dream-arousing enamel.
The brothers were blessed with their voices, but they also worked hard to refine them, from a very young age.
Her father was a miner who could play the guitar.
At his wife's side, he hosted a country show on local radio in Shenandoah, Iowa.
Don and Phil had to pick up the microphone early on.
The family later moved to Knoxville, not far from the country metropolis Nashville, where the boys developed their own singing style. Don presented with his velvet baritone, Phil then caressed him in lighter pitches. "It's like playing tennis with someone who is really great," Phil once said in an interview. "Don't let yourself be distracted for a microsecond or he'll leave you behind."
Highly concentrated and weightless - this is how the Everly Brothers shaped pop music. Wherever in the next few decades young white men played around each other in two-part harmony songs, their influence was present. From the Beatles to the Eagles, from the Byrds to Simon & Garfunkel, they have all been or are avowed Everly Brothers fans. Paul McCartney wrote them the song "On the Wings of a Nightingale" to thank them for their inspiration in the eighties when they tried one of their many comebacks.
The fact that the brothers themselves never had sustained megastar success may have hurt over the years.
The fact that they were extremely different may have been even more problematic at various career points.
"I'm a liberal democrat," Don once said.
“Phil is pretty conservative.
We are pretty strangers, we are only close when we sing. "
Phil, the younger brother, succumbed to lung cancer in 2014 at the age of 74.
As the family of the "Los Angeles Times" confirmed, Don Everly died on Saturday in his Nashville home.
He was 84 years old.