@rockaction
That caught me off guard but I love the harmonies
I'm just warming up.
Bye Bye Love.
3.3
The Everly Brothers
Songs Our Daddy Taught Us (1958) / A Date With The Everly Brothers (1961)
Positional scarcity. In-draft shenanigans aside, there are very few realized 1950s albums outside of jazz and classical albums, the forms that dominated the moment for the serious beatnik and middle class purchasing and listening set. Classical was as respectable as a suit, Detroit's industry, and Cleveland’s symphony. Jazz was urbane, hip, hi-fi, narrow suits and lapels, howling with Kerouac and friends. Rock n’ roll, on the other hand, was industry run-off, marketed singles and jingles for the teenage set, Bobby socks, “Oh My God!” (if you had parents that allowed the Lord’s name or carnal desires to almost be spoken in vain), tight boyfriend sweaters, and poodle skirts. The fully realized jazz or classical recording came in 33 1/3 and represented the best in hi-fidelity. Rock lived and died with cramped booth recordings and 45s. A serious rock album was almost unheard of -- it was nowhere near its time yet.
So how to explain The Everly Brothers’s
Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, then? Here stepped a band from out of the rock n’ roll vernacular, six hits by their side, and they put out – an album of country and folk standards? It was surprising to everyone then; these two young boys, rock n’ rollers, doing an album of country and traditional folk songs. It still surprises people now. There was no cash grab on the early singles, no skyrockets in flight, marketing delight, but a devotion to voice and craft and a world of the South heretofore unknown to most middle class teens in the North and Midwest. There’s a devotion to home and tradition in the idea of the album, in its performance, in its recording.
And the devotion shows quickly on what is, quite frankly, a beautiful but utter downer of an album. The peppiness of the Everlys is juxtaposed against the subject matter they choose. If there was a move by Cadence, their label, it was to make the boys serious for the country set that still listened to the radio in Appalachia, folks that still suffered, that still had not seen the disposable income that the middle classes of the North and Upper Midwest had seen. The songs, almost strident in their difficulty, walk hard. The young men -- boys! -- sing beautifully, but they deal with some tough stuff.
On “Roving Gambler” they take down a traditional country/folk song formerly narrated by a woman who falls in love with a gambler and they rework the lyrics so that the Everlys are the gambling men, riding through town, hearts all a-flutter in their wake. And the edginess doesn’t stop there. Throughout the album, narrators will kill their wives, hard-hearted women will deny ever-loving men on their death bed, wardens will be bribed by weeping mothers whose babies are dying their last breath in jail. You get the drill. Even a simple paean to Kentucky is one lamenting a a distance between narrator and childhood home. The album closes with a child’s death, a child reassuring her mother as she lay dying, telling the mother not to worry but to put away the child’s shoes. From the mouths of babes?
Tough stuff in its beauty. This is not for the faint of heart. This is from another time, where God steeled hardscrabble folk for all sorts of existential pain, leaving only bittersweet memories, reminding us of the mortal in mortal coil, the tendrils of the hard-fought in just surviving.
Flip it to the sixties and we get heartache, but of a different, modern kind.
A Date With The Everly Brothers is the boys’ fourth studio album, showing them in fine form. The beginning track “Made For Love” is traditional teenage wholesome fare for the teenage set. Father knows best in his all-knowing advice, but even he cedes to nature, the song shuffles beyond his control, the harmonies too heavenly for Dad.
Girls, girls, girls were made to love…
That’s why you watch ‘em walk down the street
That’s why their kisses taste awfully sweet
And so the album proceeds. The thrills and heartaches of the teenager. The highlights include “Sigh, Cry, Almost Die” and its swing/shuffle that shows a maturity way beyond 1960 pop.
Sigh…Cry…Almost Die
I can’t kiss you---ooooh again
This is the end
You’ve had your fun and now it’s done
There’s a bend in their voice. I can personally almost hear the methedrine. And the album continues apace, never quite hitting the apex of their single releases, but with standout performances nonetheless. The standout of the album comes at its close. The ever-haunting “Cathy’s Clown,” about which I’m sure musicology theses have been written, especially its martial beat and its harmonies.
And – oh! -- the harmonies. It’s impossible to write about the Everlys without their harmonies. Uruk-Hai, he of the indispensable knowledge, told me a long time ago that the Everlys were born with slightly different voices, one an octave away from the other, making for perfect singing in unison. Which they do to obvious effect. Somehow it never – and I mean never – gets cloying in the way harmonies can do. They’re right up there with the Beach Boys at their best, and they’re actually, um, better than the Boys, just not as baroque or chamberish. Perhaps I slight the Beach Boys and their efforts here, but the Everlys forego the pyrotechnics for efficacy. They even save a pedestrian song like “Donna, Donna” and make it artistic with their vocals.
When they could misfire with a track selection, they pass with flying colors. A country-influenced duo doing “Lucille?” Well, they freaking nail it. The harmonies transcend whatever lack of soul might be evident individually. It’s a standout track here, not an embarrassment. The Everlys are multi-dimensional, they’re talented like America wouldn’t see on a pop scale until the Hansons (yes, them. That’s for Mrs. Rannous.)
And that’s the story. Those are the two albums. The brothers mmm-drop first and mmm-bop later. Kelce out.