The Everly Brothers

Don & Phil Everly became close friends with Buddy & The Crickets. As well as being on the same package tours, Phil Everly and Buddy Holly became music producing partners in late 1958, where they wrote for and produced Lou Giordano's first Single "Stay Close To Me" was written by Buddy and "Don't Cha Know" was written by Don. They played on the tracks and sung backing vocals where needed. The recording session was held in Bell Sound Studios, New York.

Buddy Holly wrote "Wishing", "Heartbeat" and "Love's Made A Fool Of You" as demos, in the hope that The Everly's would want to record them. Their Management/Publishing team (Acuff/Rose) knocked them back.

In April 1960, only a few months after Buddy died in the plane crash in Iowa, The Crickets (Sonny Curtis, Jerry Allison and Joe Be Mauldin) went on tour with Don & Phil to England, backing them up.

The Everly Brothers were an American musical duo known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close-harmony singing. Consisting of Isaac Donald "Don" Everly and Phillip "Phil" Everly, the duo combined elements of rock and roll, country, and pop, becoming pioneers of country rock.

Don and Phil Everly were raised in a musical family. As children in the 1940s, they appeared on radio in Iowa, singing with their parents as the Everly Family. During their high-school years in Knoxville, they performed on radio and television. The brothers gained the attention of Chet Atkins, who began to promote them. They began writing and recording their own music in 1956. The brothers' first hit song was "Bye Bye Love", which hit No. 1 in the spring of 1957. Additional hits, including "Wake Up Little Susie", "All I Have to Do Is Dream", and "Problems", followed in 1958. In 1960, they signed with Warner Bros. Records and recorded "Cathy's Clown", which was their biggest-selling single. The brothers enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve in 1961 and their output dropped off, though additional hit singles continued through the early 1960s. Their final Top 10 hit was "That's Old Fashioned (That's the Way Love Should Be)" (1962).

The Everly Brothers

The Everly Brothers experienced a decline in popularity in the United States in the 1960s due to changing tastes in popular music, long-simmering disputes with Acuff-Rose Music CEO Wesley Rose, and increased drug use by the brothers. However, the duo continued to release hit singles in the U.K. and Canada, and they had many successful tours in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, the brothers began releasing solo recordings; they ended their musical partnership in 1973. In 1983, the Everly Brothers reunited. They continued to perform periodically as a duo until about 2005, when they quietly broke up again. Phil Everly died in 2014, and Don Everly died in 2021.

The Everly Brothers had a major influence on the music of the generation that followed them. Many of the top acts of the 1960s were heavily influenced by the close-harmony singing and acoustic guitar playing of the Everly Brothers; those acts included The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees, and Simon & Garfunkel. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked the Everly Brothers at No. 1 on its list of the 20 Greatest Duos of All Time.

The brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the inaugural class of 1986 and into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. Don Everly was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2019, earning the organization's first Iconic Riff Award for his distinctive rhythm guitar introduction on "Wake Up Little Susie".

As children, Don and Phil Everly sang on KMA and KFNF in Shenandoah as "Little Donnie and Baby Boy Phil". The brothers also sang on radio with their parents as the Everly Family.

While in Knoxville, the brothers found work performing on Cas Walker's Farm and Home Hour, a regional radio and TV variety program. The brothers caught the attention of family friend Chet Atkins, manager of the RCA Victor studios in Nashville. Shortly thereafter, their mother moved the family to Nashville. Despite affiliation with RCA Victor, Atkins somehow arranged for the Everly Brothers to record for Columbia Records in early 1956. Their "Keep a-Lovin' Me", which Don wrote and composed, flopped, and they were dropped from the Columbia label.

Atkins introduced the Everly Brothers to Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose music publishers. Rose told them he would secure them a recording deal if they signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters. They signed in late 1956, and in 1957, Rose introduced them to Archie Bleyer, who was looking for artists for his Cadence Records. The Everlys signed and made a recording in February 1957. "Bye Bye Love" had been rejected by 30 other acts. Their record reached No. 2 on the pop charts, behind Elvis Presley's "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear", and No. 1 on the country charts and No. 5 on the rhythm and blues charts. The song, by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, became the Everly Brothers' first million-seller.

Working with the Bryants, they had hits in the United States and the United Kingdom, the biggest being "Wake Up Little Susie", "All I Have to Do Is Dream", "Bird Dog", and "Problems". The Everlys, though they were largely interpretive artists, also succeeded as songwriters, especially with Don's "(Till) I Kissed You", which hit No. 4 on the US pop charts.

The brothers toured with Buddy Holly in 1957 and 1958. According to Holly's biographer Philip Norman, they were responsible for persuading Holly and the Crickets to change their outfits from Levis and T-shirts to the Everlys' Ivy League suits. Don said Holly wrote and composed "Wishing" for them. "We were all from the South", Phil observed of their commonalities.

"We'd started in country music." Although some sources say Phil Everly was one of Holly's pallbearers in February 1959, Phil said in 1986 that he attended the funeral and sat with Holly's family, but was not a pallbearer. Don did not attend, saying, "I couldn't go to the funeral. I couldn't go anywhere. I just took to my bed."

Buddy with Don & Phil

The Crickets backing The Everly's in England 1960