Harmony

Phil Everly died over the weekend.  He was 74.

Rock and Roll, we are told, started as a blender-mix of rockabilly and R&B.  Elvis put a rockabilly delivery onto a rhythm ‘n blues beat.  Chuck Berry sped up the blues to rockabilly speed.  Johnny Cash did rockabilly over a persona that could have made Howlin’ Wolf go “wow.  That’s the blues”.

And the Everly Brothers brought the final piece of the “billy” half of rockabilly – the tight, keening vocal harmonies that characterized bluegrass music – out of the holler and onto pop radio.

More below the jump.

With the Everly Brothers, vocal harmony was an artistic element in its own right, a color in a palette that brought feeling – joy, pain, thrill, gloom – in its own right, in a way that no single voice could.

The Associated Press’ David Bauder has an excellent obit in the Strib that describes the Everly’s stylistic impact:

Art Garfunkel answered the door to his Manhattan apartment holding a framed black-and-white picture of two smiling men. It was a test.

Correctly identifying Phil and Don Everly in the picture would reveal me as a journalist knowledgeable about music and the roots of Garfunkel’s career. Flustered, I failed. It should have been obvious.

The Everly Brothers, who will blend their voices no more following Phil’s death at 74 Friday from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, were the architects of rock ‘n’ roll harmony. Simon & Garfunkel were unimaginable without them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney took their cues, too. Their harmonies (and don’t forget George Harrison) formed the bedrock of the Beatles’ sound.

Like Garfunkel, Phil sang the high notes. He had the lighter colored hair. He would step away from the microphone, like on “Cathy’s Clown,” to let older brother Don sing a few lines alone and you noticed how unremarkable Don’s voice was unadorned. Only when that voice merged with his brother’s as a single, new voice did it become special.

The Everly’s technique – two tightly-wound harmonies acting almost like an instrument on their own – was different from, say, Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly (where the Jordainaires or the Crickets were a background accent).  And Bauder notes its influence on the Beatles and especially Simon and Garfunkel.

There were many more, and many more recent.  The Byrds, of course, did their own version of the Everly Brothers (and did it gloriously sloppily in this rare clip of “Turn Turn Turn”, “Bells of Rhymney” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”); they mixed two fairly voices that were fairly mundane on their own (Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn) with a young David Crosby, a fairly instinctive, tight high harmony singer.

The Hollies, if anything, bid up the Beatles’ approach to tight harmony:

Of course, the rhythm guitarist on your left (stage right), Graham Nash, would join with the Byrds’ rhythm guitarist on your left (stage right) and Steven Stills to either take vocal harmony to the next level or turn it into a bloated melange that the Everlies would never recognize – but that’s another whole argument.

But the idea of the razor-tight vocal pops up with groups that aren’t “vocal groups”. What would “Night” be without the raw but impeccable interplay between two vocals (in this case Springsteen overdubbed with both parts, although pianist Roy Bittan did a very capable job at the high part in live performance):

And today, in an age when few bands seem to attempt harmony live, among the leading practitioners of the Everly’s craft are…

…the dreaded Nickelback.

Whatever you think about the dreaded, leather-lunged Chad Kroger and the hits-in-his-sleep business operation he created, you gotta ask yourself; when was the last time you saw a live, electric band not only try to do tight, two and three-part harmony live on stage, but pull it off without breaking a sweat? (And don’t yap about Autotune; sure, they use it; but you’ve gotta get close enough to the pitch for it to work, or it sounds like a T-Pain single played backward).

Closer to the Everly source? I present former mid-period Byrd Gram Parsons joined with a very young Emmylou Harris to take an Everly’s song back up the holler just a little over 40 years ago:

Anyway – RIP Phil Everly.

5 thoughts on “Harmony

  1. The unusual (at least to me) pairing of Norah Jones and Billy Joe Armstrong, with their recent Everly Brothers tribute album (“foreverly”), is even more timely now. A pretty good effort for an unlikely duo and unlikelier subject.

    The video of the Everly’s 1983 reunion concert at the Royal Albert Hall is well worth seeking out. Even after their 10-year estrangement they barely missed a beat. That must have hard to achieve given their ages at the time and their signature tight harmonies. Their body language and attentiveness to each other on stage shows the skill and obvious difficulty involved in their musical style. Check it out, even if not an Everly Brothers fan. Great line-up of backing musicians, too.

    Great post, Mr. Berg.

    R.I.P., Phil …

  2. Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds did some nice Everly Brothers covers. And the reunion concert Joe mentions is available in its entirety on Youtube.

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