The Ever­ly Broth­ers were first-gen­er­a­tion pio­neers of rock ‘n’ roll’s first gold­en era, but they always stood apart from many of their con­tem­po­raries due to their roots in rur­al South­ern white music tra­di­tions rather than the blues and R&B that drove Elvis and Jer­ry Lee Lewis and Lit­tle Richard et al. Bob Dylan was a fan (“We owe those guys every­thing; they start­ed it all”), whilst John Lennon and Paul McCart­ney mod­elled their own vocal blend on Don and Phil’s tight har­monies. Simon & Gar­funkel were clear­ly inspired, as were the Byrds, the Hol­lies, and the Eagles who all acknowl­edged their debt to the broth­ers’ unique sound.

They were born (Don in 1937 and Phil in 1939) into a fam­i­ly already steeped in coun­try music. Ike Ever­ly, their father, was a well-respect­ed gui­tarist who land­ed a show on radio sta­tion KMA in Shenan­doah, Iowa, in 1944, and he moved the fam­i­ly there. Short­ly after that, Don and Phil began appear­ing on his pro­gram, and by 1949 they were reg­u­lars on the show, lend­ing their angel­ic har­monies to tra­di­tion­al moun­tain tunes pop­u­lar­ized by the likes of the Blue Sky Boys, the Stan­ley Broth­ers and the Lou­vin Broth­ers (there were a lot of fam­i­ly-based groups in those days!).

In 1953, the fam­i­ly moved to Ken­tucky, and the fol­low­ing year Don and Phil got their first break when a fam­i­ly friend, gui­tarist Chet Atkins, picked one of Don’s ear­ly com­po­si­tions for Kit­ty Wells to record. Atkins fur­ther con­vinced the broth­ers to move to Nashville to try to break into the busi­ness as a duo, and they were soon picked up by Archie Bley­er, the own­er of New York label Cadence Records, who was suit­ably con­vinced by what he’d heard to make a record with them.

The first song Bley­er cut with the Everlys was Bye Bye Love, record­ed at RCA Stu­dios in Nashville on 1st March 1957. It became an instant nation­al smash and over the next six years, the Everlys would land a stag­ger­ing num­ber of tunes on the upper reach­es of the charts — includ­ing Wake Up Lit­tle Susie, Bird Dog, and All I Have to Do Is Dream (all writ­ten by hus­band and wife song­writ­ing team, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant), as well as a hand­ful penned by Don or Phil, such as (’Til) I Kissed You, When Will I Be Loved and Don’s love­ly paean to teenage roman­tic angst, Cathy’s Clown.

By the time the Everlys record­ed Cathy’s Clown in ear­ly 1960, their record­ing style was already very well-estab­lished. As always, the record­ing ses­sion was live with no over­dubs, and the instru­men­ta­tion was sim­ple: acoustic and elec­tric gui­tar, Floyd Cramer on piano, Floyd Chance on bass and Bud­dy Har­man on drums. Released on 4th April 1960, it hit num­ber one and remained there for five weeks.

For the next three years, the Everlys scored more hits, but by the end of 1964 the British Inva­sion was sweep­ing Amer­i­ca and the broth­ers’ look and sound start­ed to seem a bit dat­ed; their stag­ger­ing suc­cess began to sub­side. Nev­er­the­less, the Ever­ly Broth­ers’ place in pop his­to­ry is secure, and this song remains a fab­u­lous reminder of their won­der­ful­ly com­ple­men­tary vocal har­monies.