Crying in the Rain

Category: News/Obituary

For the second time this weekend we have to say goodbye to a Kentucky-born Hall of Famer.

Don Everly died Saturday (8/21) at his Nashville home of a reported heart attack.

The elder of the Everly Brothers was born in Kentucky (whereas brother Phil was born in Chicago) in 1937.  Father Ike was instrumental in teaching the two boys love of music and harmony, inspired by contemporary brother duets for both father (the Blue Sky Boys) and sons (the Louvin Brothers).  

Armed with those harmonies and a boatload of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant songs, the Everly Brothers hit the music scene in the mid-50s, where things were starting to get “fuzzy” as to what was country, rockabilly, or rock and roll.  The music of the Everlys hit the right spot for fans of all three, scoring them success after success on both the pop and country charts.  Rightfully so, they’re in both the Rock and Country halls of fame.

Both brothers enlisted in the Marine Corps (there’s a famous clip of them singing “Ebony Eyes” and “Crying in the Rain” in their uniforms on The Ed Sullivan Show) and slowly drifted apart.  They infamously broke up onstage during a show in 1972.  Paul McCartney, a diehard fan, helped reunite them in the early 80s (he wrote their comeback song “On the Wings of a Nightingale”).

They managed to tolerate each other on stage for the fans at Everly Brothers Homecoming shows in Central City, Kentucky, but eventually they stopped performing together.  The brotherly harmony that brought musical heaven was, as in so many other cases in music history, driven apart.

When Phil died of COPD in 2014 Don said that “our love will always be deeper than any earthly differences we might have had.”  Those included politics: Don said, in endorsing a presidential candidate in 2016, that the brothers’ views were so totally opposite that they could never have done a political fundraiser. 

And so we bid farewell to yet another true American music icon (as the Musicians Hall of Fame Facebook page stated when they broke the news).  Fans of them, and their influences (if you didn’t know, Don’s daughter inspired the rock band Guns ‘n’ Roses to do “Sweet Child o’ Mine”), won’t have to do their crying in the rain over this one.

Don Everly was 84.