R.I.P. Don Everly

[dws1982]

Lots of music greats dying lately. Listening to those harmonies between Don and Phil, you'd swear you were hearing something close to a miracle.

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Don Everly, Who Set the Standard for Pop Harmony as Half of the Everly Brothers, Dies at 84

Don Everly, who with his late younger sibling Phil established the template for close harmony vocalizing in the chart-topping duo the Everly Brothers, died Saturday at age 84 in Nashville. No cause of death was immediately disclosed.

The Los Angeles Times confirmed the death through a family spokesman, even as tributes were already accumulating on social media Saturday night as word circulated about his death.

Everly (pictured above, right) – an inaugural inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 who also joined the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001 – grew up singing the high, fluid harmonies that would make him famous in his family’s country act. Beginning in 1957, he and his brother cut a groundbreaking series of hit ballads and rockers for the Cadence and Warner Bros. labels.

The Everlys left a bold impression on the rock musicians who succeeded them. The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel – whose early pairing as Tom & Jerry essentially cloned the brothers’ sound – were only the best known acts to adapt their achingly beautiful harmony sound.

The brothers also made their mark on a later generation of country-rock musicians, with their impact felt in the work of the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and the Eagles.

In his notes for the 1994 Rhino Records boxed set “Heartaches & Harmonies,” critic and historian Ken Barnes wrote, “Excepting only the urban doo-woppers, you’d be hard-pressed to find a voice-blending rock act from 1957 on whose conceptual blueprint wasn’t first sketched by Don and Phil.”

Full story here.