When the Everly Brothers brought fame home to Shenandoah
Local folks knew they were good, as boys, singing on the town’s two radio stations from 1945-’53. But they didn’t expect that in 1957, they’d top the rock ’n’ roll charts with “Bye Bye Love.”
SHENANDOAH, Iowa – If you’ve been reading me for years, you know that this town of about 4,800 in the southwestern corner of the state is my hometown. I haven’t actually lived here since 1972, but it still sometimes seems like I never left.
You may know that Shenandoah is also the hometown of the Everly Brothers, who along with Elvis Presley, James Brown, the Beatles and other music legends, were in the first class of inductees in 1986 into the national Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, now located in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Everlys were born elsewhere – Don in 1937 in Muhlenberg County in western Kentucky, and Phil in 1939 in Chicago. But in 1945 they moved to Shenandoah with their parents “Cousin Ike” and Margaret Everly, and they became a family musical act performing live daily on the local radio stations, first KMA and later KFNF. Don and Phil were singing on the air from the ages of 8 and 6.
“Both boys learned to sing gospel hymns and country music songs on their folks’ half-hour show at 5:30 a.m.,” recalled the Evening Sentinel, the Shenandoah newspaper that was my alma mater, in a 1967 story.
This is the tiny childhood home of the Everly Brothers in Shenandoah. It has now been moved adjacent to the Shenandoah Historical Museum, and the house is open to the public with lots of Everly memorabilia and information inside.
In the summer of 1953, when Don had just finished his sophomore year at Shenandoah High School and Phil the eighth grade, they were showing such promise as singers and guitar players that the parents decided to move on to bigger places with more opportunities. First Chicago, then Knoxville, Tenn., then Nashville. They connected with the great guitarist Chet Atkins, who lined them up with songwriters Boudleaux & Felice Bryant.
And it was like magic happened.
On March 1, 1957, Cadence Records introduced the Everly Brothers singing “Bye Bye Love.” Within weeks, the song topped the charts of both rock ’n’ roll and country-western music. In the fall, they released “Wake Up Little Susie,” which was even bigger. For the next six years, the Everlys stayed right at the top of pop music, with multiple hit songs -- most of them now regarded as rock classics.
My goodness, what did teenagers back then in Shenandoah think of all that?
“We were all excited, that’s for sure,” said Ronn King, who was a classmate of Phil Everly and is now retired in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after a long career in radio. “We’d all known them as friends. Don and Phil were both nice, clean-cut kids, with real talent. They moved away and then all of a sudden, they have this hit record and they’re being talked about all over the country. And we knew them!”
Sheet music from their first big hit, in the early spring of 1957.
Eventually the Everly Brothers had a noisy split. That was in the middle of a concert in California in 1973. They reunited in 1983 and then lived out their lives performing about whenever and wherever they decided to go.
That included a July, 1986, “First-Ever Hometown Concert” in Shenandoah, attended by more than 8,000 people.
OMG, what a night!
It was such a big deal that we Offenburgers delayed the funeral for three days of my brother Tom Offenburger. He had just died in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of 52 of a heart ailment, after a distinguished career in journalism and the Civil Rights movement. We all were sure Tom would understand and approve. So we delayed his memorial services, we all got to celebrate the Everlys being back home, and I even I got to introduce them to the big crowd at the concert.
Phil Everly died in 2014 at the age of 74. Don died at 84 in 2021.
This one, in the fall of 1957, was an even bigger hit. And many more followed.
They never forgot Shenandoah, that’s for sure. They told me before the hometown concert in ’86 that they regarded this as “our-growing up hometown,” where they spent their formative early-teenage years and, actually, where they launched their music careers.
Did they ever consider writing a song about our town?
“Yeah, we’ve talked about it,” Phil said in my story then for the Des Moines Register, “but it’s one of those things where we’d have to sit down and write it ourselves, and we hardly have a chance anymore to do that. There’s another way to look at this, though. Even though we’ve never written a song titled ‘Shenandoah,’ or that had the name of the town in it, just about all of our songs have pieces of Shenandoah in them. It’s so much a part of what we are that it becomes a part of everything we do.”
So, as the years have passed, I kept telling myself that on some future trip to Shenandoah, I was going to spend a few hours in the Shenandoah Public Library. I wanted to go through the library’s bound volumes of the old Evening Sentinel to see just how the hometown newspaper had covered the Everlys, especially in their breakout year of 1957.
Did the paper cover, or even make mention, of the former local radio performers suddenly making it big nationally – even globally? As a newsie my whole career, I was certainly hoping I’d find lots of stories. But I wasn’t sure. This was early rock ’n’ roll, you know, and not everybody was crazy about it.
Historical marker in Shenandoah, between the historical museum and the childhood home of the Everly Brothers, tells their local story. That photo at the top shows Don and Phil Everly with their parents Ike and Margaret Everly, costumed up for one of their live radio shows — which were often watched by local people sitting in the studio audience at KMA and later KFNF.
Alas, I never seemed to have enough time in Shenandoah to spend a couple hours at the library. Once, I called library director Carrie Falk and asked if, in this new digital age, the library was possibly putting its newspaper archives online and making them publicly-accessible. Her answer then was that they were working on it, but that service wasn’t ready yet.
Three weeks ago, I was in Shenandoah again – like most of my recent trips this one was primarily for a funeral – and I took time after the service to go to the library. When director Falk saw me at the front counter, asking for the Sentinel’s bound volumes, she came out to give me really good news. The newspaper archives – at least of the papers that served the area from 1884 to 1977 – are now all accessible free on the library’s website, by clicking on this link.
I wanted to give the library director a big hug, but I’ve seen “Music Man” dozens of times and I know about library rules. So I just thanked her. She sure has the facility living up to its wonderful motto: “Connecting you with literature, information and the world.”
The Everly Brothers’ plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame in downtown Nashville, “Music City USA.”
And now, in my early searches for hometown stories about the Everly Brothers, I’ve already found some gems:
--Sentinel reporter Robert Black, reporting on Sept. 5, 1957, about one stop on Phil’s two-day visit to Shenandoah: “Teenagers jammed the Rose Garden Wednesday night to see Phil Everly, younger member of the Everly Brothers. Approximately 300 – all the building could hold – were on hand when Phil entered by the back door about 8 p.m., according to (deejay) Mike Heuer, who with Tommy Burns, presided at the record hop. Phil spent one half-hour signing autographs and he jitter-bugged to the record ‘Bye Bye Love’ with Carolee Knittle. The Everly Brothers made the record popular… Attendance at the hop Wednesday night included teenagers from Essex, Red Oak, Emerson and other southwest Iowa points.”
--Included in another story about Phil’s visit to the community: “Tuesday morning, Phil visited Shenandoah High School. According to a friend there, ‘The girls screamed just like they do on TV!’” Also this: “With the pompadour haircut over flashing blue eyes, and a face that is very serious until he smiles, Phil looks more than 18. His brother Don, 20, who is married, stayed in Nashville.” And this: “The phenomenally popular ‘Bye Bye Love’ has sold 1 ½ million records in the U.S. and is also a sensation in Canada. The record has also sold very well in England.”
--In a brief item in the local news listings of April 1, 1958: “The Everly Brothers of Nashville, Tenn., former residents of Shenandoah, are featured in the current issue of Look magazine. They are sons of Mr. and Mrs. Ike Everly, former radio entertainers here. The boys were Evening Sentinel carriers 10 years ago, and are now internationally known musicians getting $2,000 for personal appearances.”
Enough for now. I’ll share more in occasional future columns. I’m thinking this will be a series, “When rock ’n’ roll came to Shenandoah.” I’ve never written a stage play, but I think this could be one.
The Everly Brothers, as they’re portrayed in a photo on the wall of the famous Surf Ballroom in the north central Iowa town of Clear Lake. They performed at the Surf several times over the decades.
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A stage play sounds like a great idea!