“I just could not get enough of that sound,” the singer Emmylou Harris said of the Louvin Brothers’ music, speaking in an interview with The Observer, the British newsweekly, in January 2010. “I’d always loved the Everly Brothers, but there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers.”
Country Music Hall of Fame member Charlie Louvin, who with his brother Ira ranked with Ralph and Carter Stanley as one of the greatest duos in bluegrass history, passed away overnight. Louvin, 83, had been receiving experimental treatment for pancreatic cancer.
Nashville-based entertainment reporter Jimmy Carter said on Twitter that Louvin’s wife Betty told him Charlie died around 1:30 a.m.
The Louvin Brothers influenced an entire generation of country and, later, alternative country artists, including Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris and Uncle Tupelo…
First cousins of singer-songwriter John D. Loudermilk, Ira and Charlie grew up in a poor farm family in northeastern Alabama, mostly in Henegar. Ira mastered the mandolin, and Charlie picked guitar. Ira and Charlie first performed as the Radio Twins in 1942, worked in Chattanooga with the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1943, and changed their name to the Louvin Brothers in 1947 while working at WROL in Knoxville, because they wanted a professional name that was easier to pronounce and spell. They spent considerable time in Memphis, and they debuted on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 1955.
The Louvins recorded for Apollo in 1947, Decca in 1949, and MGM in 1951 and 1952—their early recording dates were sporadic, in part because of Charlie’s military service in Korea. They did not achieve great commercial success, however, until they began recording for Capitol in September 1952, an affiliation that would continue until the Louvins broke up in August 1963. Although the duo’s biggest hits for Capitol were released in 1955 and 1956, during the early days of rock & roll, their musical style was already defiantly anachronistic. Their high, lonesome harmonies, punctuated by Ira’s stirring mandolin solos, were closer to country music of the 1930s than the honky-tonk or country-pop of the mid-1950s. As a sign of their traditionalism, their first three Top Ten singles, “When I Stop Dreaming,” the chart-topping “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” and “Hoping That You’re Hoping,” didn’t include drums. They mixed gospel and secular forms, often focusing on the traditional themes of family, love, and obligation that link the two…
Along with his brother and musical partner Ira, Louvin was a pioneer of the country music genre known as close harmony. The duo were best known for their mid-Fifties and early Sixties hits “When I Stop Dreaming” and “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby.” Louvin was also a successful solo artist with hits such as the Top Five single “I Don’t Love You Anymore” in 1964…
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