Songs Our Daddy Taught Us Bonus Songs Our Daddy

Product Description (2 CD deluxe digipac edition with 32-page booklet; 28 tracks, 89:52 playing time) It's an album that has grown in stature every year. It was a concept album a decade before concept albums were supposedly invented. It was a folk revival album before the folk first revival, before the second folk revival or the most recent folk revival. It's not just one of the great albums of the Fifties - it's one of the greatest albums of all time. It's the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. In 1958, the Everly Brothers decided to do a very different LP. It wouldn't be teen songs, it would be a tribute to the songs that their father - a jobbing, journeyman country musician and pioneering finger-style guitarist - taught them when the Everly family act played country radio shows in the early 1950s. At a time when country music was becoming slick and commercialized, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us was a statement about country music's roots. It's about country music when it was called folk music because it was folk music. The Everlys chose songs written between the 1600s and 1950, yet made a unified statement from them. They sang and played guitars with just a string bass for extra accompaniment. It was a daring move for the duo in 1958, singing ancient songs of darkness, loss, and death, to their teenage rock 'n' roll audience, but it was a move that paid off. Fifty-five years after the Everlys recorded Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day and jazz chanteuse Norah Jones teamed up to do every song on the album in the classic Everly style. Now BEAR FAMILY - the world's premier archive label - places another twist on that classic LP. BEAR FAMILY hasn't just reissued the original Everly Brothers LP on CD in pristine audio, but fleshed it out with a second CD with early or original versions of the songs that the Everlys learned from their father - Songs Our Daddy Learned. So a revealing album now becomes doubly revealing. Hear this music as it emerged from the hills of Appalachia in the early twentieth century. Then hear the Everly Brothers' versions. And then hear Billy Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones. It's a journey like no other through the roots of American music - and American music is really, truly the music of the world. Review The Everlys had reached their commercial peak when they made this album of sparsely arranged traditional songs, a concept that was quite a surprise from a top rock & roll act, and considerably ahead of its time. It's actually not as enduring as their early rockers and pop ballads, but the singing is superb on their interpretations of standards like Barbara Allen and Kentucky. --Richie Unterberger, Rovi