In 1960 I was an eight year old boy with a teenage sister who watched American Bandstand every day after school and had a Tele-Tone 45 rpm portable record player in her bedroom. With a big fat plastic spindle, she would stack up to about a dozen records and it would automatically drop and play them one at a time. I was entranced by the whole concept – the music, the machine, the grooves on the disc, and especially the labels, which I would spend hours reading and memorizing. Composers, arrangers, song titles, publishers, ASCAP or BMI, selection numbers, running times, and especially the stylized fonts for the label’s logos.
One reason I took an interest in music at such an early age was because my cousin Arnold was a hot-shot producer and the whole family followed his many successes. His first big hit was in 1956 with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” for Okeh Records, and four years later he moved on to MGM, where he scored big with Connie Francis’ “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and eventually was promoted to president of the label.
On Billboard magazine’s chart for the Top Hits of 1960, Francis had three songs versus Elvis Presley’s two. And while Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” begat a national dance phenomenon and a Percy Faith instrumental was the number one single, only Bobby Rydell, Brenda Lee, and The Everly Brothers rivaled Miss Francis. Don and Phil’s biggest records that year were “Cathy’s Clown” and “Let It Be Me,” but this is the one I dropped the needle on most often and to this day it remains stuck inside my head.
Written by Don Everly and the first track on their Warner Bros. debut album It’s Everly Time, “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)” stayed on the American charts for 12 weeks and has been covered at least a dozen times. The biggest sellers of those all were country versions, starting with a duet by Hank Williams Jr. and Lois Johnson in 1970, followed by Connie Smith in 1976 and Emmylou Harris in 1983. When John Prine decided to include it on his classic In Spite of Ourselves duets album, he tapped Connie Smith as his partner on the song.
While I don’t know why I am so attached to this song, it turns out that there’s likely a scientific reason for it. Dr. Vicky Williamson is a music psychologist and memory expert at Goldsmith’s College in London, and several years ago she began studying earworms, otherwise known as stuck-song syndrome, sticky music, and cognitive itch. In a 2012 article I found on the BBC website, she suggests that “earworms may be part of a larger phenomenon called ‘involuntary memory,’ a category which also includes the desire to eat something after the idea of it has popped into your head. ‘A sudden desire to have sardines for dinner, for example,’” as she put it.
Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra and Traveling Wilburys covered “So Sad” on his 2012 solo release, along with other songs of that era, and described it this way: “These songs take me back to that feeling of freedom in those days and summon up the feeling of first hearing those powerful waves of music coming in on my old crystal set. My dad also had the radio on all the time, so some of these songs have been stuck in my head for 50 years. You can only imagine how great it felt to finally get them out of my head after all these years.”
In 2013, Will Oldham (as Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy released what has become one of my all-time favorite albums, titled What The Brothers Sang. An Everlys’ tribute album, it jumps over their entire Cadence Records catalog of hits from the ’50s, and dives deeper into the more obscure catalog tunes. In Pitchfork’s review, Stephen Deusner wrote: “ ‘Devoted to You’ and ‘So Sad’ are all the more powerful for being so spare in their arrangements, as though illustrating the power of a small country bar band.” One of the highlights of the year was having the chance to see them perform the album from end to end at Town Hall in NYC.
We used to have good times together
But now I feel them slip away
It makes me cry to see love die
So sad to watch good love go bad
Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad
Is it any wonder
That I feel so blue
When I know for certain
That I’m losing you
Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad
So sad to watch good love go bad
How an 8-year-old boy can latch onto a song such as this and hold it close for 47 years is almost unexplainable. The above-mentioned Dr. Williamson has been working on a “cure” for earworms, suggesting tips such as finding another song to replace it with, going for a run, or doing a crossword puzzle. But for myself, I think I’ll pop open a tin of sardines for dinner and give y’all a vertical stacking of some cover versions I’ve found. Bon appetit.
In 1973 Don Everly showed up drunk to a show. He kept screwing up the lyrics until Phil smashed a guitar over his head and stormed out. The only time the brothers spoke during the next decade was at their father’s funeral. The brothers patched things up in 1983 enough to embark on a lucrative nostalgia tour that yielded a double album and was captured and released on video.
This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.