Rock & roll lost one of its supreme harmony singers when Phil Everly, half of the Everly Brothers, died today at the age of 74. According to a report attributed to his wife Patti Everly, the cause was complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Everly was a longtime smoker. 
 
 Listen to 12 essential Everly Brothers tracks 
 
 Harmony singing had been key in country and bluegrass, but starting with their first hit, 1957’s "Bye Bye Love," the Everly Brothers brought the sound of deeply intertwined voices — and more than a hint of Appalachia — to rock & roll. That blend resulted in 15 Top 10 hits between 1957 and 1962, including songs that went on to become rock standards: "Wake Up Little Susie," "All I Have to Do Is Dream," "Cathy’s Clown," "When Will I Be Loved." The brothers’ close-knit harmonies were also a major influence on rock & roll, impacting on the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, the Mamas & the Papas, and many others, and they were among the first acts inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. 
 
 Look back at Phil Everly's life in photos 
 
 "The Everly Brothers’ impact exceeds even their fame," wrote Paul Simon in Rolling Stone in 2004. "They were a big influence on John Lennon and Paul McCartney and, of course, on Simon & Garfunkel. When Artie & I were kids we got our rock & roll chops from the Everlys." That influence continues to this day: Last fall, Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones recently released an Everly Brothers tribute album. "The Everly brothers go way back as far as I can remember hearing music," Armstrong said in a statement. "Those harmonies will live on forever." 
 
 "We give one-sixth their worth to those alive; afterward, the other five: Your sound, dear Phil, was my model of beauty and charisma when I was 14," Art Garfunkel said in a statement. "You guided my musical development, my life. I sought a partner because you showed me what two can do. I always saw you up in Mt Rushmore, next to the other guys — a great hero of American culture." 
 
 The sons of a Kentucky coalminer, the Everlys began entertaining in grade school: When the family relocated to Iowa, the family had a radio show (Ike, their father, was also a singer), and Don and Phil would perform on the daybreak-hour show before heading to school. When they were teenagers the brothers relocated to Nashville. Although Columbia Records took an early interest in them, it wasn’t until they cut "Bye Bye Love" — a song rejected by 30 other acts — for another label, Cadence, that the Everlys' career took off. "Driving back to Nashville when we got within radio distance, they had this pop station on in the car — and it was playing our record," Phil recalled to RS in 1986. "That was, like, big juju. It really was." 
 
 Read Paul Simon's touching tribute to the Everly Brothers 
 
 Although many of the British Invasion bands of the ’60s adored the Everlys, the brothers themselves became out of step with the times by the middle of that decade. The Everlys were still capable of superb music (1968’s Roots album was an early country-rock landmark) and never lost their vocal power. "We spent so much time playing music together," recalls guitarist Waddy Wachtel, a member of the Everlys band in the early ‘70s along with Warren Zevon. "On the Everlys tour, every night we were in the hotel rooms playing music and Don and Phil would be there with us. It was unbelievable. They’d start singing in the rooms and it was like the heavens would open up." 
 
 But by then, the hits dried up, drug use took its toll, and the two brothers, who were increasingly growing apart musically and personally, infamously broke up onstage in 1973. They pursued solo careers with much less success but reunited onstage in 1983 and recorded several studio reunion albums in the ’80s. The first, EB84, featured "On the Wings of a Nightingale," a song written expressly for them by Paul McCartney. 
 
 The brothers rarely performed after the ’90s and long lived on separate coasts — Phil in Los Angeles, Don in Nashville — and also had different personalities. Of the two, Phil tended to be more straight-laced and low-key. As he told RS, "The ’60s weren’t my cup of tea. I never bought that philosophy that, you know, we’re all brothers and that’ll solve everything. And I never believed that music dictated the times. I always thought it reflected them." 
 
 See the Everly Brothers and more Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees 
 
 The brothers’ last high-profile concerts together took place a decade ago, when they reunited to open shows for Simon & Garfunkel on their "Old Friends" tour. “They hadn’t seen each other in about three years," Simon recalled. "They unpacked their guitars — those famous black guitars — and they opened their mouths and starting to sing. And after all these years, it was still that sound I fell in loved with as a kid. It was still perfect." ||||| (LOS ANGELES) — Phil Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential harmony duo that touched the hearts and sparked the imaginations of rock ‘n’ roll singers for decades, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan, died Friday. He was 74. 
 
 Everly died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at a Burbank hospital, said his son Jason Everly. 
 
 Phil and Don Everly helped draw the blueprint of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1950s and 1960s with a high harmony that captured the yearning and angst of a nation of teenage baby boomers looking for a way to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day. 
 
 The Beatles, early in their career, once referred to themselves as “the English Everly Brothers.” And Bob Dylan once said, “We owe these guys everything. They started it all.” 
 
 The Everlys’ hit records included the then-titilating “Wake Up Little Susie” and the universally identifiable “Bye Bye Love,” each featuring their twined voices with lyrics that mirrored the fatalism of country music and a rocking backbeat that more upbeat pop. These sounds and ideas would be warped by their devotees into a new kind of music that would ricochet around the world. 
 
 In all, their career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. In their heyday between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits. 
 
 The two broke up amid quarrelling in 1973 after 16 years of hits, then reunited in 1983, “sealing it with a hug,” Phil Everly said. 
 
 Although their number of hit records declined in the late 1980s, they made successful concert tours in this country and Europe. 
 
 They were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the same year they had a hit pop-country record, “Born Yesterday.” 
 
 Don Everly was born in 1937 in Brownie, Ky., to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers. Phil Everly was born to the couple on Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to from Brownie when Ike grew tired of working in the coal mines. 
 
 The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family’s radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa. 
 
 Their career breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records. 
 
 Their breakup came dramatically during a concert at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. Phil Everly threw his guitar down and walked off, prompting Don Everly to tell the crowd, “The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago.” 
 
 During their breakup, they pursued solo singing careers with little fanfare. Phil also appeared in the Clint Eastwood movie “Every Which Way but Loose.” Don made a couple of records with friends in Nashville, performed in local nightclubs and played guitar and sang background vocals on recording sessions. 
 
 Don Everly said in a 1986 Associated Press interview that the two were successful because “we never followed trends. We did what we liked and followed our instincts. Rock ‘n’ roll did survive, and we were right about that. Country did survive, and we were right about that. You can mix the two but people said we couldn’t.” 
 
 In 1988, the brothers began hosting an annual homecoming benefit concert in Central City, Ky., to raise money for the area. ||||| "We give each other a lot of space," Don Everly told The Times in 1999 when they played a couple of shows in the Southland. "We say hello, we sometimes have a meal together.... Everything is different about us, except when we sing together. I'm a liberal Democrat, he's pretty conservative." 
 
 Philip Everly was born Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago, about two weeks before older brother Don turned 2. The children of two musicians, Ike and Margaret Everly, Phil and Don early on began singing on their parents' radio show in Iowa. 
 
 The family moved through the South and Midwest, landing radio shows in different cities until the rise of television began to supplant radio as the preferred medium for entertainment. 
 
 The brothers credited Ike with teaching them all they knew about music. Ike Everly was an accomplished guitarist who reportedly influenced country guitar legends, including Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, and facilitated his sons' recording career by introducing them to famed guitarist and talent scout Atkins when they were in their early teens. 
 
 Atkins connected them with Wesley Rose of Nashville's famed Acuff-Rose Publishing, and Rose offered to get them a recording contract if they would sign to Acuff-Rose as songwriters. Rose introduced them to Archie Bleyer, who signed them to his New York-based Cadence Records label, and it wasn't long before the hits began to flow. 
 
 "The Everlys took the country brother duet tradition one step farther," historian Colin Escott wrote in the 2012 second edition of the Encyclopedia of Country Music. "They added Bo Diddley riffs, teenage anxieties and sharkskin suits, but — for all that — the core of their sound remained country brother harmony." 
 
 A year after the family moved from Knoxville, Tenn., to Nashville in 1955, the Everly Brothers rocketed to No. 2 on the pop charts with "Bye Bye Love," a song by Nashville husband-wife songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the first of many songs by the Bryants that the Everlys would record, including "Wake Up Little Susie," "Bird Dog," "Problems" and "All I Have to Do Is Dream." 
 
 Those songs are now perceived as remnants of a more innocent age, but "Wake Up Little Susie" was banned from many radio stations because its story of two teenagers being out together into the wee hours was considered too racy. 
 
 "It didn't even enter our minds that anybody could object to it," Phil recalled in 1984. "But if we'd called a press conference to deny it, nobody would have shown up. They were all off listening to big bands." 
 
 Both Everly siblings also knew a thing or two about songwriting, with Phil contributing "When Will I Be Loved," and Don writing "('Til) I Kissed You," "Cathy's Clown" and "So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)." 
 
 In 1960, the Everlys moved from Cadence to the 2-year-old Warner Bros. Records label for what was widely reported to be one of the most lucrative contracts in popular music. Without missing a beat, they delivered their first hit for Warner Bros. with "Cathy's Clown," which spent five weeks at No. 1, and at that point they were more popular than Elvis Presley, who'd enlisted in the U.S. Army. 
 
 Despite their personal differences, the musical magic that earned them an inaugural spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still surfaced when they sang together. 
 
 "That's the one part where being brothers makes a difference," Don said in 1999. "It's just instinct. That's the charm of what the Everly Brothers are: two guys singing as one. I want people to leave there thinking 'Whoa, it's still happening, it's still good.'" 
 
 In addition to his wife, brother and mother, Everly is survived by sons Jason and Chris, and two granddaughters. 
 
 Funeral services will be private. 
 
 randy.lewis@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @RandyLewis2 ||||| LOS ANGELES (AP) — There is no more beautiful sound than the voices of siblings swirled together in high harmony, and when Phil and Don Everly combined their voices with songs about yearning, angst and loss, it changed the world. 
 
 FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2001 file photo, Phil Everly, right, of the musical duo The Everly Brothers, looks at his plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame along with his sons, Chris, left, and Jason, in... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Aug. 30, 1997 file photo, Phil and Don Everly sing some of their hits at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Ky. Everly, who with his brother Don formed... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Jan. 4, 1984 file photo, Phil, left, and Don Everly, of the Everly Brothers joke around for photographers in New York City. Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential harmony... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Nov. 6, 2006 file photo, Phil Everly, left, and Cowboy Troy arrive at the 40th Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn. Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential harmony duo... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this April 1, 1960 file photo, Phil, left, and Don of the Everly Brothers arrive at London Airport from New York to begin their European tour. Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential... (Associated Press) 
 
 Phil Everly, the youngest of the Everly Brothers who took the high notes, died Friday from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 74. 
 
 He left a towering legacy that still inspires half a century after The Everly Brothers' first hit. 
 
 You could argue that while Elvis Presley was the king of rock 'n' roll, Phil and Don Everly were its troubled princes. They sang dark songs hidden behind deceptively pleasing harmonies and were perfect interpreters of the twitchy hearts of millions of baby boomer teens coming of age in the 1950s and '60s looking to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day. 
 
 The Everlys dealt in the entire emotional spectrum with an authenticity that appealed to proto rockers like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who gladly pass the credit for the sea changes they made in rock to the ruggedly handsome brothers. The Beatles, the quartet whose pitch-perfect harmonies set the pop music world aflame, once referred to themselves as "the English Everly Brothers." And Dylan, pop culture's poet laureate, once said, "We owe these guys everything. They started it all." 
 
 Two generations later, artists are still finding inspiration in the music. Most recently, Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones lovingly recorded a tribute to the Everlys and their unique album "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us." 
 
 "There's so much darkness in those old songs," Armstrong said recently. "I think mainly that's just how people communicated when it came to mourning and loss. Then with the Everly Brothers it sounds like these two little angels that sing." 
 
 That reaction was universal for the Everlys. Their hit records included the then-titillating "Wake Up Little Susie" and the era-identifying "Bye Bye Love," each featuring their twined voices with Felice and Boudleaux Bryant's lyrics that mirrored the fatalism of country music and the rocking backbeat of modern pop music. These sounds and ideas would be warped by their devotees into a new kind of music that would ricochet around the world. 
 
 Listen to the Everlys' "Cathy's Clown," for instance, then the Fab Four's "Please Please Me." You'll hear it right away. Simon & Garfunkel also were strongly influenced by the Everlys and recorded live versions of "Bye Bye Love" and "Wake Up Little Susie." 
 
 In all, the brothers' career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. In their heyday between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits. 
 
 The two broke up amid quarrelling in 1973 after 16 years of hits, then reunited in 1983, "sealing it with a hug," Phil Everly said. 
 
 Although their number of hit records declined in the late 1980s, they made successful concert tours in this country and Europe. 
 
 They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the same year they had a hit pop-country record, "Born Yesterday." They also are members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, a nod to their heritage. Phil Everly was born to folk and country music singers Ike and Margaret Everly on Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago, two years after his older brother. 
 
 As the sons of country and western singers, they had been performing since they were children and were the most country-oriented of the early rock giants. The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family's radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa, and though their sound would become more cosmopolitan over time, they never strayed far from their country roots. 
 
 Don Everly said in a 1986 Associated Press interview that the two were successful because "we never followed trends. We did what we liked and followed our instincts. Rock 'n' roll did survive, and we were right about that. Country did survive, and we were right about that. You can mix the two but people said we couldn't." 
 
 Their breakup came dramatically during a concert at Knott's Berry Farm in California. Phil Everly threw his guitar down and walked off, prompting Don Everly to tell the crowd, "The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago." 
 
 During their breakup, they pursued solo singing careers with little fanfare. Phil also appeared in the Clint Eastwood movie "Every Which Way but Loose." 
 
 Phil Everly last performed in public in 2011, but his son Jason told The Associated Press on Friday he had been actively writing songs, living part of the year in Burbank and the rest in Nashville. He said his father had been in the hospital for about two weeks when he passed away. 
 
 Though the COPD caused by smoking affected his health, Jason Everly said it never affected that voice. 
 
 "He sang like an angel," his son said. "It was pretty surprising how he could still get those notes. We would still talk about it and sing together." 
 
 The inspiration attributed to the Everlys' voices brought the brothers together again in 2003 at the request of Simon & Garfunkel, a duo known to fight bitterly as well. The resulting tour brought a chuckle from Simon in a Rolling Stone interview. 
 
 "It was hilarious that the four of us were doing this tour, given our collective histories of squabbling," Simon said. "And it's amazing, because they hadn't seen each other in about three years. They met in the parking lot before the first gig. They unpacked their guitars — those famous black guitars — and they opened their mouths and started to sing. And after all these years, it was still that sound I fell in love with as a kid. It was still perfect." 
 
 ___ 
 
 AP Music Writer Chris Talbott reported from Nashville, Tenn., and can be reached at http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott . Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report. ||||| The singer, who was a lifelong smoker, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at a hospital in Burbank, California, said his son Jason. 
 
 Phil and Don Everly can be credited with creating the blueprint for a harmonic style of singing that during the late 1950s and 1960s, in the words of one critic “captured the yearning and angst of a nation of teenage baby boomers looking for a way to express themselves”. 
 
 The Everlys’ hit records included Wake Up Little Susie and Bye Bye Love, All I Have To Do Is Dream, which married the fatalism of country music with a rocking backbeat, forging a new sound with a global reach. 
 
 In 1959, Cathy’s Clown, written by Don, remained at No 1 in America for five weeks in 1959 and topped the British charts for seven, selling more than eight million copies worldwide. 
 
 In a measure of their influence The Beatles referred to themselves early in their career as “the English Everly Brothers” and Bob Dylan once said: “We owe these guys everything. They started it all.” 
 
 In all, their career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. At the peak of their success, between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits. 
 
 The pair broke up amid recriminations in 1973 after 16 years of hits, but reunited in 1983, “sealing it with a hug,” Phil Everly said. 
 
 Although their number of hit records declined in the late 1980s, they continued to tour, both in the United States and Europe and were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the same year they had a hit with “Born Yesterday.” 
 
 Don Everly was born in 1937 in Brownie, Kentucky, to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers. Phil Everly was born to the couple two years later, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to after Ike grew tired of working in the coal mines. 
 
 The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family’s radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa, but their breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records. 
 
 For most of their recordings, Don sang the baritone part and Phil the tenor part, using vocal harmony mostly based on diatonic thirds. 
 
 Their split came dramatically during a concert at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. Phil threw his guitar down and walked off, prompting Don to tell the stunned audience, “The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago.” 
 
 During their break-up, they pursued solo singing careers, but to little acclaim. Phil also appeared in the Clint Eastwood movie “Every Which Way but Loose”, while Don made a couple of records with friends in Nashville, performed in local nightclubs and played guitar and sang background vocals on recording sessions. 
 
 In a 1986 Associated Press interview Don Everly said that the two were successful because “we never followed trends”. 
 
 He added: “We did what we liked and followed our instincts. Rock ‘n’ roll did survive, and we were right about that. Country did survive, and we were right about that. You can mix the two, but people said we couldn’t.” 
 
 In 1988, the brothers began hosting an annual homecoming benefit concert in Central City, Kentucky, to raise money for the area. 
 
 Their influence spanned the decades. Simon & Garfunkel recorded live versions of Bye Bye Love and Wake Up Little Susie and Paul McCartney paid tribute by mentioning "Phil and Don" in his 1976 million-seller, "Let 'Em In. 
 
 More recently Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones recorded a tribute to the brothers last November, reinterpreting the duo’s 1958 album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, which had paid homage to their Tennessee roots. 
 
 Armstrong said: “There’s so much darkness in those old songs. I think mainly that’s just how people communicated when it came to mourning and loss. Then with the Everly Brothers it sounds like these two little angels that sing.” 
 
 Phil Everly was thrice married and had two sons, Jason and Chris, both singers and songwriters. He married his third wife, Patti Arnold, in 1999.
– Phil Everly is dead at age 74 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and the obituaries are paying homage to just how much he and brother Don influenced the early days of rock and roll as the Everly Brothers. Songs such as "Wake Up Little Susie," "All I Have to Do Is Dream," "Bye Bye Love," "Cathy’s Clown," and "When Will I Be Loved" became "rock standards" and their harmonies swayed everyone from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to the Mamas & the Papas, recounts Rolling Stone. It notes that Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones recently put out a tribute album. Bob Dylan: "We owe these guys everything," he once said. "They started it all." And the Beatles sometimes referred to themselves as the "English Everly Brothers," notes Time. 'Troubled princes': "You could argue that while Elvis Presley was the king of rock 'n' roll, Phil and Don Everly were its troubled princes," write Chris Talbott and Robert Jablon at AP. "They sang dark songs hidden behind deceptively pleasing harmonies and were perfect interpreters of the twitchy hearts of millions of baby boomer teens coming of age in the 1950s and '60s looking to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day." Early days: Phil was born Jan. 19, 1939, about two years after his brother, and they got their start singing on their parents' Iowa radio show, reports the Los Angeles Times. The family moved to Nashville in 1955, and the brothers hit No. 2 the following year with "Bye Bye Love." Their career spanned five decades and included 19 top 40 hits in their heyday. The brothers split in 1973 but reunited a decade later. The UK Telegraph rounds up video of some of their biggest hits.