TT: Forged in sorrow, cloven by anger

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the Louvin Brothers. Here’s an excerpt.
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Family acts have long exerted a powerful pull on audiences. Whether it’s a brother-and-sister musical duo like Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin or a husband-and-wife acting team like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it’s irresistibly fascinating to see them perform together on stage. When they get along–and sometimes even when they don’t–they very often give the uncanny impression of being able to think, move or sing like a single person. Alas, such acts are no longer as common in the music business as they used to be, perhaps because families aren’t as close as they used to be. Nor have they ever been all that common in classical music. It is in the field of pop music that family members are far more likely to collaborate, and it is in country music that they have left the deepest mark.
Why is this so? Because many country musicians were children of the Great Depression who were born into poor rural families. If they wanted to hear music, they usually had to make it themselves, and if they did it well enough, they had a chance to lift themselves out of poverty. What’s more, it’s natural enough for siblings who make music together as children to keep on doing so in adulthood.
Brother acts have usually been more popular in country music than sister or husband-and-wife acts, and none has been more admired or influential than the Louvin Brothers, who cut their first record in 1947. Like many sibling acts, they were a match made in hell, so much so that Ira Louvin’s violent, alcohol-fueled temper finally led his younger brother Charlie to break up the duo in 1963, two years before Ira died in a car crash. But you’d never have guessed it from hearing them sing together, for their high, hard-bitten voices wound round one another in harmonies so closely woven that you couldn’t always tell which brother was singing what part.
Two months before his own death in 2011, Charlie Louvin finished work on a memoir that was published earlier this year. “Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers” (Igniter/HarperCollins), which has the rough-hewn sound of a real person swapping stories after hours, is one of the most important and illuminating memoirs ever written by a country singer. Not only is it as readable as a first-rate novel, but “Satan Is Real,” which is named after the Louvin Brothers’ best-known album, a 1959 collection of gospel songs, offers urbanites a joltingly vivid glimpse of what it was like to grow up on a Depression-era farm….
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Read the whole thing here.
The Louvin Brothers sing “I Can’t Keep You in Love With Me” on Pet Milk Grand Ole Opry in 1961: