Everlys Return to Kentucky for Hometown Concert

Three-hundred volunteers are hanging signs and handling everything from parking to ticket sales for Thursday night’s return of the Everly Brothers to the town the singers call home.

The two are playing a benefit concert, and the festivities will include an Everly Brothers monument and parade. The town also is renaming a 3-mile section of U.S. 62 to Everly Brothers Boulevard.

The singers hope to make it an annual event to honor Kentucky music and the tradition of Muhlenberg County. They formed a foundation and named two local businessmen to administer funds for scholarships and other community projects.

The money is to be raised by the annual Everly Brothers Central City Music Festival, which will be taped by the Nashville Network.

Don Everly, 51, now lives in Nashville, and Phil, 49, lives in Los Angeles. But their parents, the late Ike Everly, a coal miner and guitar picker, and Margaret Embry Everly, 68, now living in Nashville, were both from Muhlenberg County, and the boys spent their summers with grandparents and relatives around Central City.

Don was born in Brownie, a now-extinct coal camp, just outside of town. Phil was born in Chicago, where his father was playing in a band at the time, but says he would like an honorary birth certificate from Kentucky.

The excitement has taken residents’ minds off Muhlenberg County’s depressed coal economy and double-digit unemployment.

Everly Brothers T-shirts are popping up all over this west Kentucky community of 5,500, and local radio stations are playing such vintage favorites as “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love.”

“My kids are tired of hearing me say this, but we’re going to have a heck of a party,” said Joe Ben Tucker, owner of Tucker’s Funeral Home and co-administrator of the foundation.

The celebration began with a small ceremony to thank the brothers for a $6,500 donation for a police radio system. Then Tucker suggested that Don and Phil could bring their guitars and sing some of their classics in front of the city building.

Cousin Ted Everly, pastor of the Lighthouse Baptist Church in Central City, passed the idea along.

“They were tickled to death about it, and they were coming to the state fair (for a Friday concert), so they said, ‘Let’s plan this one day ahead of time,’ ” said Bill Greenwood, a local insurance executive who is helping organize the event.

Ticket orders have come from as far as California, Colorado, Canada and New Jersey, and a bus is bringing a load of fans from North Carolina.

Also performing will be John Prine, who wrote the song “Paradise,” about a Muhlenberg County community displaced by a steam plant. Prine’s parents were from the area, and he used to visit as a child.