A complicated bond in bluegrass and in life

itbooks, $26.99, 320 pages

In 1959, the Louvin Brothers—one of the best-loved and influential bluegrass acts of the 1950s and 60s—released an album called “Satan Is Real.” The cover shows brothers Ira and Charlie, dressed in immaculate white suits, standing in what looks like the glowing embers of hell, with flames ablaze around them. Standing guard nearby is a glowering, 16-foot tall devil holding a black pitchfork.

By today’s standards, the effect is more campy than frightening. Satan is a red plywood cutout, with leering cartoon eyes and buck teeth, that looks anything but real. But the book by the same title—and with the same cover—is about as real as it gets.

Co-authored by younger brother Charlie, who died last year at age 83, and Denver-based writer Benjamin Whitmer, its pulp-fiction appearance belies what’s inside: an unexpectedly frank and insightful account by a natural storyteller who talks it just as he walked it.

Born Ira and Charlie Loudermilk in rural Section, Ala., the brothers escaped a life of poverty and abuse to become one of the greatest harmony duets in country music history. The Everly Brothers, the Beatles and the Byrds co-opted their close, dreamy harmonies; Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons cited them as major influences.

Their "high and low" sound contrasted Ira's pure, soaring tenor with Charlie's deeper, mellower tones; their smooth, high-lonesome style was modeled on the likes of the Monroe Brothers and the Delmore Brothers and heavily influenced by their staunch Southern Baptist upbringing. When their early gospel songs brought them little commercial success, the brothers turned to secular music.

It may have been the right step for Charlie, but for Ira—a boy everyone back home had counted on to become a preacher—the worldly realm left him “trying to drown out the call with liquor and women.” It didn’t work.

Following a string of top-ten hits in the 1950s—including "When I Stop Dreaming," "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby" and "Cash on the Barrelhead”—Ira’s increasingly volatile behavior forced the breakup of the duo; Charlie went on to a successful solo career, charting 30 singles and receiving four Grammy nominations. But the split never healed, and although “Satan Is Real” is in part a chronicle of a life in country music, it’s also an attempt to make sense of one brother’s heaven and the other one’s hell.

Of the two, Charlie enjoyed the more durable lifestyle, a disciplined, sober musician who stayed faithful to one woman all his life. Ira, who died in a car wreck in 1965, was a hard drinker with a short temper that often led to smashing instruments onstage; a veteran of four explosive marriages, he barely survived a shooting by his third wife. He was also a brilliant songwriter and talented mandolinist—a perfectionist whose problems can be traced to an abusive father who often beat him into unconsciousness.

Some of the book’s most memorable scenes take place in childhood, when the two boys alternated between brutal workdays in their father’s cotton field and inspiring escapes into the family tradition of Sacred Harp singing and other musical get-togethers. Their father played banjo frequently with friends and neighbors, and eventually pushed his shy boys to sing in repeat performances at home and in church that "trained all the bashfulness right out of" them.

In Louvin’s descriptions of his and Ira’s performances at barn dances, “cake walks,” on radio, and with well-known musicians of the time, there are the hoped-for, sepia glimpses of the famous—Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys and Girls at a country auditorium in the 1930s; a 13-year-old Johnny Cash in overalls and bare feet hanging around a Louvins show in Arkansas; a drunk Hank Williams lying on the sidewalk at the Louisiana Hayride; and Bill and Charlie Monroe (“Lord, they hated each other”) facing off in their front yards with baseball bats.

Whitmer’s skill is evident in the smooth flow of more than 75 years of history divided into brief, anecdotal chapters, and in the way he seems to have stepped aside and left the tape running. Everything else is pure, unvarnished Charlie Louvin: plainspoken, blunt, funny, sharing his homespun wisdom about life, love, drinking and playing country music at every turn, with language occasionally rough enough to strip paint. There are times when you can almost hear his gravelly voice and smell his cigarette burning.

Between the lines, though, we can see him returning again and again  to the Cain-and-Abel motif, determined to wrestle this big brother mystery to the ground and get it right for once. In the process of recalling the self-destructive behavior on and off stage that eventually ended his and Ira’s harmonies, both musical and fraternal, their relationship unfolds in all its affectionate, frustrating, messy, loyal and complicated glory.

Of the tradition of Appalachian music, handed down from generation to generation, Louvin says, “It’s something you can’t teach and you can’t fake, and I’m afraid it has been all but lost forever.” Not quite. “Satan Is Real” brings it all back in this real-life ballad of two brothers who fought to keep that rare tradition alive, along with each others' dreams.