Felice and Boudleaux Bryant: Love Hurts and Songs Pay the Bills

If you wanted to boil down all of popular music to just two words — or better yet down to just two syllables — you couldn’t do better than “Love Hurts.” The great majority of all songs are variations on this two-beat meme. Love gets us up in the morning, obsesses us all day and keeps us up at night, alternating brief moments of ecstasy with stretches of anguish. 

Usually we’re talking about romantic love, but it could also be love of family or love of friends, love of home or love of drink. Countless songs have tried to explain how the thing that’s so thrilling one moment can be so painful the next, but only one song boiled it down to nine letters. 

The songwriters who performed this prodigious act of distillation in 1960 were Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, a husband-and-wife team in Nashville who’d already had #1 pop hits with the Everly Brothers and top-10 country hits with Carl Smith, Eddy Arnold and Little Jimmy Dickens. They were the first people in Nashville to support themselves solely by songwriting. Behind their commercial triumphs was an artistic one of concentrated essence.

“The key to the Bryants’ success was a combination of sophistication and lack of pretension in both words and music,” says Tim Rice, the lyricist for Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Lion King; “They got straight to the point and used every day phrases in an original way. In short, good tunes and words that most listeners could easily identify with.”

Boudleaux (pronounced BOOD-low) was a classically trained violinist; Felice (pronounced feh-LEESS) couldn’t read music, but they worked together seamlessly to create marvels of minimalism that are still sung today — songs such as “Bye Bye Love,” “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” “Rocky Top,” “Sleepless Nights,” “How’s the World Treating You” and “Love Hurts.” 

“That title, ‘Love Hurts,’ was a gift from the gods, and Dad recognized it as such,” says Del Bryant, the couple’s son, the retired CEO of BMI Music, one of the Western world’s top two music-publishing companies. “It’s the perfect balance: the positive of love and the negative of hurt. But what makes it a great song is that it’s the truth: love does hurt. 

“We’ve all been teenagers; many of us have been married. We’ve all had ‘old love, new love, every love but true love,’ as Cole Porter said, and he was one of Dad’s favorites. Songs begin with nuggets, and my parents knew how to recognize those nuggets when they got one, how to build around it and how to embellish it.”

Boudleaux and Felice both contributed words and melodies; he fleshed out the harmonies. In the early days, they would jot down ideas on napkins, envelopes, grocery bags or whatever. If you asked him about his latest song, he would fish in his pockets for those scraps of paper. Sometimes he found them; sometimes the song was lost forever. Finally, the couple’s mentor, Hank Williams collaborator Fred Rose, convinced them to buy an accounting ledger and write their songs in it, so they wouldn’t get lost.

Eventually there were 16 such ledgers, now on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame through August 2 in the exhibit We Could: The Songwriting Artistry of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Ledger #6, dated February 25, 1960, opens to page 98, where the Bryants jotted down their ideas for “Love Hurts.” Boudleaux created a strip of sheet music by drawing five horizontal lines across the top of the page and then filling the lines with notes for the melody.

Below that, in Boudleaux’s hand, are the words for the opening stanza: “Love hurts. Love scars, pains and mars.” “Pains” is crossed out and replaced with “wounds,” which is more visual and sings better. Later on, “I know the score” is changed to “I know a thing or two,” which better reflects the narrator’s limited understanding. “Love is like a flame” is changed to the more universal experience of “Love is like a stove, burns you when it’s hot.” 

Below the lyrics, added much later, are the artists who recorded the song. The Everly Brothers actually recorded it first, as a 1960 album cut, but Orbison was the first to release it as a single, the B side of 1961’s “Runnin’ Scared.” Ex-Traffic drummer Jim Capaldi had a top-five U.K. hit in 1975, and the hard-rock band Nazareth scored a top-10 hit in the U.S. plus #1 hits in Canada, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and South Africa. Later on, Cher had a European hit with it, and Rod Stewart included it on a #1 pop album.

“Once they had that two-beat melody for ‘Love Hurts,’” Del explains, “the words fell in with the music as if they were following orders. It was just a matter of filling the slots with words. Dad told me more than once that when you used perfect rhymes and meter that repeats exactly, you turn the listener into a co-writer. Before the Everlys sing ‘Gee whiz’ on ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream,’ everybody knows that word is coming, because you’ve set it up so well. The listener becomes part of writing the song.”

But the best version of “Love Hurts” is the incandescent duet between Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, recorded in 1973, just before Parsons died. Harris’s flickering, high soprano sustains the promise of the title’s first half, while Parsons’ world-weary tenor echoes the pain of its second part. The voices push and pull at each other, as if trying to pull those words apart, as if love could exist without hurt or hurt without love, but it’s just not possible. 

“There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo,” Emmylou Harris told The Guardian in 2018. “And I have always been fascinated by that. That song, and our harmony, is kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together … We probably did it all in one take, live.”

Boudleaux, who died in 1987 at age 67, would have turned 100 on February 13, 2020. His centennial year is being honored in many other ways. The Nashville Symphony Orchestra will celebrate his birthday (also the couple’s 75^th wedding anniversary) with a concert featuring vocalists Jamey Johnson and Steve Tyrell as well as a rare performance of Boudleaux’s instrumental Polynesian Suite, featuring Chris Scruggs on lap steel guitar.

Bill Malone, the legendary country-music historian, and his wife Bobbie will publish their biography, Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story, in March. Carolyn Smith Bryant, Del’s wife, will publish a revised version of her book, Heartbreak Handbook: A First Aid Kit When Love Hurts. PBS will continue to rerun last fall’s Country Music, the 16-hour Ken Burns documentary that prominently features Boudleaux and Felice. 

“This is a film not only about stars and music but also about songwriting,” Burns told me. “So you have to include Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Kris Kristofferson and Dolly Parton. By the time you reach this apotheosis of songcraft, you care about the words as much as the melody.”

Most tantalizingly of all, Del is readying an album of his parents’ demos, the home recordings they made to pitch their songs to singers and producers. He believes these unreleased songs include hits just waiting to happen.

“It’s crazy,” he says. “They wrote so many songs for everyone that they got cut. Dad believed that the songs that got cut weren’t necessarily better; maybe they just happened to click with the singer at the time. He believed the other songs were just waiting for the chance to wake up. As he often said, they’re like wine aging in a cave somewhere waiting to be uncorked. I have found many obscure or unrecorded songs that fall into the same pocket as the hits.”

This surge of interest in Boudleaux and Felice Bryant kicked off on September 11 at the Ryman Auditorium, when the Americana Music Association presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to the couple. The Milk Carton Kids, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattingale, hosts of the awards show, saluted the Bryants for writing “a lot of songs, fifteen hundred of them, songs that have echoed from the 1950s on down through history as we know it,” said Ryan. 

Pattingale cited the example of “Sleepless Nights,” a song written in 1959, recorded by the Everly Brothers in 1960, by Parsons & Harris in 1973, by the Judds in the ’80s, by Elvis Costello and Eddie Vedder in the ’90s, by Vince Gill and Norah Jones in the 2000s and “right here, right now, tonight in the twenty-teens by the Milk Carton Kids.” Ryan and Pattingale proceeded to deliver a two-voices/two-guitars version of the song with all the close harmony of the Everlys’ original.

“Of all the hits the Bryants wrote for the Everly Brothers,” Pattingale now says, “I find ‘Sleepless Nights’ to be among both their most accessible and most complex songs.  The chords are downright weird, the harmonies are not intuitive. But you hear the most natural and beautiful lullaby ever — very much like Chopin in that way.”

Like “Love Hurts,” “Sleepless Nights” distills romantic agony to a two-word phrase. The singer claims that he can get through the daytime without letting go of the tears pressing against his eyelids, but at night he can’t stop them; they come gushing out. The melody rises in hope that the departed lover will return and “end these sleepless nights for me,” only to collapse in disappointment. The close harmonies on the song — whether by Ryan and Pattingale, Parsons and Harris or Don and Phil Everly — create the curious sensation that this most solitary form of despair is simultaneously shared by many.

“That’s one of the saddest, best written songs ever,” Del says. “The harmony part is so over-the-top beautiful — the way it comes down to the lead vocal on the line endings — that even solo artists have someone sing it with them. The chords are sweet, but the words are sad. People don’t mind celebrating their heartbreak because it reinforces the importance of love. It’s something we’ve all felt.”

Boudleaux and Felice met on Valentine’s Day, 1945. He was a small-town Georgia boy, a classically trained violinist (he’d briefly played in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) and an accomplished hillbilly fiddler. That odd combination of skills enabled him to get all kinds of jobs all over the nation, and on this day he’d just begun a stand at the cocktail lounge in the Schroeder Hotel (now the Hilton) in Milwaukee. Matilde Scaduto, an Italian-American local girl two years estranged from her first husband, was working in the hotel as an elevator operator.

When the musician came by the elevator, the wise-cracking Matilda said, “Can I buy you a drink?” nodding at the water fountain. She turned on the water and it spurted all over Boudleaux’s tuxedo. It was, she says in the Malones’ biography, “love at first splash.” Before long Boudleaux told her that the name Matilda didn’t suit her. He was going to call her Felice, because she was always so happy. A few days later, he added, “Now we’ve got to do something about that name Scaduto.” “What suits you?” she responded. “Bryant,” he said. They ran off together in February and after Felice’s divorce finally came through, they were officially married in September.

They wound up in Boudleaux’s childhood home of Moultrie, Georgia, where he worked with local dance bands and Felice grew bored at home. She returned to her childhood hobby of expressing her pent-up feelings in verse and once she got started, she couldn’t stop. Before long, her husband joined in, and they were turning the poems into songs. At first, it was just a game they could play together, a low-cost form of entertainment. 

But in 1948, when the couple’s first son Dane was one and their second son Del was on the way, an old friend put them in touch with Fred Rose, Hank Williams’ mentor and collaborator. Rose gave the Bryants’ “Country Boy” to Little Jimmy Dickens, who turned it into a #7 country hit in 1949. Suddenly the Bryants realized this could be more than a hobby; it could be a career.

“Country Boy” married a bouncy, sing-along melody to a string of colorful examples of rural life: the singer grew up wearing diapers made from “old feed sacks” and “’spenders out of plow lines,” and he still believes “in fussin’ when you’re mad and scratchin’ when you’re itchin’.” 

Beneath the jokes, however, was a stubborn pride in being different from the high-society folks in the movies and the papers. The Bryants wrote a string of these non-conformist anthems for Dickens, including “Out Behind The Barn” and “I’m Little But I’m Loud,” culminating in the masterful “Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go),” later recorded by that iconic non-conformist Bob Dylan.

It’s easy to see how these songs celebrating the unorthodox might have sprung from the Bryants’ imagination. He was a Southern Protestant who grew a luxurious beard and read the Bhagavad Gita; she was a Northern Catholic who ran off with a musician and carved out her own place in a male-dominated profession. 

“It hurt her that she wasn’t taken seriously by the good old boys in Nashville,” biographer Bobbie Malone says. “When they sang the songs to Boudleaux’s parents, his mother didn’t believe she had written them. But Boudleaux knew how good she was; he took her seriously, and that kept her going. But it drove her crazy to go to a business environment with Boudleaux, because the men would talk over her only to him. So she wouldn’t let the ledgers out of the house; they would have to come to her territory and deal with her.”

Rose encouraged the couple to move to Nashville in 1950 and become full-time songwriters. They were the first people in town with that job title; they didn’t perform; they didn’t produce records; they only wrote songs. It didn’t hurt that folks like Chet Atkins remembered Boudleaux from his fiddle solos on the radio, long before they ever met him. He could hang out at Mom’s (late known as Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge), across the alley from the Grand Ole Opry, mingle with the musicians and pitch them his songs. 

He might even invite them back to the house where Felice would serve one of her famous spaghetti dinners with red wine to put the guest in the mood to hear a song and maybe agree to record it. If the singer did record it, Boudleaux would be right there in the studio to help out with arrangement, and he and Felice would hit the road to encourage radio programmers to play the song.

It worked. “Out Behind The Barn” was a #9 country hit for Dickens; “Hey Joe” was #1 for Carl Smith, and “The Richest Man (In the World)” was a #6 hit for Eddy Arnold. The Bryants were soon making enough money to build their dream house north of Nashville in Hendersonville. Most days they stayed home and wrote songs from morning to night, believing that no one could predict which song would become a hit, so it made sense to write as many as possible.

“I’ve seen my dad sit in a chair for 24 hours and write 12 songs,” Del recalls, “because someone was coming over for spaghetti, and he was to have a lot of songs that might fit that singer. Mom was cleaning the rug once, and a stone got caught in the vacuum cleaner. The rhythm of that clicking stone led to the song ‘Take a Message to Mary.’” 

In the midst of this success, Boudleaux’s barber was telling him that his two sons were pretty good singers. Sure, sure, the songwriter said, but he never got around to hearing them. It wasn’t till Don and Phil Everly, sons of barber Ike, signed a contract with Cadence Records in 1957 and needed some songs that they finally met Boudleaux. When they did, he offered them a tune that the country duo Johnny and Jack had turned down, a number called “Bye Bye Love.” While they were in the studio, Don was playing a Bo Diddley riff on his acoustic guitar, and Boudleaux said he should play that on “Bye Bye Love.” 

The song was soon a #1 country hit, a #2 pop hit and a #5 R&B hit. The follow-ups, “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” also written by the Bryants, were #1 on all three charts. “Wake Up, Little Susie” tells the story of a teenage couple that wakes up to discover that they’ve slept past their curfew. Boudleaux began the song, and he left it ambiguous what the boy and girl were doing when they fell asleep next to each other. When Felice heard the song, she worried that it was far too suggestive for 1957. 

In the Bryants’ ledger you can see where Boudleaux’s original lyrics (“Your father’s gonna be hot./ He’ll kill me like as not/ The truth won’t matter, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot.”) have been scratched out and replaced overhead by Felice’s (“The movie wasn’t so hot./ It didn’t have much of a plot./ We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot.”). The new words were not only less salacious but also much wittier.

The Bryants and the Everlys were made for each other. Don’s lead tenor and Phil’s high harmony both had a sure grasp of pitch and phrasing, so they could execute Boudleaux’s elaborate harmony schemes with seemingly little effort. The brothers wore their emotions on their sleeves, so they could capture both the yearning hopes and crushing disappointments of love. And they added the thumping rhythm that allowed the Bryants’ songs to cross over from country to the new field of rock and roll.

They should have worked together for years, but it wasn’t to be. When Fred Rose died in 1954, his son Wesley not only took over the powerful Acuff-Rose publishing house but also became the Everly Brothers’ manager. When the Everlys dropped Wesley as their manager in 1962, he refused to let them have any songs from Acuff-Rose writers, including the Bryants, a move that hurt not only the songwriters but also the singers — and even more so the millions of listeners deprived of this collaboration. 

The Bryants kept writing and kept having hits. Often they would get away from Nashville to the Gatlinburg Inn in the East Tennessee mountains. On their 1967 sojourn, Felice complained that they were writing too many depressing songs about getting old, “so I told Boudleaux I wanted something peppy and upbeat and a lot more positive,” she says in the 2011 documentary film All I Have To Do Is Dream: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story. He banged out a couple of fast lines on his guitar and started singing, ‘Wish I was on old Rocky Top, down in the Tennessee hills.’ He said, ‘How’s that?’ I said, ‘That’s fine.””

Later in the movie, after the Osborne Brothers have made “Rocky Top” one of the highest charting bluegrass songs of all time, we see Boudleaux and Felice standing on the field at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville during halftime of a University of Tennessee football game. They were being honored, because “Rocky Top” had become the team’s weekly halftime theme song — and in 1982 it became an official Tennessee state song.

Boudleaux died five years later. Felice tried to write with other people, but her heart wasn’t in it, and she gave it up. She lived out her life in quiet solitude and finally died herself in 2003. 

“Someone asked Boudleaux once why he wrote so many positive love songs,” Bobbie Malone reports, “and he said, ‘I’ve had a very successful relationship.’ They enjoyed each other’s presence so much. It was so much a part of their relationship that she wasn’t interested in writing with anyone else after he died. She wanted to become a Sicilian widow. Her sons tried to get her writing again, but she wouldn’t.”

“Dad would never gotten into songwriting without Mother,” adds Del. “He would have gone on being an alcoholic violin player if Mother hadn’t sobered him up and turned him into a songwriter. Mother had to write, and Dad had to keep her amused. She wanted it more than Dad, and Dad wanted Mother more than anything.”