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Close-knit couple were the perfect pair to write ‘Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts’

They’ve produced a brisk yet in-depth look at Boudleaux and Felice Bryant.

"Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story" is about the...
"Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story" is about the married songwriting team that wrote many beloved chart-topping country hits in the 1950s and ’60s.(University of Oklahoma Press)

When speaking to Bill C. Malone and Bobbie Malone, it’s impossible to not get caught up in the sweet charm that being together for over four decades brings. The accomplished historians, both Texas natives, still easily laugh at each other’s jokes, seamlessly complete one another’s sentences and gently correct one another when the occasion calls for it.

It almost makes too much sense for the Malones to write a biography on Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, perhaps the greatest married country songwriting team to have ever lived. Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story is a brisk yet in-depth look at a couple who didn’t change the country music industry as much as they helped create it together.

In a time when just about anything that feels too good to be true is probably false, the Malones choosing the Bryants as the subject of their first collaborative book effort is thankfully as real as their admiration for one another.

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“I’ve known and loved so many of their songs,” Bill C. Malone says when discussing his book subjects. “But once we got started working on the book, I found their love story sort of parallels our love story. Boudleaux was a country boy from Georgia who fell in love with an exotic Sicilian girl from Milwaukee, and I was a country boy from East Texas who fell in love with an exotic Jewish girl from San Antonio.”

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Bobbie Malone interjects with a bemused chuckle, “Well, that’s not exactly a parallel.”

To see a picture of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, or to listen to one of the couple’s many beloved chart-topping country hits from the 1950s and ’60s, is to get a taste of one of the sweetest partnerships in music history. Perhaps unknown to the more casual country music fan, the Bryants were a near-constant presence in the country music industry for decades following their move to Nashville in 1950.

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When pictured together for personal or professional purposes, the husband and wife duo were often captured cuddling each other close and casting loving glances. Although the pair were masterful writers, these storybook images also conveyed just how united the Bryants were.

Two of their most famous songs, “Bye Bye Love,” made famous by the Everly Brothers in 1957, and “Love Hurts,” famously released by Roy Orbison in 1961 and then Gram Parsons in 1973, are anything but cheery, sugary ditties, yet they’re impossibly harmonious, pretty to the point it’s tough to imagine they weren’t tunes of innocent joy. As in-love as the Bryants were, their combined skills at crafting the sort of cosmopolitan country that made cash registers ring for a generation in Nashville was every bit as strong and undeniable.

Although the Bryants have been country music royalty for decades, having been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1991, their status as power brokers behind the scenes has meant their names haven’t become transcendent household names. That under-the-surface status has been changing a great deal in the past few months, however, with the success of last year’s PBS-powered Ken Burns documentary series Country Music, and now, the new biography.

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Bill C. Malone is revered for his seminal "Country Music, USA," the 1968 tome many consider...
Bill C. Malone is revered for his seminal "Country Music, USA," the 1968 tome many consider to be the greatest published history of the genre to this day. And Bobbie Malone has published a number of books, specializing in American history outside of her husband’s favored musical interest.(Mark Golbach)

In the acclaimed eight-part documentary, the Bryants’ impact was given ample screen time, with iconic artists from country music’s past extolling the virtues of the classic songs the couple helped bring to the masses as Nashville morphed into an industry town dubbed “Music City.” Bill C. Malone’s was one of the authoritative voices heard throughout the eight-part series, helping viewers understand the importance of a wide range of country characters as the only nonmusician involved in the film’s final cut.

A graduate of the University of Texas, Bill C. Malone is revered for his seminal Country Music, USA, the 1968 tome many consider to be the greatest published history of the genre to this day. And for her part, Bobbie Malone has published a number of books, specializing in American history outside of her husband’s favored musical interest, recently working with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

If matrimonial devotion is a prime aspect of the Malones’ and Bryants’ life stories, so, too, is another serendipitous, invaluable and unpredictable commodity — the luck of impeccable timing.

“We’re professional historians,” Bobbie Malone says. “But unlike Felice and Boudleaux, we’re not great businesspeople, yet we know if anyone is going to pay attention to this book, it’s going to be now.”

The idea for the book came about when the Malones were in New Hampshire to screen a rough cut of Burns’ documentary. As it just so happened, so, too, was Del Bryant, Boudleaux and Felice’s youngest son. Seizing the moment, Bobbie Malone introduced herself to Del Bryant and expressed her interest in writing about his parents, though originally, she viewed the project only as an article for the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Capitalizing on the opportunity in his own way, Bill C. Malone asked Bobbie Malone, “Why don’t we write their biography? Why stop at an article?”

As accomplished as each Malone is, working together in this way was new, and it presented its own hurdles, which, unsurprisingly, they approached with the grace and humor that expert partnerships possess.

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“We work on things differently,” Bobbie Malone says. “People would ask us, ‘You and Bill have such a wonderful relationship; are you sure you want to do this?’ I can’t say we never disagreed. I kept wanting to put in more colorful details, so Bill called me ‘the color commentator.’”

The experience proved to be so fruitful for the Malones that they’re already working on a new project, a biography of noted bluegrass musician Tim O’ Brien. But again, the timing was a factor in how the couple moved forward together.

“I said, ‘What are we working on next?’” Bill C. Malone explains. “And she said, ‘What’s the hurry?’ Well, I’m 85.”