My singing was a serious gift that I respected all through my childhood, my life. I was skinny, a lefty, a Scorpio. My father called me "Whitey Skeeziks" but I identified with the "A" of Arthur: It was steeple-shaped, upward aspiring, hands in prayer: I loved my white satin collar when I sang in the temple.
I was the angel singer and I felt "touched."
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At twelve I was in my seventh year of being a singer when Paul and I got together: We became rehearsal freaks of fine exactitude. We did our version of doo-wop, copying Dion and the Belmonts. We wrote "A Guy Named Joe." We fused rock 'n' roll with country (rockabilly), the way Buddy Holly did. But it all took flight when Don and Phil Everly started having hits in 1957. We fell out over their sound. Every syllable of every word of every line had a shine, a great Kentucky inflection, charisma in the diction. From moment to moment they worked the mic with star quality. The Everlys were our models. Paul and I wrote our songs together and practiced getting a tooled, very detailed accuracy in our harmony. We came together, with mouths, a foot apart, under a dome of very fine listening, and fashioned a sonic entity of its own.