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Phil Everly, 74, died Friday in a Burbank, Calif., hospital. His son Jason tells The Associated Press, NPR and other news outlets that the legendary singer suffered from chronic pulmonary disease.

Everly’s brother Don, now 76, is among the other survivors.

Their webpage on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame catalog of inductees rightly notes that the brothers “transformed the Appalachian folk, bluegrass and country sounds of their Kentucky boyhood into a richly harmonized form of rock and roll. … With Don taking the melody and Phil harmonizing above him, the Everlys released a steady string of hit records between 1957 and 1962 that crossed over from country to pop and even R&B charts.”

Those hits included:

— “Bye Bye Love”

— “Wake Up Little Susie”

— “All I Have to Do Is Dream”

They also wrote songs that became hits for others, including:

— “Cathy’s Clown”

— “When Will I Be Loved”

— “(‘Til) I Kissed You.”

But a list of hits doesn’t do justice to their place in rock ‘n’ roll. As the Hall of Fame adds, the brothers’ “close-harmony singing directly influenced a rising tide of musicians that included the Beatles, the Hollies, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds.”

Last October, singer Graham Nash talked on Fresh Air about how the Everly Brothers about what happened the first time he and friend Allan Clarke heard “Bye Bye Love.” The English lads were at a school dance when they started to walk across the room:

“We got halfway across the floor and ‘Bye Bye Love’ by The Everly Brothers came on — and it stopped us in our tracks. We sang together, so we knew what two-part harmony was, but this sounded so unbelievably beautiful. … Ever since that day, I decided that whatever music I was going to make in the future, I wanted it to affect people the same way The Everly Brothers’ music affected me on that Saturday night.”

Nash and Clarke would go on to found The Hollies, and Nash would later be part of the super group Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young, of course).

When Simon and Garfunkel toured in 2003, Rolling Stone writes:

“They knew only one group could possibly share the bill with them: the Everly Brothers. As teenagers, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel used to sing Everly Brothers songs on the grounds of Forest Hills High School. They were their single biggest influence, with no close second. …

“Simon and Garfunkel didn’t want their biggest influences to actually open for them, so the Everlys were called onstage in the middle of the show to perform ‘Wake Up Little Susie,’ ‘Let It Be Me’ and ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ before Simon and Garfunkel came back out to join them on ‘Bye Bye Love.’ Seeing two of the most combative duos in rock history all sharing the stage was a pretty incredible sight.”

Both of those famous duos split and reunited over the course of their careers. As the AP says, the Everly Brothers “broke up amid quarreling in 1973 after 16 years of hits. … Their breakup came dramatically during a concert at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. Phil Everly threw his guitar down and walked off, prompting Don Everly to tell the crowd, ‘The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago.’ ”

But the brothers reunited 10 years later, “sealing it with a hug,” Phil Everly said.

Update at 4 p.m. ET. They Were “Most Beautiful Sounding Duo I Ever Heard,” Paul Simon Says.

From The New York Times:

“Paul Simon, whose song ‘Graceland’ includes vocals by Phil and Don Everly, said in an email on Saturday morning: ‘Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock and roll.’ ”

The brothers were among the original inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. That April, Don Everly talked with NPR’s Noah Adams about their singing and their career.

“Sometimes I look at Phil,” he said, “and … it sounds to me like when Phil and I hit that one spot — I call it ‘the Everly Brothers’ — I don’t know where it is. It’s not me or it’s not him. It’s the two of us together. … It amazes me sometimes.”

Lou Reed, the singer and songwriter whose work as a solo artist and as the leader of cult-favorite band The Velvet Underground influenced generations of musicians, has died at age 71.

Rumors of Reed’s possible demise have been circulating for the past week; his death was first reported Sunday by Rolling Stone. The magazine notes that he received a liver transplant earlier this year.

Update at 3:45 p.m. ET: Reed’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, has confirmed to NPR that Reed died Sunday morning at 11, of complications related to his liver transplant. We’ve made slight changes to this post to reflect that confirmation. Our original post continues:

Lewis Allan “Lou” Reed was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1942. The musician’s official Facebook page didn’t announce his passing overtly, choosing instead to post a photo titled “The Door” Sunday morning. More than 1,000 notes of condolence and grief soon followed.

Reed’s songs as a guitarist for The Velvet Underground and later during his solo career blended art and noise in deceptively simple combinations, with his New York-inflected voice telling stories of street deals and odd characters.

“One chord is fine,” he said of his approach to the guitar, in Rolling Stone’s obituary. “Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”

In a remembrance of Reed, NPR’s Neda Ulaby quotes his Velvet Underground co-founder and longtime collaborator John Cale explaining that the band didn’t care to make things easy for their listeners:

“We were not user-friendly at all,” Cale told NPR in 2000. “Anyone listening to a bass guitar and regular guitar coming out of the same amp — it couldn’t have been a really great listening experience.”

Along with Cale on viola, bass and other instruments, the band’s core personnel included drummer Moe Tucker and guitarist Sterling Morrison. Bassist Doug Yule later replaced Cale in the lineup.

The band’s first two albums, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and White Light/White Heat (1968), became touchstones of art-rock for generations that followed. A third self-titled album, produced without Cale, included the mournful “Pale Blue Eyes.”

In a career that spanned New York’s Andy Warhol-era experimental art scene and included the unlikely hit “Walk on the Wild Side,” Reed never lost his sense of urban grit and cool.

“Walk on the Wild Side came from Transformer, Reed’s second solo album that was produced by David Bowie and released in 1972. On the strength of that single and songwriting gems such as “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love,” the album cemented Reed’s status as a star whose music will be played for decades to come.

As Neda reports, “Walk on the Wild Side” was Reed’s only Top 40 hit; the song’s iconic bass line has been sampled and evoked by musicians producing everything from rock and club music to hip-hop.

Reed is survived by his wife, the musician Laurie Anderson; the pair wed in 2008.