The Isley Brothers: Unsung Pioneers of Rock 'N Roll

Darrell M. McNeil interrogates the factors that led an influential musical group to be excluded from a category they very much belonged in, for seven decades and counting.

JANUARY 01: Photo of ISLEY BROTHERS; Ernie, Kelly, Ronald, Chris Jasper, Rudolph and Marvin (Photo by Gilles Petard/Redferns)

The Isley Brothers have been an integral part of my ecosystem since I was 2 years old. At 60 now, my earliest cognitive memories include two pivotal 45s, “It’s Alright,” by The Impressions, and “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)” by The Isley Brothers. These records were the launchpad to my 40-plus year career in music. 

The inflection point came seven years later, my father holding court in front of the stereo, requisite Cutty Sark and Viceroy in hand. Screaming guitars threatened to tear paint off our walls. On the floor, a black album jacket featuring six glowering brothers in ornate silks, leathers, and denims. My 9-year-old brain reasoned they made those sounds, and I wanted to make those sounds, too. The Isley Brothers: 3+3 embedded in my young psyche like nothing else.

The Isleys, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, influenced legions of artists including: The Beatles, The Mamas & The Papas, Whitney Houston, Living Colour, The Yardbirds, The Doobie Brothers, George Michael, Kendrick Lamar, Robert Palmer, and Thundercat. Few articles have told the Isley’s story in full—the group usually characterized as adjunct to other popular figures—but their 67-year career is testament to their place as multi-generational legends in pop music, culture, and history.

However, despite their impact, the Isleys continue to be a criminally slighted keystone, especially regarding American pop music’s Black cultural foundation. As one of the first groups on the scene when the rock and roll genre broke, they spent their peak years fighting through an environment where rock morphed into a White-exclusive arena. Countless Black legends—Sly & The Family Stone, Labelle, Shuggie Otis, Richie Havens, Rufus, Betty Davis, Mother’s Finest, Funkadelic, and others—have been erased and reduced by the industry, being classified as “R&B and soul” acts, with fewer economic opportunities than rock musicians, and never getting recognition equal to their White peers—schisms documented voluminously as being exacerbated by the music industry and target-specific (i.e., segregated) media: a 1987 NAACP Report, “The Discordant Sound Of Music,” declared, “No other industry in America so openly classifies its operations on a racial basis… The structure of the industry allows for total White control and domination.”

The inflection point came seven years later, my father holding court in front of the stereo, requisite Cutty Sark and Viceroy in hand. Screaming guitars threatened to tear paint off our walls. On the floor, a black album jacket featuring six glowering brothers in ornate silks, leathers, and denims. My 9-year-old brain reasoned they made those sounds, and I wanted to make those sounds, too. The Isley Brothers: 3+3 embedded in my young psyche like nothing else.

Raised on equal parts urban, Album Oriented Rock, and Top 40 radio in the nation’s most cosmopolitan polyglot city—New York, N.Y.—this sophistry of rock and roll being a “Whites Only” tableau rang false, foreign, and entirely dissonant to me. I knew The Isley Brothers were definitionally rock artists, as were myriad other Black musical acts. And this was before my immersion in pioneers like Ike & Tina Turner, Little Richard, Big Mama Thorton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, The Coasters, Fats Domino, and before them, all the jump blues, boogie woogie, taproot Blues, gospel and Black Americana greats who laid rock’s foundation. The math on rock fabricated by most of its White producers, gatekeepers and followers was/is anathema to the facts.

This ultimately compelled me to write my first ever published book, “The Isley Brothers: 3+3,” from the iconic 33 1/3 series of books on pinnacle pop music albums from Bloomsbury Publishing. The Isleys were a lifeline to me, as a Black musician, writer and cultural steward, forced to negotiate my cultural standing in the world: a reminder, inspiration and affirmation that Black people not only belonged in these realms, but as the ore genesis for these genres, had ownership stake in these bedrock contributions to American popular culture. This served as my compass in the circles I traveled in my career, especially in joining the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a 501c3 advocacy group championing the creative freedom of Black artists, and later becoming its director of operations in 2000.

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I wanted to use the Isleys’ career as a lens through which to document the cultural transitions of rock music. Rock began as “rhythm and blues” through the 40s and 50s, and morphed into “rock ‘n roll” as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and other White acts copied these styles, avoiding the racial stigmas leveled at rock’s founding Black artists, while capturing the imaginations (and expendable income) of onboarding White youth. By the 70s, rock expunged Black artists wholesale from the genre, victims of falsehoods like “Black people don’t play or listen to rock,” “Black performers can’t sell albums,” or “Black music doesn’t sell in ‘general markets.’” Despite no support from the White rock establishment, the Isleys amassed a stretch of gold, platinum, and double platinum albums between 1971 and 1978, selling in equal volume to icons like Heart, John Lennon, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eric Clapton, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Allman Brothers, David Bowie, and others (several of whom were influenced by the Isleys). My book dissects how social biases and practices minimize Black performers, regardless of their success.

Such biases posed near-insurmountable challenges for The Isleys. Summarily, one of the most essential rock catalogs never got the spotlight it deserved—including the masterpiece that made the group an institution. Prior to 1973, The Isleys had a respectable, if not always consistent, 15-year career: a Grammy, four Top 40 hits and 21 songs in the Billboard Top 100. But they lacked the watershed moment that would ensconce them in the rock firmament. Then, that July, the flood gates finally burst: heralded by the classic, “That Lady,” The Isley Brothers 3+3 firmly established the group among elite circles. 

It was the first of eight successive platinum albums, their career and legend thereafter solidified (Billboard Black albums #2; Billboard pop albums #8, two million copies sold, and 20 weeks on the charts). It was a rare record by a Black act that hit urban, rock, and pop crowds equally, despite the chasm between Black and White formats and audiences. That The Isley Brothers 3+3 was so successful across all formats, despite both passive/active-aggressive resistance, is confirmation of oppositional components contributing in equal measure to its brilliance.

But the rock establishment threw every disqualifier at the Isleys, barely couched as “race-neutral” critique, oblivious to the paradox of White artists with sonically comparable work (Elton John, Leon Russell, Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, Hall & Oates, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bob Seger, Chicago, et. al). Eric Weisbard, critic, educator and organizer of EMP Pop Conference, notes in his book, Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, “Rock definitionally excluded the Black performers central to an earlier era’s rock and roll.”

As one of the first groups on the scene when the rock and roll genre broke, they spent their peak years fighting through an environment where rock morphed into a White-exclusive arena. Countless Black legends—Sly & The Family Stone, Labelle, Shuggie Otis, Richie Havens, Rufus, Betty Davis, Mother’s Finest, Funkadelic, and others—have been erased and reduced by the industry, being classified as “R&B and soul” acts, with fewer economic opportunities than rock musicians, and never getting recognition equal to their White peers…

In my research, I uncovered how integral the Isleys were to rock music history: their experiences in the wild frontier of early indie record labels; their connection to pivotal figures like Hugo & Luigi, Lieber & Stoller, George Goldner, Burt Bacharach, Bert Parks, Dionne Warwick, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Berry Gordy, Art Kass and Neil Bogart, Carole King, Clive Davis and so many others. What’s even more remarkable is how their music translated over three generations of fans and major shifts in musical styles: presently, they enjoy extended life as Black pop royalty, passionately embraced by Generation Hip Hop/R&B, authors of another string of million sellers, through new music, cameos, covers, or sampling, and expanded audiences through online music streams, YouTube, and social media.

Racism in entertainment and media is an ongoing fixture, and my book couldn’t be any timelier, as tightly held myths of rock and race have recently come under fire. Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, got called onto the carpet for his blatant racial myopia running the magazine. (Full disclosure: I co-authored the BRC’s op-ed in Rolling Stone’s on their former publisher.) Rocker Lenny Kravitz criticized Black media over its blind spot to Black rock artists. And Black pop icon Beyonce faced a backlash from country music gatekeepers for centering Black culture in country and Western music with her last release, Country Carter, despite the historic Black roots of Americana genres.

One admitted shortcoming of my book is I couldn’t talk to the Isleys directly, due to their hectic schedule. (Although, I’ve interviewed the group a few times in the past.) I wished to give flowers to the remaining group members while they are still here—Rudolph Isley sadly passed away during the book’s production, leaving Ronald (83), Ernie (72), and Chris Jasper (72) as the last survivors of the 3+3 iteration. Regrettably, I wasn’t able to immerse deeper into their creative process, nor have more candid conversations about them navigating industry racism for nearly seven decades, while still building new generations of fans. 

Nevertheless, the research and discovery were exhilarating, using bios, articles and Isley interviews from press archives to piece together their story. Juxtaposing their experiences against the array of people, places, and events they interacted with proved fascinating. and revealed a more nuanced understanding of their journey.

I believe fervently that the Isleys—and countless other Black artists—must be in the same conversations as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Bob Dylan, and other White rock icons. A more authentic conception of rock, with greater direction from those who were responsible for the genre’s creation (i.e., people of color, women, LGTBQIA), can go a long way to foster deeper consideration from wider audiences. 

With rock in decline for lack of inspiration and original ideas, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the genre continues to rob it of any legitimacy and hope for a resurgence.