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\”You Know You Make Me Wanna Shout!\”: How Three Brothers Turned a Church Service Into Rock ‘n’ Roll
“You Know You Make Me Wanna Shout!”: How Three Brothers Turned a Church Service Into Rock ‘n’ Roll In the summer of 1959, three brothers from Cincinnati were dying on stage. Ronald, Rudolph, and O’Kelly Isley had gospel voices, matching suits, and a string of failed records. Rock ‘n’ roll was in a strange moment…
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The Isleys: A Family That Sang Through the Sorrow
Sixty years, three generations, six consecutive decades of hits — the Isley Brothers’ career is unmatched in popular music. But behind the chart records lies a family saga worthy of a novel: a brother lost in childhood, marriages made and unmade, a frontman reborn as a gangster-smooth alter ego, and siblings claimed by illness and…
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How the Isley Brothers Turned a Phil Spector Reject into “Twist and Shout”
It’s one of the great resurrection stories in pop history. In 1961, a song called “Twist and Shout” was recorded by a forgotten vocal group, produced by a 21-year-old Phil Spector — and it flopped so completely that its own co-writer disowned the recording. A year later, three brothers from Cincinnati took the same song…
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The Untold Story of the Isley Brothers: The Family That Reinvented Soul Music — Again and Again
No group in American music has reinvented itself as many times as the Isley Brothers. They started as a gospel quartet in the 1950s, became R&B shouters, survived Motown, founded their own label, turned into a funk-rock band, and ended up as hip-hop’s favorite sample source — charting hit singles in six consecutive decades, from…