They’re the only group in the history of music to have a demonstrable influence on both the Beatles (who covered the Isleys’ take of “Twist And Shout” for one of their biggest early hits) and Ice Cube (who rapped over this album’s “Footsteps In The Dark, Pts.

More than maybe any other band or artist, you can chart the changes in Black music - how it was played and what it was called - via the Isleys. They started in gospel, but in the decade-and-a-half since their first LP, Shout!, they’d gone from rock ’n’ roll upstarts, to Motown signees, to Black Power soul brothers, to acoustic folk balladeers, to, in the early ’70s, pioneers of funk and arguably the most visible and popular group working in that genre. But the bigger change was in the group’s sound. A second generation of brothers Isley had joined O’Kelly, Ronald and Rudolph in the group, as Ernie, Marvin, and in-law Chris Jasper had become members of the band full-time for 1973’s 3+3. The Isley Brothers, all five of them, who decamped to upstate New York in 1976 to record the funk classic Go For Your Guns, were not the same Isley Brothers who started as a precocious gospel group more than 20 years earlier.

“With the possible exception of the Beatles, no band in the history of popular music, and certainly no African American act, has left a more substantial legacy on popular music than the Isley Brothers.” - Bob Gulla, ‘Icons of R&B and Soul’

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