Episode 81: “Shout” by the Isley Brothers

A history of folk music in 500 songs.

Episode 81

Shout by the Isley Brothers.

Today we're going to take one of our rare looks, at this point in the story anyway, at an act that is still touring today.

Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months.

Of course, events have overtaken that, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we've looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally, rather than doing international tours playing major venues.

Of course, the version of the Isley brothers touring today isn't quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group's lead singer, remains in the group, and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists.

The Isleys had top 40 hits in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and as recently as 2006, they had an album go to number one on the RB charts.

But today, we're going to look back at the group's very first hit from 1959.

You know, you make me wanna talk, kick my heels up and down.

Throw my hand up and down, throw my head back and talk.

Come on now, don't forget to say you will.

Don't forget to say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Say you

The Isley brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born.

Indeed, even before their parents were married.

When O.

Kelly Isley Sr.

was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, He told his father-in-law to be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going going to be the next Mills brothers.

Isley Sr.

had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups, the Isleys seemed to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves.

As it turned out, O'Kelly and Sally Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group.

Like many black vocal groups in the early 50s, they were a gospel group, and O'Kelly Jr., Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents.

They appeared on Ted Mac's Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show, which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won.

Their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing.

But then tragedy struck.

Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen.

The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer.

It would be two years before they would perform live again.

By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon.

Eventually, a compromise was reached between parents and brothers.

Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers' favourite act, Billy Ward and the Dominoes.

We've talked before about how Billy Ward and the Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became Soul, with hit records like Have Mercy, Baby.

I know I've done you wrong.

Now my heart is full of sorrow.

So take me back where I belong.

I've been a good for nothing.

Both Ward's original lead singer Clyde McFatter and MacFater's later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing.

And so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes.

As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to MacFatter and to Wilson.

Indeed, Ronald has talked about MacFatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it's never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know MacFatter.

But their real mentor was a much less well known singer, Beulah Bryant.

The three eldest Isley brothers, O'Kelly, Rudolph and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes.

Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the 50s through to the 80s, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records.

When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all.

But Brian had contacts in the music industry and started making phone calls for her young protégés, trying to get them bookings.

At first, she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo, and occasionally performed at their amateur nights.

Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazaro to listen to them over the phone.

Nazaro was known as the Monster Agent.

He was one of the most important booking agents in New York.

but he wasn't exactly fair to his young clients.

He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people.

Nazaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent's share.

Nizaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone, rather than singing to him live.

When he found out they really did sound like that, Nizaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of.

They went from having no money at all to playing on Vroadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O.

Kelly Isley Jr.'s later recollection.

This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s.

But they still hadn't made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like Rock and Roll Waltz by Kay Starr.

Let's do the Rock and Roll Walt.

It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for, and nor was their first record.

They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill Bass Gordon and Ben Smith.

As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith, and it's quite difficult to sort out which was which.

Even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page.

As Ben Smith the Saxe player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him,

in which case this Ben Smith probably also played Alto Sax for Lucky Millander's Band and wrote the hit I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem for for Glenn Miller.

It's more certain exactly who Bill Bass Gordon was.

He was the leader of Bill Bass Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wap track, Two Loves Have I.

Two loves have I

and the Jamie of God.

Well, two loves have I

both are in my heart.

Money is a flame.

Well, I'll be ever as far.

Lots of love have I,

and you both are in my heart.

Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957, the first Isley Brothers single, Angels Crayed, came out.

The day that you left me, my love

The teardrops fell down

from above

because we had to pour

too.

Unfortunately, the single didn't have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label.

According to O'Kelly Isley, they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract.

But the Isley Brothers knew better.

They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they'd signed it, rather than being filed, and they'd swiped it from the desk when no one was looking.

Teenage didn't have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label.

They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner.

Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers and the Chantelles, as well as his own group, the Valentines.

Will there go

fairly move it now alive?

Taking my baby away.

By this point, Barrett had established an almost production line method of making records.

He would blockbook a studio and some backing musicians for up to 24 hours, get as many as 10 different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett.

The Isley's first record with Barrett, Don't Be Jealous, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley.

There's some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group.

It certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three.

Either way, the song doesn't show much of the style that the Isley brothers would later make their own.

Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the coasters mold, had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of old MacDonald.

They were nearly there, but not quite.

The next single, I Wanna Know, came closer.

You can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people's successful records.

Ronald Isley's vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano ripping that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own.

But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore.

But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin.

A A few more singles were released on Gone, often pairing a previously released track with a new B-side, but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner's label.

But just as they'd moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit.

They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA Records, and the duo signed them up.

Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange figures in popular music in the 1950s.

They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children's records, before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of Black Records that we've talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling.

Dance with my Henry,

you better dance while the music goes on.

Roll on, roll on, roll on, while the cats stop balling.

You

After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Maurice Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed.

Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a 50% stake in the new label.

While they were there, they showed they didn't really get rock and roll music at all.

They produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who'd had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lyman.

broke them in little pieces.

And I knew you do.

So you lie awake to sing up a nose all night.

So you think that love's about

time

and life.

But they still managed to produce a string of hits like Honeycomb by Jimmy Rogers, who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name, which went to number one.

Well, it's a darn good life, and it's kind of funny how the Lord made the bee, and the bee made the honey, and the honey bee looking for a home.

And they called it a honeycomb.

And they roamed the world and they gathered all of the honeycomb in the one sweet fall.

And the honeycomb from a million trips

made my baby's ellipse honeycomb.

I won't you be my baby.

Well, the honeycomb be my own.

Got a handkerchief and a piece of bony made a walk and they also recorded their own tracks for roulette, like the instrumental Chawawa.

After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA.

Maurice Levy let them go, so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth.

At RCA, they continued their own recording career with records like Just Come Home.

and free.

I'll be asking you

no

questions.

Just come home,

my love, do me.

They also produced several albums for Pericomo, so you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Aisley brothers.

And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there there was at least some creative difference there.

I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis's films, and has a generic, lightweight backing track, apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part.

The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant.

and in some ways even groundbreaking.

It doesn't sound like a late 50s record as much as it does an early 60s one, and one could imagine, say, Jerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record.

But it falls between the stools of RB and Pop, and doesn't quite convince us either.

That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with.

But it didn't quite work for the Islees yet.

But their second single for RCA was far more successful.

At this point, the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people.

And one song they performed regularly was Lonely Teardrops, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Raquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson.

Say you will.

My heart is crying, crying.

Lonely till it drops.

My beauty never drive.

Lonely till it drops.

The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Eisley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line, Say You Will, from Wilson's song.

He'd start doing a call-and-response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response, Shout.

These improvised, extended endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles' records too, especially What Did I Say and I Got a Woman.

When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of Lonely Teardrops, had gone.

The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still Lonely Teardrops and just perform the extended tag.

As it turned out, they kept in a little of Lonely Teardrops, the Say You Will, Say You Will line, and the resulting song, like Ray Charles's similar call-and-response-based What Did I Say?, was split over two sides of a single, as Shout Parts 1 and 2.

Say that you love me, say that

That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Eisley Brothers' first chart hit, reaching number 47.

More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher.

In the USA, Joey D and the Starlighters made number six in 1962 with their version.

Yeah, you want to let me go.

Hey, yeah, I want you to know.

I bet I want you to know right now.

You've been good to me, baby.

In the UK, Lulu and the Lovers made number seven in 1964.

I bet I want you to know right now.

You've been good to me, baby.

Better bed to myself.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you remember,

I don't want nobody else, yeah,

yeah, because I want you to know,

no, I did I want you to know right now

you know you'll make me wanna see and in Australia, Johnny O'Keefe released his version only a month after the Aisleys released theirs and reached number two.

You know you'll make me wanna talk, Roll my hands up and stop.

Kick my hands and stop.

Kick my heels up and stop.

Come on, nice up, take it easy.

Take it easy.

Despite all these cover versions, the Isley's version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty.

It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album.

Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isley's original, Respectable, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the Shout style.

Sometimes, this almost worked, as on Ring-a-Ling-A Ling, Let the Wedding Bells Ring, whose words are close enough to Little Richard style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively.

But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin's How Deep is the Ocean?

or He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination.

They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of Shout.

At this point, they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Lieber and Stoller.

Lieber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides, they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Lieber and Stoller song Teach Me How to Shimmy, and the ISD's own Standing on the Dance Floor, a rewrite of an old gospel song called Standing at the Judgment.

shut up,

shut up, shut up.

I said, oh, shut up, shut up, I'll leave us.

What is he doing?

Standing on the death, the way upon me.

But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year and signing with a tiny label, Scepter.

After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie.

They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder.

But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one-hit, combined with the dance craze.

The Eisley brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but Twist and Shout is a story for another time.

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