The Isleys’ folk-rock moment

Dress me up for battle when all I want is peace / Those of us who pay the price come home with the least…

The news of Rudolph Isley’s death took me back to a particularly cherished period in the Isley Brothers’ long history: the time between 1971 and 1976 when they found an effective way of bringing Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter music into their world of gospel, soul and R&B.

After putting the commercially disappointing Motown years behind them and scoring a huge hit in 1969 on their own label, T-Neck, with the funky “It’s Your Thing”, the three of them — Ronald, Rudolph and O’Kelly — posed for the cover of the 1971 album Givin’ It Back in sepia tones and casual dress with acoustic guitars. The album included Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”, a conga-driven version of Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”, James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Neil Young’s “Ohio”. With their next album, Brother, Brother, Brother in 1972, they covered three songs from Carole King’s Southern California period, including a perfectly paced 10-minute version of “It’s Too Late”. The cover of that album was a bleached-out black and white triple portrait, like a Black Panthers pamphlet.

The secret behind this new direction for a veteran group was the arrival of three younger members. Ernie and Marvin Isley on guitar and bass guitar and Chris Jasper on keyboards brought with them new sounds and new attitudes. In 1973 this realignment was made explicit in the title of the group’s first album under a new deal with Columbia Records: 3+3 was one of the best albums of the decade, full of wonderful tracks, including a couple of original compositions, “If You Were There” and “What It Comes Down To”, that showed how their writing had been positively influenced by the borrowed material and how far their arrangements had moved from standard R&B moves.

The cover picture may have been back in full high-styled Soul Men mode, which perhaps betrayed an uncertainty about the response from their established following, but musically the album persisted with their new direction and contained their masterpiece from this period. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” was a decent song when James Taylor recorded it on his fourth solo album, One Man Dog, in 1971. In the Isleys’ hands it took on a new dimension.

The opening three seconds alone are magical: Ernie’s acoustic guitar figure, Marvin’s bass, Jasper’s piano and George Morland’s drums are like an indrawn breath, gently tipping Brother Ronald into the opening line. “Do me wrong, do me right, baby / Tell me lies, but hold me tight.” The vocal delivery is exquisite, every phrase subtly teased and inflected, bringing all the arts of the Baptist church-trained soul singer to bear on the task of creating emotional torment, without for a moment overdoing it. The rhythm section remain focused on their task of providing one of the greatest singers of his type with a platform of impeccable steadiness and infinite sensitivity.

All that — and an almost equally stunning version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” on Live It Up in 1973 — would lead in 1976 to “Harvest for the World”, their own composition, a thoughtful and carefully crafted protest song in which all these resources are brought to bear: the gentle but resilient strummed acoustic guitar, the chorded acoustic piano, the supple bass underpinning, the handclaps on the backbeat and the shrewdly timed tom-tom turnarounds, deployed with a gentle restraint and a quiet grace that strengthen the song’s impact. The two lines quoted at the top show how the message of a good anti-war song can pass from one generation to the next, always sadly relevant.