Every great kiss-off needs a beat you can dance to. “It’s Your Thing,” released in February 1969, is three minutes of funk built around a single refusal: I can’t tell you who to sock it to. The Isley Brothers aimed it, barely disguised, at the most powerful man in Black music. Berry Gordy had signed them to Motown, given them one hit, and then — in their reading of events — shelved them behind the acts he favoured. So the brothers left, revived their own label, wrote and produced their own record, and watched it outsell almost everything Motown released that year. It peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the R&B chart, sold a million copies and won a Grammy. It is difficult to think of a more successful resignation letter.
Second Tier at Hitsville
The frustration had been building for years. By the time they signed to Motown, the Isleys were veterans: the group had been performing since 1954, had broken through with “Shout” in 1959 and “Twist and Shout” in 1962, and had already recorded for a string of labels without ever quite becoming the stars their live reputation promised. Motown was supposed to fix that. In 1966 the label gave them a genuine classic in “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” But one hit was all Motown seemed inclined to give them. The brothers came to feel they had been cast as a second-tier act, while the label’s established Detroit stars — the Temptations, the Miracles, the Four Tops — received the promotion, the material and the attention. In Britain, where a re-release of “This Old Heart of Mine” reached number three on the UK Singles Chart, their standing was higher than it was at home, and a successful UK tour sharpened the sense that the problem was not the group. It was the arrangement.
In late 1968 they left. Gordy, to his credit, allowed the brothers to go, and the Isleys reactivated T-Neck Records, the label they had first formed back in 1964, before the Motown signing, and struck a distribution deal with Buddah Records. The name was a piece of New Jersey geography: Teaneck, the town where the family had settled. The first release on the revived label would be a statement of intent, and Ronald Isley wrote it on an ordinary weekday errand.
A Melody on the School Run
Ronald later said the song came to him after he arrived home from taking his daughter Tawana to school: the melody and part of the lyric arrived in his head, whole, and his older brothers O’Kelly and Rudolph helped him finish the words. The lyric the three of them assembled is a marvel of economy — barely more than a chorus, a taunt and a shrug. “It’s your thing, do what you wanna do” is at once a lover’s ultimatum and a mission statement, and in the mouth of a group that had just escaped the most controlling hit factory in America, nobody in the business missed the second meaning. All three brothers took the writing credit; all three produced the record themselves. For the first time in their career, there was no middleman between the Isleys and the public.
Two Takes at A&R
The session, at A&R Studios in New York in January 1969, was as unadorned as the song’s message. The record was cut in two takes. Behind Ronald’s lead vocal and his brothers’ harmonies stood a band anchored by two details that matter to the family’s later history: on guitar was Charles “Skip” Pitts, and on bass, playing on an Isley Brothers record for the first time, was the youngest brother, sixteen-year-old Ernie Isley. Woody Woodson played drums, Herb Rooney piano, and George Patterson supplied saxophone and arrangement, with the horn figures arranged by the brothers themselves.
What they captured was among the first fully fledged funk records — leaner than James Brown, looser than Motown, 2 minutes and 47 seconds of bass, horns and handclaps that Pitchfork would later describe as exploding into “a euphoric storm of woozy, joyous psych-funk.” The younger generation of Isleys quite literally walks into the record on this track; within four years Ernie, Marvin Isley and Chris Jasper would be full members, and the trio would become the self-contained band of 3 + 3.
Number Two in Pop, Number One in Soul
Released on 16 February 1969 as T-Neck single TN 901, with “Don’t Give It Away” on the B-side, “It’s Your Thing” rose with a speed that settled the argument about who had been holding whom back. It peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 — held off the top only by the Fifth Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” — and reached number one on the R&B chart, the group’s first chart-topper there. Cash Box also placed it at number two; it reached number three in Canada, number nine in France and number 30 in Britain, and finished 1969 at number 21 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100 — a remarkable showing for an independent-label single released by three brothers with no corporate machinery behind them beyond a distribution deal. The parent album, named with a broad grin It’s Our Thing, climbed to number 22 on the pop album chart. The single became the group’s second million-seller, after “Shout.”
Motown did not concede gracefully. Gordy threatened legal action, arguing in effect that the group had recorded the song while still under contract to him — a claim that hung over the Isleys for years before a 1975 court decision finally resolved the dispute in the brothers’ favour. The threat changed nothing about the outcome: the record was out, it was enormous, and it belonged entirely to the family that made it.
The Grammy, and the Long Tail
In February 1970, at the 12th Annual Grammy Awards, “It’s Your Thing” won Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group — making the Isleys, as the histories note, the first former Motown act to win a Grammy. The song was also nominated for Best Rhythm & Blues Song. It remained the group’s only competitive Grammy win, though the Academy later added the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, closing a circle that had opened in a New York studio forty-five years earlier. Rolling Stone would eventually place the song at number 420 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
The afterlife has been almost as busy as the record. The Temptations — Motown royalty, covering the escapees — recorded it the same year, on Puzzle People; Ann Peebles cut it for her 1969 debut album; saxophonist Lou Donaldson turned it into a jazz instrumental on Hot Dog in 1969, and Grant Green followed on Alive! in 1970. The Jackson 5, not yet stars, performed it at their television debut on the Miss Black America Pageant and recorded it during the sessions for their 1970 album ABC, though that version stayed in the vault until the Soulsation! box set in 1995. Led Zeppelin were slipping an instrumental snatch of it into live medleys with “Communication Breakdown” as early as June 1969. Aretha Franklin cut it in 1982, for Jump to It. James Brown, never a man to let a groove go unanswered, built Marva Whitney’s “It’s My Thing (You Can’t Tell Me Who to Sock It To)” on its backing and returned to the well for his own “My Thang” in 1974. Salt-N-Pepa and E.U. sampled it for their 1988 hit “Shake Your Thang,” and Kanye West’s “Power” rides on a sample of Cold Grits’ instrumental version. Billboard has ranked it among the thirty greatest funk songs of all time. More than sixty artists have recorded the song in all.
Nor was the single a one-off flourish. T-Neck, the label it launched, became the brothers’ platform for their biggest decade: in the 1970s the expanded six-piece Isleys would release a run of top-selling albums on it and its successors, including 3 + 3, The Heat Is On — a number one album on the Billboard 200 — and Between the Sheets. The independence declared in three minutes in 1969 turned out to be a business plan, not a gesture.
But the statistic that best explains “It’s Your Thing” is not a chart position. It is the sequence: leave the biggest label in your world, revive your own, write the song on the way back from the school run, cut it in two takes with your teenage brother on bass — and beat your old boss with it. The Isley Brothers did not just sing about doing their own thing. They organised their entire business around it, and this record is the sound of the door closing behind them.