Rudolph Isley, a co-founder and a former member of the Isley Brothers band has died at the age of 84. The cause of his death has not been made public.
“There are no words to express my feelings and the love I have for my brother. Our family will miss him. But I know he’s in a better place,” Ronald Isley said in a statement released Thursday by an Isley Brothers publicist.
Rudolph Isley began singing in church with brothers Ronald and O’Kelly (another sibling, Vernon, died at age 13).
He was still a teenager when his song “Shout,” a secularized gospel rave, blew up in the 1950s.
The song was later immortalized during the toga party scene in “Animal House.”
They got another top song “Twist and Shout” which was released in the early 1960s. The Beatles, a popular group used it as the closing song on their debut album and opened with it for their famed 1965 concert at Shea Stadium.
The Isleys’ other hits included “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” later covered by Rod Stewart, and the Grammy-winning “It’s Your Thing.”
They also had hit singles like “That Lady” and “Fight the Power (Part 1)” and such million-selling albums as “The Heat Is On” and “Go for Your Guns.”
Rudolph Isley left the group in 1989, three years after the sudden death of O’Kelly Isley, to become a Christian minister.
