Born in 1941 to Sallye Bernice (née Bell) and O\'Kelly Isley Sr, Isley was the third of six brothers (O\'Kelly Isley Jr., Rudolph Isley, Ronald, Vernon Isley, Ernie Isley, Marvin Isley. Ronald, like many of his siblings, began his career in the church. Isley began singing at the age of two, winning a $25 war bond for singing at a spiritual contest at the Union Baptist Church. By the age of seven, Isley was singing on-stage at venues such as the Regal Theater in Chicago, alongside Dinah Washington and a few other notables.\n', '

By his early teens, Isley was singing regularly with his brothers in church tours and also first appeared on TV on Ted Mack\'s Amateur Hour. In 1957, 16-year-old Isley and his two elder brothers O\'Kelly and Rudy then 19 and 18 moved to New York to pursue a music career. While in New York, Isley and his brother began recording doo-wop for local labels before landing a major deal with RCA Records in 1959; where the trio wrote and released their anthemic "Shout". By the summer of 1959, the Isley family had moved from Cincinnati to a home in Englewood, New Jersey.\n', '

For much of the Isley Brothers\' duration, Isley would remain the group\'s consistent member of the group as well as the lead vocalist for most of the group\'s tenure with sporadic lead shares with his older brothers. In 1969, Isley reformed T-Neck Records with his brothers in a need to produce themselves without the control of record labels, forming the label shortly after ending a brief tenure with Motown. In 1973, the group\'s style and sound drastically changed following the release of the 3 + 3 album where brothers Ernie Isley and Marvin Isley and in-law Chris Jasper permanently enter the brothers\' lineup, writing the music and lyrics to the group\'s new sound. The younger brothers had been providing instrumental help for the brothers since the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, Isley was living in Teaneck, New Jersey.\n', '

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