It's Your Thing

In this song, Ronald Isley is letting a girl know that she is free to spread her love around, as long as he gets some of it too. "It's Your Thing" was a popular saying at the time and wonderfully ambiguous, so it could have a sexual connotation or simply be about personal independence. Another line in the song is similarly ambiguous: I can't tell you who to sock it to Aretha Franklin had popularized the "sock it to me" line in her version of "Respect," clearly with prurient intent. Ronald, who wrote most of the song, liked the double-meaning of these lines, which made the song risqué and radio-friendly at the same time.

This was the first hit the Isleys wrote and produced themselves. They had been recording for Motown, but left the label in 1968 to take more control of their music. This was their first release after leaving Motown, and it was a huge success, hitting #1 on the R&B charts and selling over two million copies. The group never had a bigger chart hit in America, but became one of the top acts of the '70s, enjoying the creative control that came with recording on their own label.

In an interview on The Isley Brothers: Summer Breeze Greatest Hits Live DVD, Ronald Isley says he wrote this song while dropping his daughter off at school one day. He didn't want to forget the lyrics so he hummed it in his head and rushed straight to his mother's house to write it out. He sang it for his eldest brother O'Kelly, who thought it to be a hit, so they set up studio time to record it. Ronald, O'Kelly and Rudolph Isley are the credited writers on the song.