It was Career Day at a school in Arkansas
sometime in the mid-1950s. When it was Al
Green’s turn to tell his classmates what he
hoped to be when he grew up, he said, “I want to
be a singer.” He might as well have said he
wanted to be a comedian. His classmates, all of
whom planned to follow more conventional career
paths by becoming firemen, nurses, and teachers,
laughed themselves silly. The teacher didn’t
laugh, but explained to the boy that his chances
were a million to one, and he needed to be
realistic. “I don’t want to be realistic,” he
said. “I want to be a singer.” In his
autobiography, he wrote, “As far as I was
concerned, the case was closed.”
And so it was. When Rolling Stone named
Green one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All
Time, Justin Timberlake wrote, “People are born
to do certain things and Al was born to make us
smile.” Reflecting on his own success, Green
said, “You’ve got to take your time, go for what
you want and never give up.”
He was born on April 13, 1946 in Forrest City,
Arkansas, the sixth-born in a family that grew
to ten children. Singing came naturally to the
Greene family (Al would later drop the final
“e”), everyone of whom, he remembered, “seemed
to have the ability to make a joyful noise.”
His father was a sharecropper who worked hard to
feed and clothe his family, but “I wonder if all
that hard work didn’t rob him of the simple
satisfaction of being a father. . . but that’s
just another of poverty’s curses: A man will lay
down his life, only to die a stranger to his own
flesh and blood.”
Like most sharecroppers, his father worked to
survive only to survive to work another day.
One night in 1955, he ordered the family to
start packing. “Where we goin’?” they asked.
“Outta here.” Piling into their truck, Al
remembers having no clue where they were heading
until they arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
An outsider at school, he shunned sports (“I
thought chasing balls around was a complete
waste of time”) and was “something of a loner,
the skinny kid in the back of the class who
keeps to himself and doesn’t speak unless spoken
to.” But, he recalled, “there’s something about
a loner that attracts the wrong kind of
attention,” and one day a gang of bullies
roughed him up in the schoolyard, knocking him
down and kicking him repeatedly. The next day,
he smashed a Coke bottle over the head of the
“biggest and meanest one” until the bully fell
to his knees, his face covered in blood.
Suddenly, Al Green was a bad dude, equally
feared and admired by his peers. “I might have
fooled everyone with my mean and menacing
demeanor - everyone, that is, but myself.”
Sensitive and vulnerable, he found that he could
express his true self only in music.
“I sought out every opportunity I could to sing,
and if anyone thought it strange that the
toughest kid on the school yard also had the
sweetest voice in the school choir, well, I
guess they didn’t dare say a thing about it.” He
had found something more fulfilling than being a
tough guy. “I’d found something I truly loved to
do. . . and was truly good at.” Music
transported him “away from those dirty streets
and dangerous playgrounds and crowded
tenements.”
When rock ‘n’ roll exploded in 1956, Green was
just the right age to be affected, and he became
a fan of Elvis (“that smooth as silk delivery”),
Fats Domino, Little Richard, Otis Redding, and
Sam Cooke. “But the one who opened my ears to
what real singing - not to mention style and
showmanship - was all about was ‘Mr. Excitement,
Mr. Delightment, himself, Jackie Wilson.”
Wilson’s voice was “the closest thing I could
imagine to an acrobat on a flying trapeze. . .”
However, his musical influences go back even
earlier to “the rain on the window, the wind in
the corn crops, or the water lapping on the
banks of the river. That is music to my ears -
the music of creation.”
Like many another parent, his father disapproved
of his son’s interest in what many preachers
condemned as the devil’s music. It also
threatened to derail his own plan for the family
to strike it rich as gospel singers. The Greene
Family toured the South and Midwest, enjoying
some modest success, but Al continued to listen
to rock ‘n’ roll. In 1960 at the age of 14, he
finally had a showdown with his father. “I had
an Elvis Presley album,” he told NPR, “and Dad
said ‘That’s a bunch of junk, man, you need to
consider what you’re doin’. You’re singing
gospel music.’” When his father caught him
listening to Jackie Wilson, that was the final
straw. Al was given the boot.
“I had nowhere to go, really,” he said, but a
friend from high school took him in. It so
happens that the friend was a tenor singer in a
group called the Creations and Al was invited to
join. “We used to rehearse in the house,
everyday. We would just get up, stand in a line
and form, and try to come up with little dances
like we saw the Temptations do on TV.”
In 1969, he met Willie Mitchell, a producer who
enlisted him to sing backup on a record he was
making in Memphis. The ambitious Greene asked
Mitchell how long it would take for him to
become a star. Mitchell said “Well, about two
years, probably, if you really work at it.” It
wasn’t what Greene wanted to hear. As he told
NPR, “I said, ‘Excuse me, I don’t have the time.
I don’t have two years to waste on practicing to
be a star. In fact, I need some money now.’”
Impressed with his brash attitude, Mitchell took
Green to Hi Records where he borrowed $1500 to
produce a record. “This kid’s gonna be
phenomenal,” he told them.
Their first collaboration, a cover of the
Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” wasn’t
quite his style, and neither were several
follow-ups. “We was tryin’ to find Al Green,”
the singer recalled. “Who is this guy with the
high falsetto and the rough voice?” Mitchell
advised him to sing “mellow,” and Green decided
to “sing whatever comes out.” Somewhere along
the line, they found Al Green. In 1971, the
public found him too, and turned his self-penned
“Tired of Bein’ Alone” into a hit on both the
pop and R&B charts.
In 1971, he hit number one with what would
become his signature song, “Let’s Stay
Together,” kicking off a streak of thirteen top
ten hits that would include “I’m Still in Love
With You,” “Sha La La (Make Me Happy),” and
“Call Me.”
The music that Green was making with Mitchell
represented a new standard in soul music. To
critic Scott Spencer, the hits that Green
recorded from 1971 to 1977 are “unsurpassed in
their subtlety, grace, intimacy and invention.”
They also influenced a future generation of
singers. “Hearing Al as a kid made me want to
become a singer and showed me that it was OK to
have a softer, more falsetto voice,” Justin
Timberlake said. “When you watch him perform,
you see something honest and soulful and
amazing.”
In recalling that golden period more than three
decades later, producer Mitchell told The New
Yorker that “When I first got Al to come
into the studio, I knew he was special and I
knew I had to be perfect to capture it. So I
tried to use all kinds of mikes for his voice.”
The mike he considered the best at capturing
Green’s voice and making his whispers sound as
emotional as his shouts was an RCA 77DX ribbon
microphone that Mitchell labeled number 9.
“Nobody else is ever gonna use that mike,”
Mitchell declared. When Green and Mitchell
parted ways several years later, the microphone
went in the box, and stayed there until the
singer and producer reunited for the 2003 album,
I Can’t Stop.
Al Green was a star now, and he lived like one.
“There’s no way in the world a man can stay
humble and contrite beneath the blinding light
of fame.” He built himself a mansion and did not
resist the temptations of the wine and women
that seemed to go so naturally with song.
“I have had carnal relations with more women
than I can remember or confess,” he said. “I was
a no good, woman-huntin,’ champagne-drinking,
good time having, Saturday night, blues singing
man.”
In 1974, tragedy struck when a former girlfriend
poured boiling cream of wheat on him while he
was taking a bath and then turned a gun on
herself. The incident inspired nasty headlines
and became a part of his myth. The media
continues to resurrect the sordid event when
attempting to explain the singer’s decision to
embrace God.
“People in journalism like to say that that was
the reason, but I was born again in ‘73,” Green
told NPR’s Terri Gross years later. “This
incident happened in 1974. So they really don’t
correlate.” As he explained to Scott Spencer of
Rolling Stone in 2000, the year his
autobiography, Take Me to the River, was
published, “God told me I could have more
clothes than I could ever possibly wear, and
more food than I could ever eat, and more cars
than I could ever drive, and all that money. And
then he said to me, ‘I kept my side of the
bargain - what about you?’”
While Green recovered from his burns, Al
Green’s Greatest Hits was released in early
1975, becoming one of his fastest selling
albums. Later that year, Rolling Stone
called 1975's Al Green Is Love
“undoubtedly Green’s best album in several
years, thanks to a rare unity of feeling and
mood, and a refinement of style.” It was with
1977's Belle that the Saturday night
blues singing man began to sing from the light
of Sunday morning. The title cut found Green’s
spirit struggling with the lusts of the flesh:
“Belle, it’s you that I want, but it’s Him that
I need.” The album earned positive reviews, but
its poor sales indicated that the mass audience
was moving on. Green was about to move on
himself.
In 1976, he bought the Full Gospel Tabernacle
Church on Elvis Presley Boulevard, right down
the road from Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee.
He began studying the Word of God, and became an
ordained minister, preaching a sermon every
Sunday morning and teaching Bible study on
Wednesday nights. “Now, it’s one thing to come
home,” he observed. “And quite another to stay
there.”
He continued to perform secular music, but one
night after falling off a stage in Cincinnati,
“saved from death by a whisker’s breath,” he
made the decision to sing gospel exclusively.
“For too long, I’d had one foot in the Kingdom
of God and the other in the world.” God, he
believed, is a “consuming fire, and whatever
cannot stand in that fire will be burned away.”
God was not satisfied that Green alternated his
music career with service to the Lord. What did
God want? “He wanted everything.”
Green’s first gospel album, The Lord Will
Make a Way, was released in 1981. As a pop
singer, Green had never won a Grammy, but in the
next decade he would win eight of them for his
inspirational recordings. In 1982, he also made
his Broadway debut, co-starring with Patti
Labelle in Your Arms Too Short to Box With
God.
Green’s commitment to Jesus did not please all
of his fans. During an appearance at a New
Jersey casino where the crowds came expecting to
hear his hits, Green gave them a reading from
the New Testament instead. When the reading
turned out to be the whole show, some fans were
disappointed and others were angry. Green was
neither surprised nor concerned. “I know that
any man who sees through the veil of this world,
beyond to the eternal one, becomes a stranger in
the land and a prophet without honor.”
In later years, Green saw less of a need to
segregate the sexy soul that put his name on the
charts from the gospel music that expressed the
salvation that put his name in the Book of Life.
He prayed before accepting any opportunity to
step back into the world, but step back he did,
performing a duet with Annie Lennox on “Put a
Little Love in Your Heart for the soundtrack of
1988's Scrooged. The song sent him back
into the top 10 for the first time in a decade.
In 1994, he won another Grammy for a version of
Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” that
he recorded with country singer Lyle Lovett.
“God was giving back, renewed and transformed,
what I had given up to Him.”
He even took on a recurring role in the TV
sitcom Ally McBeal, and gradually began
to mix his hits, including the perennially
popular “Let’s Stay Together,” with the likes of
“Amazing Grace,” having concluded that “God
created the whole world, and also created love
and happiness . . . He created Sunday, but He
also created Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.” He was still
careful to recognize the difference between the
secular and the spiritual.
“Well, the things that are holy are holy, and
the things that are sacred are sacred, and the
things that are natural are natural, and there
is a great difference between the one to the
other. So I can’t mislead you and tell you that
it all goes together - I would be lying.”
In 1995, the year he was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, he returned to his roots
with Your Hearts In Good Hands. In 2002,
he received a Grammy for lifetime achievement,
and, two years later, he was elected to the
Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
The late country singer Loretta Lynn was
indirectly responsible for Green’s acclaimed
2008 album, Lay It Down. Roots drummer
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson had heard Lynn’s
collaboration with Jack White and wondered why a
similar meeting of musicians from different eras
hadn’t happened “on the black side of music.”
Knowing that Green had expressed an interest in
working with hip hop musicians, a Blue Note
executive put him in touch with Thompson and the
two began laying down tracks immediately at New
York’s Electric Lady Studios. “We ended up with
eight songs in that one night,” Green recalled.
“I hadn’t had an experience like that, ever!”
The album, which included appearances by John
Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Anthony
Hamilton, proved to be Green’s commercial
comeback, reaching number nine on the
Billboard Hot 200 album chart. Its theme was
love. “Baby, there’s love in it, out it, on the
side of it, on top of it, on the bottom of it.
There’s love everywhere.”
In his autobiography, he wrote, “God is not done
with Al Green, the good, the bad, and the one in
between.” Perhaps when he sings “Let’s Stay
Together” now, he’s addressing the Lord more
than he is a woman or the audience.
“Let's, let's stay together
Loving you whether, whether
Times are good or bad, happy or sad”