Soul Survivor: Al Green is Still in Love With You

Al Green Has Been Through the Fire

“I thank the good Lord for being here. I’ve had to learn a lot of stuff over the years.”

In 1974, a disturbed lady friend, Mary Woodson, took her own life after flinging a pot of boiling grits at Green, scalding him badly. By all accounts, the incident threw him into an inner turmoil that altered the course of his life. Green went into the studio without his all-star Hi band (drummer Al Jackson, Jr., who’d passed away in 1975, and the Hodges brothers) for the first time since his Back Up Train, and without Mitchell at the helm. The Belle Album—an audible document of his transition from the nightclub to the church—was something Green created as he was forging a new self.

Author and Paste contributor Peter Guralnick’s definitive history Sweet Soul Music, published in 1986, draws an evocative picture of Green during that shaky time. Though the book is more than a decade removed from the shocks that caused Green’s musical and personal identity struggle, Guralnick felt that the singer had “found no peace” yet, despite the fact that Green had given himself over completely to recording gospel, released a couple of top sellers in the genre, and had started his Full Gospel Tabernacle church in Memphis. Guralnick found him disjointed and confused during interviews, seeming “generally not of this world.”

The Al Green who went into the studio to write and record Belle was a fractured personality—a shattered artist in a period of deep internal conflict. What emerged was an astonishing album of intensely emotional, intensely religious music that had Green opening his heart to the Lord with the utter surrender that was his hallmark. The album’s sound was looser, maybe even a little ragged compared to what Green had done with Mitchell’s refining touch, but it had the ecstatic sound of catharsis. Critics approached it first with caution, and then awe. In his autobiography, Green called The Belle Album “the most important release” of his career.

Al Green's Still Got It

“A lady saw me in the Kroger’s grocery store yesterday. And she’s trembling and shaking and red in the face, and she said to me, ‘You’re Al Green.’ I don’t know what she’s feeling inside. I came here to buy some grapes and bananas.”

Al Green’s love songs were never, at their heart, about singing you out of your pants. His pillowy entreaties hinted at a deeper, more enduring connection—“Let’s Stay Together,” “Love and Happiness,” “Stay With Me Forever.” To paraphrase from one of his album titles, Al Green wanted to explore your mind. Now, with Corinne Bailey Rae (“She was fantastic,” Green says, “she was just like a piece of cake”) on the sweetly seductive “Take Your Time,” the two singers murmur together like a couple that finishes one another’s sentences.

The ambiguity of the new album’s title says it all. Lay It Down is more than serviceable for dimming the lights and slipping under the sheets. But in the lyrics—and in the exquisite strain of Al Green’s undimmed falsetto—is something else: an exhortation to lay down life’s pain, strife and burdens, and push through to the other side. The title track, which opens the album, repeats the phrase like a mantra—lay it down—coaxing and reassuring you to let go, it’ll be all right. The album-closing “Standing In The Rain”—a hard-edged rocker with thunking drums and wailing guitar—testifies: “Do you know my name? Do you know the pain and shame? Everything’s in my hand, standing out here in the rain.” The man who sings ain’t scared.

If Lay It Down is The Belle Album’s true follow-up, it’s because it resolves the classic record’s climax. The new album’s spirituality is not overt, but it’s there, unmistakably integrated with the secular in a way that implies Rev. Green has, in fact, found some reconciliation and hard-won peace.

“I wanted to write about wild love, and the quest for love,” he says. “Love can be rude sometimes. But you have to be able to take a chance on love. It’s still worth taking a chance on love, even if you get hurt. Because love is so magnificent, so wonderful, so forgiving.”