It begins with almost nothing. A soft croon, barely a breath of melody, and then five dry taps — a man’s foot coming down on an old Coca-Cola crate on the floor of a Memphis studio. Only after those five taps does the guitar arrive, one of the most imitated licks in soul music, and behind it an organ swells like a church waking up, and a drum groove settles in that does not vary, does not hurry and does not let go for five full minutes. Love and Happiness is the loosest, funkiest record Al Green ever made, and also the most controlled. Everything in it sounds spontaneous. Almost nothing in it was left to chance.
The paradox is the story of the song. When Green recorded it in 1972 for his album I’m Still in Love with You, he was in the middle of the most disciplined run in soul: a singer who wanted to shout, a producer who kept pulling him back toward a whisper, and a house band so locked together they could hold one groove until the producer had to order them to stop. Critics would later call it perhaps his most perfect song. At the time, in America, it was not even released as a single.
Five Taps on a Coca-Cola Crate
Drummer Howard Grimes still marvelled at the session half a century later. Grimes was keeping time in the Hi Rhythm Section at Royal Studios in 1972 when, as he told the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the groove for Love and Happiness simply would not quit. The band kept playing, Green kept riding it, and producer Willie Mitchell, in the control room, was dancing. Finally Mitchell came out and called a halt, announcing that he had it — they could stop playing now.
The famous opening was Mitchell’s kind of detail. Before the guitar enters, guitarist Mabon “Teenie” Hodges — the song’s co-writer — taps his foot five times on an old Coca-Cola crate that, Grimes recalled, had been sitting in the studio for years. It was Mitchell who had the crate put in front of Hodges and a microphone placed on it. Then comes the lick, Teenie’s guitar curling around the beat, and his brother Charles Hodges pouring Hammond organ over the top in a wash of pure church. Only then does Grimes launch the drums.
There was even a quiet rivalry inside that groove. Grimes wrote in his autobiography, Timekeeper: My Life in Rhythm, that the band’s other great drummer, Al Jackson Jr. of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, was annoyed not to have played on the record. Mitchell, by Grimes’s account, had answered plainly: he had not wanted it pretty — he had wanted it funky. So Grimes played drums on it.
Written With Teenie Hodges
Green wrote Love and Happiness with Teenie Hodges, and the partnership matters. Hodges was not merely the guitarist in the room; he was Green’s most important songwriting collaborator at Hi Records, the man who would also write with him on Take Me to the River, Here I Am (Come and Take Me) and Full of Fire. Where Mitchell shaped how Green sang, Hodges helped shape what Green sang about — and his sparse, rhythmic guitar left the singer acres of space to move in.
Green described the making of the song, in his 2000 autobiography Take Me to the River, as dangerous precision: it was like mixing explosive chemicals, he wrote — everything had to be added at exactly the right time and in exactly the right dose. The dose, above all, was tempo. The tempo was the most important thing to Willie Mitchell, Green explained — and if you listen closely, you can hear Teenie counting the band in with his foot on a cardboard box on the take that nailed it. The memoir says cardboard box, Grimes remembers a Coca-Cola crate, but both agree on the essential thing: the most famous count-in in soul was a foot, a box and a microphone, kept by a producer who knew feel is built from such accidents.
Green also described what he was reaching for vocally: not a return to the old-style soul of his early days, but something pulled from the same source of raw and gritty need. The result, in his words, was like a slow fever — building on the beat, pushing the temperature up with each breath of the staccato horns, and pushing through to delirium on the fade.
Royal Studios and the Hi Rhythm Section
The room deserves its share of the credit. Royal Studios, at 1320 South Lauderdale Street in South Memphis, was a converted movie theatre — the old Royal Theatre — home of Hi Records since the 1950s and, by 1972, effectively Willie Mitchell’s laboratory. As the Recording Academy later put it, Royal was the playhouse of Green and Ann Peebles and the laboratory of the Hi Rhythm Section — the Hodges brothers, Teenie on guitar, Leroy on bass and Charles on organ, with Grimes and Jackson sharing the drum chair.
I’m Still in Love with You shows what that laboratory could do. Released on October 23, 1972, the album climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, powered by the hit singles Look What You Done for Me and the title track. Love and Happiness, at just over five minutes, sat on that album like a revival meeting breaking out inside a love song — without being one of the singles that carried it up the charts.
A Sermon Disguised as a Love Song
Listen to how Green sings it and you can hear the preacher he would soon become. The lyric is built like a sermon: it defines its terms, testifies, warns and promises. Love and happiness, the song insists, are not accidents that befall the lucky; they are what happens when somebody is truly good to you. Green preaches over the groove, testifying in the spaces the band leaves him, rising into falsetto like a voice going up from a pulpit.
That is why the song became a centrepiece of his live performances. On Soul Train in March 1973, he opened it serenading the audience at close quarters before the foot-taps cued the band — a performance so definitive that Soul Train historian Stephen McMillian later called the song quintessential Al Green and one of the greatest soul songs of all time. Long before he was ordained and famous as the Reverend, the ministry was already audible here.
The Hit That Wasn’t — At First
Here is the strangest part: America barely got the chance to buy it. London Records released Love and Happiness as a single in Britain on April 27, 1973, backed with So You’re Leaving. Hi Records did not release it as a single at home while the album was on the charts, preferring the title track, Look What You Done for Me and For the Good Times. The song spread anyway — through radio airplay, through that Soul Train appearance, and through musicians, for whom it became a standard almost immediately. Earnest Jackson covered it in 1973, as did First Choice and the Undisputed Truth; Lee “Scratch” Perry reimagined it as Jungle Lion in 1974.
Only in the summer of 1977, to revive Green’s flagging sales, did Hi finally issue an edited American single, backed with Glory Glory. It peaked at No. 104 on the pop chart and No. 92 on the R&B chart — numbers that say nothing about its stature. That year it also led off Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Volume II.
Quintessential Al Green
The verdicts accumulated slowly, then all at once. Writing in Vibe, Alan Light called it perhaps Green’s most perfect song. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 98 among the 500 greatest songs of all time, and Dave Marsh placed it at No. 861 in The Heart of Rock & Soul. The covers kept coming: Al Jarreau in 1979, Living Colour in 1991, and Etta James on her 1992 album The Right Time.
What survives, finally, is the construction. A foot on a crate. A guitar lick nobody has improved on. An organ borrowed from church, drums borrowed from funk, horns arriving like punctuation in a sermon, and over it all a singer who had learned, at great cost, that the softest voice in the room is the one everybody leans toward. Willie Mitchell wanted the tempo right and the feeling funky, and for once nobody had to be argued into anything. The groove just would not quit — and the producer, dancing in his own control room, had the sense to keep the tape rolling until it did.
Leave a Reply