-
Sing Like Al Green: The Fifteen Minutes and the Eight Days Behind \”Let’s Stay Together\
Sing Like Al Green: The Fifteen Minutes and the Eight Days Behind “Let’s Stay Together” It took Al Green about fifteen minutes to write the lyrics to “Let’s Stay Together.” It took Willie Mitchell more than a hundred hours to get him to sing them. That asymmetry — a quarter of an hour of writing,…
-
The Reverend of Memphis: Faith, Family, and Forgiveness in Al Green’s Second Life
On Sunday mornings in Memphis, just down the road from Graceland, the most seductive voice in soul music history puts on a black robe, steps behind a pulpit, and goes to work. The congregation at the Full Gospel Tabernacle is a cross-section of the city itself — Black and white, old and young, dressed in…
-
How Al Green and Questlove Created “Lay It Down”: The Story Behind the 2008 Comeback Masterpiece
By 2006, Al Green had nothing left to prove and every reason to stay comfortable. He was the Reverend now, a pastor in Memphis, a Kennedy Center Honor waiting in his future, his place in the pantheon of soul secure since the day “Let’s Stay Together” first slid across the radio. He had already made…
-
The Untold Story of Al Green: The Reverend of Soul
They call him the Reverend, and it is not a nickname. Al Green really is an ordained minister who preaches every Sunday at his own church in Memphis. He is also the man who made the most seductive soul music of the 1970s, a singer whose falsetto could make a love song sound like a…