Al Green

Dansby/Forrest City

1946 -

Al Green’s journey begins in Forrest City, Arkansas, where he was born into a large sharecropping family steeped in gospel music. He sang with his siblings in the Green Brothers before the family moved north to Michigan when he was nine. Gospel remained at the center of his musical foundation even as the young Green became fascinated by secular performers such as Jackie Wilson and began searching for a sound of his own.

That search eventually brought him back south. After an early R&B hit with “Back Up Train,” Green met Memphis bandleader and producer Willie Mitchell in 1969. Their partnership at Hi Records created one of the most distinctive sounds in American soul music: spare rhythms, warm horns, gospel-inflected organ, and Green’s extraordinary voice shifting effortlessly from an intimate whisper to an aching falsetto. “Tired of Being Alone” broke through in 1971, followed by “Let’s Stay Together,” “I’m Still in Love with You,” “Love and Happiness,” “Call Me,” and “Take Me to the River.”

Green’s music lived in the tension between the sacred and the secular. By the late 1970s, he had turned much of his attention toward gospel and the church, becoming an ordained minister while continuing to perform and record. That combination of sensual soul and spiritual intensity became one of his defining characteristics. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted Green in 1995, credits him with broadening the emotional and sonic possibilities of soul, pop, and rock.

Although Green’s career was forged largely in Memphis, the first chapter belongs to Forrest City. His Arkansas beginnings in family, church, and gospel place him within the same Delta tradition that produced so much of the music that reshaped twentieth-century America.