Long Burn

Love and happiness

Love and happiness
You be good to me
I'll be good to you
we'll be together
we'll see each other
walk away with victory

oh baby,
love and happiness...
love and happiness...
Make you do right...
love'll make you do wrong...
make you come home early...
make you stay out all night long...
the power of love...

love is...
wait a minute...
love is...
walkin' together...
talkin' together...
say it again...
say it together...
Mmmm....

And that of course is from Love and Happiness by the Reverend Al Green.

Green was born in Forrest City, Arkansas. The son of a sharecropper, he started out at age nine in a Forrest City quartet called the Greene Brothers; he dropped the final "e" from his last name years later as a solo artist. They toured extensively in the mid-1950s in the South until the Greenes moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when they began to tour around Michigan. He was kicked out of the group by his father because he was caught listening to Jackie Wilson.

On October 18, 1974, Green's girlfriend, Mary Woodson, poured boiling grits on him as he was showering, causing second-degree burns on his back, stomach and arm. She then killed herself in an adjacent bedroom. Deeply shaken by the event, Green converted to Christianity and became an ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis in 1976. He then concentrated his energies towards pastoring his church and gospel singing, also appearing in 1982 with Patti Labelle in the musical Your Arms Too Short to Box With God.

You can go here to try to win a free copy of The Immortal Soul of Al Green

From Publisher's Weekly's review of Al's Autobiography Take Me To The River: Labeled by many as the Last Great Soul Man, Green writes modestly and with great spirit about his career. The bulk of the narrative, written with Seay, concentrates on Green's early life, from his boyhood as a sharecropper's son in Jacknash, Ark., to his family's move to the ghetto in Grand Rapids, Mich., to his desperate pursuit of a singing career. While Green quickly established himself as a neighborhood tough and ladies' man, he never let his reputation as a "badass dude" keep him from singing in the school and church choirs. Choosing between the secular and the sacred proved a constant struggle for Green. In the end, he writes, "I never did develop a preference for one church over the other. To me, shouting at the top of your lungs while hammering on a tambourine or whispering your prayers as the organ softly played were just two different ways of saying the same thing: We're all down here, Lord, doing the best we can." At 29, Green was already an international superstar when he again questioned his path. Ultimately, he opted to "leave behind the glitter and the glamour of the world to seek out a poor and plain existence," buying a church of his own on the outskirts of Memphis and earning a degree as an ordained minister.

I can't tell you of all the happiness Al Green's music has given me through the years, but my deep heartfelt thanks to my brother Lowell for putting on Al Green when we were driving around in his squished grasshopper green Ford Galaxy 500 in the 70s, and to Tim and Kate for giving me a copy of his greatest hits album after their wedding. This is the greatest album of all time.

posted by Matt_J @ 1:17 PM