© 2024 NPR Illinois
The Capital's Community & News Service
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

We're Still In Love With Al Green

Al Green performs during the 2009 Essence Music Festival at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
Sean Gardner
/
Getty Images
Al Green performs during the 2009 Essence Music Festival at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.

Arguably the pre-eminent male soul singer of the 20th century, Arkansas-born Al Green shot to fame in the 1970s on a string of deeply Southern, arch-soulful hits in collaboration with Memphis producer Willie Mitchell like "Let's Stay Together" and "I'm Glad You're Mine." When the hits dried up, he become ordained as a minister, and in the late 1980s, he made a poignant return to secular music. Beyond his timeless brilliance as a pop songwriter, and despite years of troubling domestic problems, Al Green's peerless voice rises to the surface: ranging from a suffocated silken warble to a gritty sandpaper shout, his trademark singing is memorialized on five decades of recordings that are by turns interior and raucous, delicate and gutbucket-funky. Happy birthday, Rev.

You can always hear more Al Green on NPR's R&B and Soul music channel, I'll Take You There.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.