Barney Hoskyns, Al Green - Take Me to the River: Al Green with Davin Seay lyrics

"Gen’lmen, we just havin’ church
Here" Six words which - directed at me and
A fellow soul buff at the Full
Gospel Tabernacle church by it's chuckling
Irrepressible pastor - still
Cause this writer to blanch after 15 years

In truth, the sight of two pale Englishmen
Seated stiffly at the
Back of his church was probably no great
Novelty for the Reverend Al Green a visit to
The white A-frame structure in the Whitehaven
District, mere shouting distance from
Elvis Presley Boulevard
Was an obligatory stop on the
Honky soulboy’s tour of
Memphis for these particular
Tourists, morever, there was the
Supplementary pilgrimage to the
Royal Recording Studio
The "windowless cave" where Willie
Mitchell cut the tracks
That made Green a black pop superstar

I went to worship in Memphis because I too
Had succumbed to the spell of those records
Lost myself in
Both the breathlessly sexy curlicues of
Green’s singing and the
Earthy, boxed-in crunch of the
Mitchell sound for me
"I Didn’t Know" on 1975’s Al Green is Love
Was the most ecstatic eight minutes of deep
Soul on vinyl and it wasn’t even deep
Soul per se it was - like
All the records the two men made
Together with those virtuosi
Of understatement
The Hodges brothers - a supernal
Blend of downhome and uptown
Lo-fi southern grit
And whipped-cream Philly topping it was a
Key sound of the early ’70s
As intrinsic to my adolescence as T rex

Green, like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye
"crossed over" almost everyone I know
Has at the very least a copy
Of Al Green’s Greatest Hit's
Many more than own an Otis Redding
Collection why? Because Otis
Was fundamentally one-dimensional
Where Al was a changeling
A vocal shape-shifter who
Within a single performance could
Flip from comedy
To tragedy, from godliness to lubricity
And from male to female and back again

Al Green was a one-off
Which is why one has looked forward
To his "story" for so long
Like Cooke’s and Gaye’s
It’s a narrative of inner conflict
Of sin and salvation and
Guns and God - "strong as
Death, sweet as love
" as Green sang it on a
Little-known masterwork from 1974 in
This instance it wasn’t the singer
On the end of the
Gun barrel but a deluded New Jersey
Housewife who shot herself dead
After hurling a pan of boiling
Grit's over Green’s back

"The Rev green, in the bathroom
With the grit's" It turns out
That that shocking night in
October 1974 wasn’t quite the watershed
Moment in Green’s cv
We've been led to believe 'Take
Me to the River' takes pains to stress that
Green was already on
His way back to his creator
When the unhappy Mary Woodson
Crossed his path yet it
Nevertheless encapsulates the way
Green has spent much of his
Life torn between his
Love of God and his adoration of women

"There’s no use trying to deny the obvious
" Green notes in his book "There’s
Something about me that women
Find very attractive" Predictably
Much of 'Take Me to the
River' is written in this
Bland, pseudo-conversational style
One beloved of As Told To ghosts it’s
Strange how everyone - sanctified
Soulsters and metal mutants alike
- winds up with
The same "voice" on these printed
Pages so many of
These tomes read like treatments
For Lifetime biopics
With their pat anecdotes and
Cosily reductive homilies

I’d so much rather have heard the slightly
Nutty voice - part Little Richard
And part Prince - of the real
Rev al then we might
Have had a book to stand alongside
Chuck Berry’s My Autobiography or even
Charles Mingus’ Beneath the
Underdog too often one can feel Davin Seay
Filling in missing details in
Green’s "voice" all too
Rare are the genuine moments of revelation
Or even just plain insight
Even the accounts of
How the famous Hi sound came about
Are undermined by self-contradiction:
One moment
Green is claiming that "softening" his
Vocal style was his idea
The next he’s giving Willie
Mitchell the credit

As Craig Werner notes in his recent
A Change is Gonna Come, the Last
Soul Man’s return to the ministry "brought
The deep soul tradition full circle
" taking the music out of the pop marketplace
(The next stop, lest we forget
Was disco) Today we make do
With the ersatz emoting of Macy
Gray and Shelby Lynne
Music that references Green but seldom
Wrestles with the agonies
Of choosing between the church
And the roadhouse

We will never see his like again