Love and happiness: In the pews of Al Green's church in Memphis

With the soul legend himself, aged 77, singing and preaching and sounding magnificent

The Rev Al Green, circa 1972, from the cover of his Greatest Hits album

In an unfamiliar city it is rarely a good sign when your burly African-American taxi driver says: “I wouldn’t be driving you in this neighbourhood if it was dark.”

We are in Memphis, the most violent city in America. There were 397 homicides here last year in a population two-thirds the size of Edinburgh.

It is Sunday morning and the streets are quiet. This corner of the city, south of downtown, is a featureless blur of strip malls and shotgun shacks with the occasional island of well-guarded prosperity.

I am going to church.

Not any church. I am heading to the Full Gospel Tabernacle, in Hale Road, founded by soul legend The Rev Al Green in 1976.

Younger readers may need a reminder who Al Green is, so here’s a video of him singing one of his biggest hits live in the early 1970s, when he was one of the world’s biggest stars.

I wonder how many babies worldwide have been conceived to a soundtrack of Al Green’s smoochie soul? Got to be millions, surely.

In the Soulsville neighbourhood of Memphis just a few streets separate Hi Records, where Green made most of his music, and Stax Records, the 1960s label and recording studio. But they are a world apart musically.

Stax made its name with a muscular soul typified by the uncompromising stomp of Sam & Dave’s Soul Man and the untethered intensity of Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness.

Green’s music, recorded in the early 70s, was characterised by restraint. His songs did not build to a wild climax. They stayed in the groove. Instead, Green extemporised his vocal, weaving around the melody like a male Aretha Franklin in a style derived directly from black Gospel.

Green sold more than 20 million records in the 1970s and was one of the planet’s biggest vocal performers. But there was a tension in Green’s life between the secular and the sacred that would ultimately take him on a different path from his contemporaries. It would take him to the Full Gospel Tabernacle.

My taxi pulls into a car park outside a neat, unprepossessing white church with a modest spire. My visit is a long shot. Green attends his own church irregularly, taking services on the occasional Sunday.

Will today be one of those days?

I walk inside and a tall, elderly man in sharp Sunday best hands me a leaflet.

The reverend, it seems, has been promoted to a bishop.

Inside, the church is airy, bright and simple. There are three framed pictures: Da Vinci’s The Last Supper; a sentimental depiction of a riverside baptism; and a promo mug shot of Green in his 1970s heyday. On the altar a large chair upholstered in burgundy leather is draped in a purple throw embroidered in gold letters: it says “Bishop Al Green”.

The service is sparsely attended. There are about 50 people present, mostly African-American. There is a small choir.

A four-piece band strikes up and we are off. A small, grey-haired elderly woman sings a devotional blues number. She is a tiny tornado, birling around the area of front of the altar, throwing herself physically into her performance. I feel transported to the Methodist tent missions of the 1950s.

In the middle of the number Al Green walks unannounced onto the altar and takes his seat in his burgundy chair. Bespectacled and carrying a little weight, he is dressed in an immaculate black three-piece suit and an open-neck white shirt. Watching the old lady sing he grins with evident pleasure.

Then it his his turn. Apologies for the wobbly hand-held video, which I took on my phone from my pew at the back of the church, trying to be unobtrusive:

I have, in my time, seen a number of famous singers perform in their later years: Frank Sinatra in his 70s (at Ibrox stadium, of all places); Paul McCartney in his 80s; Elton John in his 70s. All were magnificent, but age had taken the edge off their vocal power. Their voices in old age were very different to how they sounded half a century before.

Green, however, is ever-green. His tone and timbre are just the same as on those indelible hits of the early 1970s, songs such as Love and Happiness, Tired of Being Alone and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. The band’s soft shuffle helps, the sparse arrangement reminiscent of those Hi Records days, especially the interaction between organ and electric guitar. Green’s voice embroiders the melody with subtlety and economy. It is a joy to hear and a privilege to be there.

Over the next two hours Green sings and preaches and leads his congregation in worship. I say preaches but his long and rambling homily is more of a stream of consciousness. It is part bible study, part memoir, part update on how Green is feeling right now, and part rant about the sinful iniquities of the modern world.

He starts by apologising to parishioners who haven’t seen him with his new beard, and might not like it. He describes how his granddaughter broke her leg in a car crash after a driver ran a red light.

He talks about being a child uprooted from his home in Arkansas in the middle of the night and moved across the state line by his father. He complains the pews are emptier since Covid, with some folk preferring bingo to salvation. He confides that these days he doesn’t get out much. “I don’t go to houses. I just stay at home with my bag of songs.”

He seems to be stalling. “I just need a little more time,” he says. “Sometimes I go to preach one sermon and by the time I get to the pulpit the lord wants me to say something else.”

Eventually he gets into his stride.

Sex is explored in depth. “Whoremongering jezebels” are roundly condemned. We are warned about “lakes full of brimstone filled by angels”. Green tells the young women in the congregation that young men will ask them to “take off their sweaters”. They should refuse, and trust in the lord.

“There’s a lot of playboys in the church,” he warns, “and playgirls too. And when they find you want to play, they’ll play.”

He paces like a restless animal. He grips the pulpit. He points to the heavens. He sits on the steps of the altar and talks so quietly, without the microphone, the congregation has to strain forward to hear.

He offers his flock the solace of faith. We live in troubled times, he says. We hide ourselves under a refuge of lies. Trouble will last for a night but joy ain’t far behind. Our strength is our stillness. Our belief in the lord.

At one stage, slightly lost, he allows himself a big sigh. “I’ve had people say to me, can you just leave Jesus out?” he says. “But there is nothing that can separate you from the love of god.”

We swerve into geopolitics and the Palestinians and Israelis. The two are cousins, he says. But Palestinians should be heedful “not to hit a lion”. We move on to a story about the temptations of lemon pie.

Then, miraculously, triumphantly, perhaps accidentally, he arrives at back at the bible verse that is meant to be the text for the sermon, Isaiah 28: “For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.”

Eventually the service draws to an end. Green starts thanking the lord and calling down his blessings. And the band quietly joins in:

There is a wonderfully cheesy 1991 song called Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn that references Green, but is best known for the line where the singer, after playing a number in a blues cafe, is asked by the owner: “Tell me, are you a Christian, child?” And he replies: “Ma’am, I am tonight.”

I am a devout atheist. But as I leave Al Green’s church after the service there is something alight in my heart. The holy spirit? The soul in soul music? Who knows. I only know this is the closest I have come to a religious experience in many, many years.

For that, I have Bishop Al Green to thank.

And all of God’s people say: “Amen.”

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I stayed in Memphis as a guest of the city tourist board, Memphis Travel, memphistravel.com. You can find my photo essay on Memphis here. And you can read me on Memphis bookshops here.

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