Search - Al Green :: Immortal Soul of Al Green

The careers of most soul greats are marked by a struggle to reconcile opposite impulses--sanctified piety and earthly lust, down-home grit and urbane polish, bluesy pain and carefree jubilation. Throughout the '70s Al Green floated above such contradictions by blithely imagining that they didn't exist. The ecstatic good will with which Green's voice overflowed couldn't be neatly categorized; it contained the sacred, the erotic, and the just plain old friendly. Similarly smooth and rough vocal tones were, for him, equally valuable devices with which to seduce the listener, and his fluid technique was matched by Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell. Sheathing raw soul within velveteen strings, the Hi sound didn't so much combine elements of Stax gutbucket and Philly International suavity as meld the styles whole. Green's '70s output is near-flawless, which makes compiling him a challenge--why not just go out and buy a handful of his classic albums? Rather than rise to that challenge, the 1997 four-disc set Anthology acknowledged defeat with a hodgepodge of hits, misses, live tracks, and outtakes. All business, The Immortal Soul of Al Green takes a different tack, presenting a genuine overview: seventy-five tracks, including practically every charting hit, in rough chronology. You can hear the early Green, a rough-and-ready southern soul man, grow comfortable within the smoother Hi formula. And you can hear the later Green, tiring of that formula, coast into the late '70s (brilliantly, but coasting regardless) until he steps away from Mitchell to record The Belle Album, a stripped-down masterpiece based around his own acoustic guitar. The set is unified by Green's unwavering sensibility, which, through it all, radiates both comforting warmth and tingling excitement--yet another pair of varied traits Green refused to acknowledge as opposites. --Keith Harris