100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #47 Al Green – Let’s Stay Together

Released : 1972

“Sixty percent of my audience are women,” Al Green was said to have once revealed. “And a woman is more sensitive than a man, especially in the area of love and happiness.” 

Here was a man who after all knew both sides of that coin; having been thrown out of his familial home in Michigan for the sin of listening to Jackie Wilson, he then moved in with a friend and together they formed a band and indulged in wickedness only the fairer the sex can encourage. As a child he was a devotee of “those hip shaking boys” – better known to him as Elvis Presley and Wilson Pickett – but it was a chance encounter with producer Willie Mitchell in 1968 that would transform his career from middling tribute act to one of soul’s defining voices.

When they met Mitchell promised to make Green a star within 18 months, and although it took a little longer before Tired of Being Alone announced the singer to the public, his next single would come be as definitive as Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay. Slower than much of it’s contemporaries and less hard edged, Let’s Stay Together was armed with both the seductive texture of Green’s vocals and a string heavy, jazzy arrangement that offered a degree of sophistication rarely heard in the movement’s canon before.

Whether 60% of the record’s buyers were female is unknown. But Green would look subsequently to god for answers, a similar place from which to seek the truth.