Mahalia Jackson was a gospel traditionalist who was suspicious of blues and soul. She once told a journalist, ‘I’d never give up gospel for the blues. Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you’re through with the blues, you’ve got nothing to rest on, but when you sing gospel, you have a feeling that there’s a cure for what’s wrong.’ At times her Christianity projected a resoundingly pompous view of other musical forms but it was not without a core truth. Of soul music, she could be even more damning, revealing a seething disrespect for musicians who traded in their brilliance for cheap thrills. ‘It seems to attract people who are a flashy mess,’ she once said in a diatribe against the drugs, toxic glamour and financial failures that seemed to blight the great soul singers of her time, such as Little Willie John, David Ruffin and Marvin Gaye.
Al Green, then on the cusp of signing to Hi Records and moving his life to Memphis, was more philosophical about the musical culture he worked in. ‘The battle between the secular and the sacred,’ he wrote in his book, Take Me to the River, ‘has brought down more great Black musical artists than drugs or loose living or any other hazard of the trade.’ He was not simply pointing his finger at others. The magazine Rolling Stone said prophetically of Green, ‘to a greater extent than even his predecessors Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Al Green embodies soul music’s mix of sacred and profane’.
Gospel had dominated Jackson’s life from her birth in a shanty town by the Mississippi, where she was surrounded by jazz and Dixie, to her death in the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Chicago in 1972. She had married and divorced twice, and the one constant in her life was gospel. Her reputation had two consequences. She influenced generations of black musicians to use their voice as an instrument and she brought a level of social acceptability to African-American music that no one before had successfully done. Curiously, her dedication to spiritual music – rather than funk or atonal jazz – made her an unthreatening figure to the powerful. During her remarkable career she sang for three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Kennedy – notably appearing at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and at a Royal Command Performance for the Queen in London, and becoming the first westerner to perform for Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Politicians loved her godly conservatism, and, strange as it may seem, she struck up a friendship with the most unlikely figure, President Richard Nixon, who once sent a US Air Force jet to bring her home after she collapsed on-stage in Munich. It was the preface to a string of health problems that ended with her death from heart seizure. In a line that could have been on her gravestone, she somehow managed to combine her love for food, gospel and the entrepreneurial spirit: ‘I’ve been singing for over forty years, and most of the time I’ve been singing for my supper as well as the Lord.’
Unlike almost every other singer who visited Memphis in 1968, Jackson was one of the very few who attracted the attention of the notoriously white and conservative daily the Memphis Press-Scimitar, who described her as ‘a mountain of soulful serenity’. Unlike the sexually explicit soul stars of the funk revues, or the message music that had hardened since civil rights, Jackson was solid and dependable, and she radiated family values. She was eventually entombed in a white granite grave in Providence Memorial Cemetery, Chicago, and then moved to a resting place designed in the style of Martin Luther King’s tomb. Dick Gregory, the comedian, said in her memory, ‘The night before the final push a lot of folks would be sitting round and not knowing if we were going to live or die. After you left Mahalia singing about heaven, dying didn’t seem too bad.’ Jackson’s final visit to Memphis was to sing at a benefit concert for the Riverview-Kansas Day Care Center, which at the time was a vacant warehouse at 1424 Florida, near the offices of the Memphis Invaders. The plan was to convert the space into a centre for the poor, providing daycare for working mothers and offering medical and dental services to local infants.
Throughout the sixties she had appeared regularly in the African-American press, dispensing culinary wisdom, sharing recipes and proselytising on behalf of traditional forms of southern soul food. Rural food featured prominently in southern soul music, which used cooking as a metaphor for everything from love to celebration. The name of the old Chitlin’ touring circuit was derived from chitterlings, the culinary delight of boiled hogs’ intestines that were sold in the venues. It was called soul food, and it was a passion Jackson shared with the Stax studios. Much of the back catalogue of Booker. T and the M.G.’s could have fallen from the menus at her franchise restaurants. In 1962 Booker T. and the M.G.’s’ international hit ‘Green Onions’ brought Stax a global reputation and was immediately followed by a string of culinary instrumentals extolling soul food, among them ‘Jelly Bread’, ‘Burnt Biscuits’, ‘Mo’ Onions’, ‘Red Beans And Rice’ and ‘My Sweet Potato’. They shared a repetitive and instantly recognisable formula of funky bass, metronome percussion and a meandering organ sound with flashes of guitar: it was as if a sixties Modernist had been let loose in a post-war cinema chain, so redolent of an era when the organ – once a staple of religion – was being reinvented. By 1965 the Mar-Keys were also in on the act with ‘Banana Juice’, but probably the best of the lot was Wendy Rene’s irrepressible Motown-styled dance record ‘Bar-B-Q’. It had a natural energy, as if a youthful and self-confident black girl had decided to dance outrageously at a whites-only garden party in the Memphis suburbs. Rene was the stage name of a local Memphis singer Mary Frierson, a one-time member of the Drapels. They were a local Memphis group led by her better known brother Johnny Frierson and featuring Marianne Brittenum and Wilbur Mondie. Frierson was a regular feature on the Memphis gospel circuit and played guitar for the Sunset Travellers in numerous concerts and on at least one recording, O.V. Wright’s ‘Another Day Lost’. Frierson and the Drapels recorded for Stax’s subsidiary label Volt, and for a time were the favoured backing singers at the Stax studios. Stax were keen to rename Rene as Wendy Storm, but she took advice from Otis Redding and adopted the more subtle stage name Wendy Rene. Already heavily pregnant when ‘Bar-B-Q’ was released, she left Manassas High School prior to graduation to pursue a professional career as a singer, recording a catalogue of obscure songs for Stax that have since been sampled by Wu Tang Clan and Alicia Keys. This gave her work a new lease on life, long after the originals had been forgotten and deleted. By 1968 Rene’s career was all but over, and she made the prophetic decision to turn down what would have been one of her last professional performances, the chance to travel with Otis Redding on his fateful journey to Wisconsin. According to the Stax publicist Deanie Parker, ‘She had all the ingredients. She wrote her own songs, had a distinctive style. But she didn’t fit into the mould typically associated with the sound of Stax. So it was difficult to launch the kind of career she really did deserve. But she was enormously talented.’ Rene’s vivacious style may have been more suited to the pop sound of Motown, but that was not to be. She had returned to gospel singing at the Church of God in Christ at Mason Temple. By 1968 her brother Johnny and his friend Marianne had crossed town and were employed as backing singers at Hi Records.
Memphis had become a place where gospel singers could cross over and yet somehow maintain their dignity. Unlike the flashy Cadillacs of Harlem or the sinful ghetto bars of Detroit, something about Memphis still respected the old ways, and even Beale Street, with its late-night saloons and dens of iniquity, held out a pious hand to religion. It was in November 1968, as Mahalia Jackson worked double-time singing by night and promoting fried chicken by day, that the two Margarets arrived in Memphis. Neither would ever be known by that name, and for different reasons they had both tried to leave their Christian names – if not their Christian faith – behind. Margaret Joseph and Margaret Ann Peebles brought with them the deep and pleading soul of the great gospel heritage. Margaret Ann Peebles was from St Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a preacher man and the seventh child of a gifted gospel family. As a young teenager she had risen to be the featured singer in her father’s P
eebles Family Choir, who toured extensively in the Mid-South opening shows for Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke. After a fight with her father, Margaret Ann Peebles walked out on gospel to join a St Louis revue band led by local saxophonist Oliver Sain, a masterful musician who had worked with Howlin’ Wolf, Little Milton and Fontella Bass. Her father knew and distrusted Oliver Sain, considering him a serpent-like figure who profited from the devil’s music. It was on tour as a featured singer with Oliver Sain’s Revue that Peebles arrived in Memphis. There she met trumpeter Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller, who had held various residencies the length of Beale Street at the Flamingo Room, Club Handy and Club Paradise. It was Miller who saw star potential in Peebles. He took the inspired decision to introduce her to Willie Mitchell, the driving force at Hi Records, foregoing a chance to take her to the overstretched and overpopulated Stax studios, where too many good acts had fallen by the wayside. Much more comfortable with her middle name, and preferring to be known as Ann Peebles, the young gospel singer took up a residency in a bar on Beale Street, singing standards, pop ballads and soul classics. Within a few short weeks, Willie Mitchell took her to the infamous NATRA convention in Miami as part of the Hi Records stable of artists and she was heavily promoted as a star of tomorrow. It was her first significant outing as a recording artist and the first tantalising hint that Memphis was about to launch a new generation of talent on the world.
The second Margaret, who insisted from an early age on being called Margie, Margaret Joseph, arrived in Memphis in the autumn of 1968 to promote her new release. She had learned to reconcile body and soul long ago. A gifted singer and actress as a child, she had a self-assured deportment supported by years of training in stagecraft. Her debut album, Margie Joseph Makes A New Impression (Volt, 1970), sees her resplendent in a full afro, sitting on a stool dressed in a figure-hugging halter-neck dress. The image screams of soul power, the rise of black assertiveness and the triumph of sexuality.
Born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, she was a singer in her father’s choir. She went on to graduate from Dillard University in New Orleans, where she studied Speech and Drama. While at university she befriended a generation of much more streetwise musicians from the Calliope Housing Project, in uptown New Orleans, among them the Neville Brothers and her eventual producer Wilson Turbinton, better known by his preferred name Willie Tee. Joseph was a determined, confidently sexual and talented singer who went on to record at Fame’s Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama and sign for the legendary OKeh label in Chicago. The last months of 1968 saw her ready to take another tilt at fame. She briefly signed for Stax, who assigned her to the Volt subsidiary, but she was crowded out by the relentless pace of releases there, lost amongst songs by Jimmy Hughes, the Mad Lads, the Emotions, Darrell Banks and Jeanne and the Darlings. But her torch song ‘Never Can You Be’, backed by an immense mid-paced crossover song ‘One More Chance’, has somehow survived and clung on for several decades as an underground classic. Paradoxically, it was ‘Never Can You Be’ that alerted Atlantic Records to her talents. In the past that would have been a simple exchange of phone calls, and she would have stayed in Memphis to work with the Stax house band and record for Atlantic; but the mood music had changed in the intervening months, and the idea of recording at Stax while signed to Atlantic – the norm until May 1968 – was now as close as it gets to musical betrayal.
Before she left Memphis, her visit too fleeting, Margie Joseph made a contribution to a style of African-American music that was about to become yet another Memphis-inspired trend. Working with Isaac Hayes and the producer Fred Briggs, she covered a version of the Supremes’ ‘Stop! In The Name Of Love’, dismantling the song and then rebuilding it as a ballad, which she prefaced by a long narrative rap. The informal rap introduction and the deconstructed pop classic had become the creative signature of Hayes, used most compellingly on his ground-breaking version of Glen Campbell’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’.
By the end of 1968 Mahalia Jackson’s southern fried chicken franchise was careering towards bankruptcy and the singer’s diseased heart was failing her. Time had moved on, and the classic gospel tradition she represented, with all its demanding constraints, was fading in the rear-view mirror. Soul music was poised for another eventful episode in its hectic rush to modernity.
It is rare for a city to define a moment in music. Detroit had done it with Motown and Liverpool with the Mersey Sound, but Memphis stood ready to achieve it twice. First, with the raucous Stax-inspired songs of the mid sixties – Otis Redding’s ‘I Can’t Turn You Loose’, Sam and Dave’s ‘Hold On I’m Coming’, Wilson Pickett’s ‘Mustang Sally’ and Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock On Wood’ – but this time round it would be tear-drenched sophisticated soul – Al Green’s ‘So Tired Of Being Alone’ and ‘Let’s Stay Together’, the Soul Children’s ‘Move Over’ and ‘The Sweeter He Is’, Margie Joseph’s ‘Never Can You Be’ and Ann Peebles’ unblemished classics, ‘I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down’ and ‘I Can’t Stand The Rain’, a song that Peebles composed in a single night with her partner Don Bryant during a Memphis thunderstorm. It was the song that virtually invented a subgenre of soul music, a subtle mid-tempo sound that radio programmers dubbed ‘the quiet storm’.
Al Green was the maestro of the quiet storm. His sweetly nurtured gospel style was woven in heaven and delivered to romantics here on earth. It was music that was never intended to be raucous, or even revivalist; the style was devotional but cast in the familiar world of love, romance and relationships. Green is one of soul music’s most popular vocalists, selling over twenty million albums in a decade. Wherever he roamed, Albert Green was instinctively a southern singer. He was born into a poor sharecropping family in the so-called ‘Jewel of the Delta’, Forrest City, Arkansas. His family soon uprooted and tried to find a better life as part of the great migration north to Michigan. They settled for a while in Grand Rapids, where his father took low-paid factory work but never totally overcame heavy drinking. Green joined his school’s gospel choir, where he stood out from the chorus and soon became a featured vocalist in church gospel groups across Michigan. At aged sixteen, in a now familiar pattern for aspiring soul singers, he fell out with his father, who in an act of petty hypocrisy refused to allow his son to join an R&B band because they were likely to play in bars and nightclubs. The overbearing and self-righteous father figure has been a recurring figure in soul music, impeding the careers of David Ruffin and Marvin Gaye as well as Al Green. Deciding to ignore his father, Green joined a group called the Creations and walked out of the family home. He entered a new world, unsafe and unprotected, in which he slept on sofas, rehearsed in corridors and travelled to concerts in a crowded car, heaving with instruments and restless friends. He found temporary refuge with a Michigan prostitute and managed to climb up the local ladder of fame by joining the undercard at Junior Walker and the All Stars shows. Green’s group hustled enough money to bring out records on what was then a low-key independent label called Hot Line Music Journal, the most visible of which was a 1968 song called ‘Back Up Train’. On the strength of the song’s regional success Green secured an opening slot at the Apollo in Harlem, but whatever money the group made drained away and Green left to go solo, with neither family nor much direction to guide him. Fleeing from debt back in Grand Rapids and drifting inevitably southwards, Green found himself in Midland, Texas, where by sheer chance he met Willie Mitchell. In an interview with Andria Lisle, Mitchell tells a story of near desperation: ‘I knew even then that Al had the talent to really be something. But he didn’t have a follow-up to “Back Up Train”, and he was down on his luck, really starving. I offered to bring him back to Memphis and work with him, but he wanted to know how long it would take to make him a star. I told him eighteen months, and you know what he said? “I really can’t wait that long.” He came around, but first he needed some money – he had some bills to pay up in Michigan. I lent him $1,500 without a contract, and he took it and disappeared up north. About s
ix months later, the doorbell rang at six o’clock in the morning. I thought it was a man coming to paint my kitchen, but the guy said, “Don’t you remember me? I’m Al Green.”’
For reasons buried in history, Mitchell chose to launch Green’s Memphis career with a cover version of the Beatles classic ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Undistinguished, it fell without trace, but just as the song was fading out Green’s voice shrieked as if he had barely begun. He barely had. By the early seventies Green had recorded a string of songs that came to define both his style and his stature, among them tireless beat ballads like ‘So Tired Of Being Alone’ (1971), ‘Let’s Stay Together’ (1971) and ‘Call Me (Come Back Home)’ (1972), which would in time join the pantheon of peerless soul music.
Green had a woman in his life, too. Her name was Mary Woodson, and she was dating him casually but not yet closely. In a story that beggars belief, Green found himself caught in a relationship layered with deceit and hurtling towards tragedy. Woodson was twenty-nine and living a double life. A married mother of four (Green only discovered this after her death), she was petite, vivacious and arrestingly attractive, and had what has been described as ‘a megawatt smile’. She had a back story that read like a soap opera. Born in North Carolina, she had been a child bride and fell pregnant twice as a teenager. By 1968 she had remarried – to a quiet and unassuming electrician called Raymond – and was now living in New Jersey. She had a history of dating, pursuing and stalking soul singers and was well known at the Continental Ballroom in Newark, a staging post on soul music’s sinful northeast coast. Running away from the confinement of motherhood, she had several unfulfilling affairs and began to became reckless and suicidal. On one occasion she was admitted to hospital in Newark after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She even talked about suicide to her mother in the family home in Madison, New Jersey, telling her she would shoot herself with a gun and that on her burial she had to have an open casket and wear a favourite red dress so her beauty could be acknowledged. She fell in love with Green at first sight, apparently, when she met him at a prison benefit concert in upstate New York. Green was performing and she was an invited member of the audience, the guest of an inmate. Unaware of her home life, Green courted her with red roses and champagne, which her husband simply laughed off. They continued what has been described as ‘a torrid affair at long distance’, calling each other obsessively and speaking for unbroken hours at a time. Late one night, after Green had been recording at Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, they returned to his twenty-one-room mansion at 1404 Saint Paul Road in Millington on the northern outskirts of Memphis. Woodson went to the kitchen to cook a pot of boiling hot grits, the staple of southern soul food. She had mentioned wanting to marry Green and raised the subject again. He brushed it off, saying that they would talk about it in the morning. Woodson pursued him into the bathroom, where Green was stripped semi-naked preparing to shave, and threw the scalding pan of grits across his bare back. She then fled to a bedroom where she shot herself in the head with Green’s .38-calibre pistol. Inside her purse the police found a suicide note, and a few days after her death Al Green’s secretary opened a letter that contained a second suicide note. Green was rushed to the Baptist Hospital in Memphis, where he stayed for several weeks undergoing emergency treatment and skin graft surgery. The incident triggered a huge emotional retreat in Green’s life and he returned to the church claiming he had been born again. His days as a secular soul star were now preciously numbered, and although his drunken father was long gone, he returned to his roots in gospel music. In an exchange that would have horrified Mahalia Jackson, his mentor Willie Mitchell tried to talk him round. Green told an interviewer: ‘I don’t know what happened, except in 1973, I had this religious conversion, and Willie Mitchell . . . goes, “Oh no! You say you found Jesus! How we gonna make money with that?”’
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