![]() Two years later, Willie and Al are hunkered down in Royal Recording Studio in Memphis, the home of Hi Records, working on the songs that would fill out Green is Blues, his first for the label, and the precursor to a string of classics, three of which ended up on this Rolling Stone list. He didn’t have the cost of a bus ticket to Grand Rapids. It wasn’t until the night was ending, and the roadhouse owner refused to pay the musicians, claiming that they hadn’t drawn a big enough crowd to cover his expenses, that Al worked up the nerve to approach Willie again. No offer of a record deal, nor a contract. Intrigued by his unconventional delivery, Willie bought him a drink after the show (Al exchanged it for a ham sandwich), and asked a question interviewers would be asking for decades: Where’d you learn to sing like that? (“Here and there” was the answer Al gave, coyly glossing over his love for Jackie Wilson, his time on the Baptist revival circuit, and his childhood penchant for mimicking bird songs.) A professional curiosity, that’s all it was. Al, a one-hit nobody, was literally singing for his dinner. Willie Mitchell, an influential bandleader, was headed home to Memphis after a successful West Coast tour. In his autobiography, Take Me to the River, Al interprets what happened that night the way he’s interpreted virtually every moment in his career since becoming an ordained minister: as an act of divine intervention. So he picks up the cardboard suitcase and sets off down the highway, probably wishing he’d never given up that car-waxing gig back in Grand Rapids. He’s hungry and tired, but his only prospects for a meal and a decent night’s sleep lie at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. For nine months now, he’s been playing lonely roadhouse clubs across the South-“the chitlin circuit”-singing his lone hit, “Back Up Train,” for the ten people who show up each night to hear it. His soiled, lime-green polyester suit-hardly adequate in this biting Texas wind-looks like he hasn’t taken it off in a week, and the soles of his imitation alligator loafers are wearing through. Everything else he owns is in a cardboard suitcase. When Al Green steps off a Greyhound in Midland, Texas, in the winter of 1968, he has 35 cents in his pocket.
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