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Al Green is an undeniable soul legend. However, as a child in discovering the roots of soul music, I discovered something about my favorite style of soul, Southern soul. Country music. Segregation created issues with radio where so many modern American soul men were not influenced by “race records,” but by their transistor radios, which, for the most part were tuned into country radio stations. However, not everyone evolved into Charley Pride. At some point as blacks began to take control over their own destinies, the blues of the underground melded with the R & B of the north, and in cases like Al Green’s 1973 B-side from the album Call Me, the country is fondly remembered as well in Green’s cover of the 1949 Hank Williams staple. It is indeed one of those wonderful happy accidents of music.
Hank Williams delivers the song like a dirge. It’s not reflecting on the loss of love, it’s reflecting on the loneliness of the human condition in coping. In that vein, this song achieves mastery. Hank’s dry, emotionless recounting of a “lonesome whippowill who sounds to blue to cry” may be one of the most intensely depressing lyrics in musical history. You want to cry with Hank because he’s lost his love, and he really has no idea what else to do with his life. The profound emptiness in his expression makes the song heartbreaking in the male expression. However, this is not the same for Al Green.
Al Green redefines this classic and stamps it as his own in reinvigorating the meaning to not a reflection on the loneliness, but a reflection on the woman. In begging likely not heard in soul music until Keith Sweat, Al Green, when he hits the line that the whippowill “has lost the will to live,” you feel the crippling force of woman upon the male psyche. It’s as if his love has snatched his soul, and he’s fighting, pleading, desiring it back, fearful of wallowing in the abyss of loneliness. That emotion is lost on many men. Many men will fold, and many will be stuck in Hank’s exposition. But in one of Al’s underrated and most defining moments, he wants, craves and celebrates in the darkness of that emotion.
On either end, this is bravery, recorded and saved for all time.
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