Surprise: it got there by being one of the best-sung hits of the 70s. The title track of Let's Stay Together is a karaoke standard and an "American Idol" joke. (Callow youth may know the Hodges brothers as those dudes who backed up Cat Power circa The Greatest.) And, while virtually every other soul marquee name of the era was recording with session dudes, he had a real band worthy of his gifts: guitarist Teenie Hodges, organist Charles Hodges, bassist Leroy Hodges, drummers Howard Grimes and Al Jackson, backup singers Rhodes, Chalmers and Rhodes, and producer Willie Mitchell, who'd had a string of instrumental hits of his own in the 60s and knew how to shape Green's expansive gifts into compact 210-second packages. He could articulate unbelievably delicate shades of feeling with his voice alone he had an astonishing sense of timing, of pitch, of emphasis, of drama. Other soul singers may have had more raw power or a wider stylistic range (although not many of them), but nobody else had Green's virtuosity or interpretive gifts. The first fruits of the unlikely deal are reissues of three of Hi's crown jewels: Al Green's fourth and fifth albums, and the magnificent greatest-hits collection that followed them a few years later. The catalogue of Hi Records- the magnificent Memphis label that cranked out hits from the 1950s to the 70s- has been in and out of print for the last few decades, and now it's been licensed by Fat Possum.
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