by David Lefkowitz (@gymshortsdave)
Summertime in Memphis presents a different kind of suffering. First of all, it’s hot – really hot. Triple digit temps are so routine by July that 85 feels like a break. Things take on a hallucinatory effect, every vision of the city rippling with the billowing heat rays that drift up all sleepy from the street. Every car seat sears your legs, every seatbelt burns to touch, and the AC never starts blowing cold until you reach your destination. The Delta oxygen, too, is out to get you. So much Mississippi River lingers in the air you might as well be out for a swim, and breathing by the mid-afternoon can begin to feel a lot like drowning.
From this sweaty, gasping crucible: a song. Hi Records was founded in South Memphis in 1957. A record store owner, two former producers for Sun Records (the high-achieving oldest child of the Memphis music boom), and a handful of others set up shop in a renovated theater on South Lauderdale Street and started recording. Hi (and its house band, the Hi Rhythm Section) was home to the golden years of several Southern Soul titans: Ann Peebles, Don Bryant, Otis Clay. No artist’s sales helped more to keep the lights on, however, than Al Green.
The son of an Arkansas sharecropper kicked to the curb as a teenager for listening to Jackie Wilson, Green was the prodigal son who never came home and never seemed to regret it much, either. The Greenes (Al would lose the extra “e” somewhere in the 60s) were a devoutly religious family who’d moved to Michigan in the late 1950s. Al loved the gospel music he was raised around, but it was the “hip-shakin’ boys” — Elvis Presley and Wilson Pickett — who really captured his imagination. It was in the fusion of these influences where the magic really took hold. After a precocious but inauspicious early career across several adolescent R&B groups, Green signed with Hi Records; in that moment a star was born, and a Memphian was made.
Al Green’s got a voice like a rocking chair on a Southern porch. This album was made for long, brutal Delta summers, for humidity so thick you feel like you’re breathing through a snorkel. A wholly perfect confluence of his influences, Call Me finds Green stepping into soul, gospel, and country with the confidence of a man who’s already seen it all, and in doing so, he transcends himself. On Call Me, Al Green doesn’t sound like Memphis, and he doesn’t speak for Memphis, either. Al Green becomes Memphis, sermonizing through your stereo.
In honor of its 50th anniversary, Call Me has now been reissued in all its power and glory. The record itself is as vital as ever, as is Green — 77 years old and still singing, still touring, and still every bit himself. But to listen to Call Me today is to pick up a call from a young man at the height of his powers. Half a century and the phone’s still ringing — go ahead and pick up.