Soul Survivor by Jimmy McDonough

Author:Jimmy McDonough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

“Being a millionaire doesn’t mean anything… you have got to be able to feel free to enjoy life… I have been in an arena with 40,000 people, but I was the loneliest man there,” a morose Green confessed to Lynn Norment in the October 1976 issue of Ebony. Al would not forget just how bad he felt in those days; he elaborated on his condition to Andria Lisle in 2004. “Psychologically I was a mess. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think. I was out of it, and had no idea of what to do.” To Chet Flippo he admitted suicidal despair: “I was in a trauma, man… I could’ve jumped off a building I was in such turmoil.”

Religion was the one thing that offered some kind of solace. Despite all the touring and recording, “Every Sunday morning I’d get up and go to church,” Green told Robert Mugge. “This guy would be preachin’, he’d set your soul on fire. I’d drive all the way to Arkansas to hear that preacher. I’d take my girlfriend and everything… I had to go.”

Other times Green would seek out “any Pentecostal, Holy Ghost feel church, any Holiness Church I could find,” he told Sandra Pointer-Jones. In order to remain anonymous, Green would “dress up in these disguises,” but he’d end up “so overcome with the spirit… my glasses would fly off, wig’s flying! Man, my incognito’d be gone.”*

Green would hide away on his Oakland, Tennessee, farm, sit by the lake, and quietly read Genesis. People trying to reach him on business would have to listen to Al’s bodyguard Curtis Forte explain just what the boss was up to. “My man Curtis would say, ‘Oh, he’s readin’ the Bible… oh, yeah, Al’s out there readin’ the Bible.’ People thought I was nuts. I thought it was wonderful.”

At the same time, strange things began to happen onstage. In New Orleans, Green sang “Free at Last.” And kept singing it. “The spirit came and I went to rejoicing onstage, but people never knew,” Green admitted to Robert Mugge. “Tears, y’know… the song went on and on, the band thought it was goin’ on quite long—and I was down at the end of the concert hall singin’, ‘Free at last’ and people were havin’ a fit thinkin’ that I’m, y’know, just singin’ a song! I’m rejoicing.”

Green would sing his hits, like he’d do night after night, but “then, when I’d get to the point of “You Ought to Be with Me” or… “For the Good Times,” man, I don’t know, somethin’ started happenin’… I’d get these impulses—BrrrrOOOOoo… the concert would start goin’ off, I couldn’t help it… I’d start quotin’ scriptures… ‘That if a man would confess to Lord Jesus with his mouth, believe in his heart God has raised him from the dead, thou shall be saved.’”

It happened again one night when Al was playing “this weird little casino gig. I stood onstage and said, ‘When you open the Bible to Deuteronomy’… I had never seen 3,000 people leaving out of a place so fast! All the pimps and their ladies… were gone.

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