The voice. The falsetto -- that silken, weightless thing that floated over Willie Mitchell's Hi Records grooves like it wasn't subject to gravity. Let's Stay Together is the sound of a man making a case for love so persuasive you forget he's singing to himself as much as anyone else. Love and Happiness. Tired of Being Alone. I'm Still in Love with You. Al Green made seduction sound like prayer, and prayer sound like seduction. The difference, for him, was almost none.

He was the sixth of ten children, born to a sharecropper in Arkansas who moved the family to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when Al was a teenager. He formed a gospel group with his brothers, then a soul group called Al Greene and the Creations (he'd drop the final "e" later). A chance encounter with bandleader Willie Mitchell in Midland, Texas, changed everything. Mitchell brought him to Memphis, gave him the Hi Records rhythm section -- the Hodges brothers on guitar and bass, Howard Grimes on drums, the Memphis Strings arranged by James Mitchell -- and together they created a sound that was part Stax, part church, part after-hours lounge. The formula was simple: let Al sing, keep the groove unhurried, and never let the production get in the way of the voice.

The voice was enough. On Let's Stay Together, his falsetto cracks on "loving you whether times are good or bad," and the crack is the point. On Love and Happiness, he ad-libs over the vamp for a full minute, scatting and moaning like a man who's just discovered something incredible and needs to tell you about it right now. On Simply Beautiful, he's accompanied by nothing but a gently strummed guitar and his own overdubbed harmonies, and it's the most intimate thing he ever recorded.

Then in 1974, his girlfriend Mary Woodson threw a pot of boiling grits on him. Third-degree burns on his back, stomach, and arms. She went into the other room and shot herself with his gun. Al took it as a sign from God. He bought a church in Memphis, became Reverend Al Green, and spent the next two decades singing gospel -- "I don't do secular music anymore," he said, and he meant it. And then, slowly, the secular crept back in. A duet with Annie Lennox. A comeback album produced by Questlove. The voice hadn't changed. It was already perfect.

He still preaches at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis. He still sings. The falsetto is a little grainier now, but the grain adds weight. When Al Green sings "let's stay together" at 78, it means something different than it did at 25. It means everything.