Search - Gospel According to Al Green on DVD

The Amazing Grace of Al Green

Stephanie DePue | Carolina Beach, NC USA | 01/16/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Gospel according to Al Green," is a long-awaited 25th anniversary edition of the television profile by Robert Mugge. The DVD documentary, originally televised in 1984, has been shown on PBS stations, BET, and at various festivals. It offers a candid, close look at Green, one of the few remaining candidates for King of Soul who's still with us today. (And one of the few who could give James Brown a run for his money as the hardest-working man in show business.) It shows the performer in the recording studio, in performance at Bolling Air Force base, and preaching at the church he founded in Memphis, Tennessee. This reissue also offers a 90-minute audio interview with the singer, and several other special features.

Green is a nine-time Grammy winner, and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; he's recorded more than 40 albums. He recently released a new CD,Lay It Down, and received the BET Lifetime Achievement Award (2008). He was a 1970's soul singer with a healthy career, built on "Let's Stay Together" and other hits, until he awoke one morning in a hotel room hungry for religion, and so became a gospel singer and Pentecostal preacher. The singer has a non-stop, whiter than white-toothed smile, a bedrock of honesty, and a galvanizing energy, and he sweats up a storm, whether in concert or preaching, which he does in speech-to-music, and song - looks to me like he literally invented rap. On this DVD, we see his electrifying takes of "Let's Stay Together," "Free at Last," and "Amazing Grace."

Mugge has been called "the king of the American music documentary" by "L.A. Weekly." The award-winning filmmaker has also made New Orleans Music in Exile; and Saxophone Colossus.

Many years ago, during my English exile, I was lying on the floor of the cottage, listening to Otis Redding, when Tony Burfield, the pompous young music business flunky who lived next door, came in. Burfield told me that the floor was meant "to walk upon and stand upon, not to lie upon," and that I was dating myself listening to Redding; that those in the know were now listening to Green, and I've never forgiven him. But I've long since forgiven Green: the man just has an amazing way with him.
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