"Love and Happiness" sounds like a celebration. The groove is loose, and Al Green's voice floats over it as if nothing could go wrong. Listen to the words and the song turns more careful. Love, Green warns, is a power. It can make you do right. It can make you do wrong. Somewhere in the middle a late-night phone call suggests that someone in this story is already doing wrong.
That is a strange thing to put in a feel-good song. It is also one of the oldest things Scripture says about love. The same force that holds a marriage together can tear one apart. The Bible's own love song says love is as strong as death, and it does not mean that only as a compliment.
The Song and the Singer
Green wrote the song with guitarist Teenie Hodges, the anchor of the Hi Rhythm Section in Memphis. Willie Mitchell produced it at Royal Studios for the album I'm Still in Love with You, released by Hi Records in October 1972. Hi did not release it as an American single until 1977. It became one of Green's best-loved records anyway.
Green had grown up singing gospel with his brothers in Arkansas. By 1972 he was soul music's great romantic voice. He later said he was born again in 1973, at the height of his fame. The next year a girlfriend attacked him in his Memphis home, leaving him badly burned, and then took her own life. During his recovery he turned increasingly toward gospel. In 1976 he was ordained and founded the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, where he still preaches. By the late 1980s the old songs had found their way back into his concerts.
Strong as Death
The Song of Songs is the Bible's love song, and near its end the bride makes a request. "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it" (Song of Solomon 8:6–7).
She calls love strong and sets it beside death and the grave. Love and jealousy stand together in her lines. The Hebrew for "most vehement flame" is shalhevetyah, and many readers hear in its last syllable the short name of God, Yah. If they are right, it is the only place the Song names him. Love at full strength is a fire with God's name on it.
The Song also warns against handling that fire carelessly. Three times the bride says, "I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem… that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please" (Song of Solomon 2:7). Love woken at the wrong time, or toward the wrong person, does the damage Green's song describes. It makes you do wrong with the same force that could have made you do right.
Green seems to have known the verse. In 1975 he released a B-side titled "Strong as Death (Sweet as Love)".
Happiness
The second word in the title has a Hebrew history of its own. The Psalms open with it. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful" (Psalm 1:1). The word behind "blessed" is ashrei, and the KJV itself often renders it "happy": "Happy is that people, whose God is the LORD" (Psalm 144:15).
The psalm defines that happiness by where a man walks, stands and sits. Some scholars connect ashrei to a root meaning to go straight or to advance. Whether or not the etymology holds, the psalm makes the link plain. Happiness in Psalm 1 is the condition of a person whose steps are going the right way.
Green's song pairs the two words as if they always travel together. Scripture agrees, on one condition. Love that makes you do right leads somewhere a person can call happy. Love that makes you do wrong produces the late-night phone call instead. The force is the same. The direction decides whether happiness follows.
The Same Voice
After 1974 Green tried, for a time, to divide his life in two. The love songs belonged to the old man. Gospel belonged to the new one. For years he kept them apart. Then, slowly, the old songs came back into his shows, sung by a man who was by then a pastor.
The Bible never asked for the division he first attempted. It keeps a love song in the canon, frank enough that the rabbis debated it. Rabbi Akiva settled the matter with a famous line: all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5). Jewish tradition reads it as the love between God and Israel. Many Christians read it as Christ and the church. Neither reading erases the man and the woman in the text. The human love is the picture, and the picture is honored.
That may explain why the same voice could carry both. A man who sang that love can make you do right had already said something true about God. The pastor only had to say where that love is pointed.
Keeping Time
The record begins before the music does. On the take Mitchell kept, Teenie Hodges taps out the tempo with his foot, and only then does the band fall in. Mitchell cared about tempo more than anything. A groove played too fast or too slow is the same notes gone wrong.
The Song of Songs cares about timing too. Its warning is against waking love before its time. The bride's charge to the daughters of Jerusalem is a count-off of its own: wait, and let love come in on the beat.
Green's song never resolves its phone call. We do not learn who was on the line or what was done. It leaves the listener with the warning and the groove. The Song of Songs closes its love story with a request, and the request is still being asked when the book ends: set me as a seal upon thine heart. Set the two side by side. One is a call in the night that no one answers for us. The other is a seal that has been asked for and not yet shown. Love strong as death is still in the asking, and the Psalms hold out happiness to the one who keeps walking toward it.