The Belle Album

It was Green's first record without Willie Mitchell, who owned Hi Records, Green's former label, and without the Hi Rhythm Section that had shaped his sound. It was also the first on which he played lead guitar, and, the Guardian noted, the last for decades to include anything but gospel material. Green wrote all the songs with Fred Jordan and Reuben Fairfax Jr. The Guardian wrote that where Mitchell had brought in strings, Green's production preferred a thin synthesiser, which sits ill against the classic sound in places, but that Georgia Boy, which takes us back to the rural South of his childhood, remains a delight. It heard the bass of Fairfax and Green's own guitar as echoing the acoustic funk of Bill Withers.

Robert Christgau of the Village Voice wrote in January 1978 that it was the most idiosyncratic LP in the top 200, a self-produced album built around Green's often acoustic guitar, with his best songs in years. In Rolling Stone that February Greil Marcus said we might someday look back on it as Al Green's best. Spin ranked it the 16th greatest record of all time in 1989, and The Wire put it on its 1998 list of 100 records that set the world on fire while no one was listening.