Let's Stay Together

Willie Mitchell produced and recorded it, and he and Terry Manning mixed it. By the Guardian's account of Green's story, Mitchell gave him the bare bones of a track that Green did not care for, and pressed him to write a lyric. Green suspected the push was a ploy to get him to record it, because he would then earn writing royalties. He claims he wrote the words in five minutes, then spent a quarter of an hour in the studio lobby so that Mitchell would think he had taken it seriously, drinking a Coke and watching a boxing match. The two argued for two days before Green agreed to record. Mitchell kept asking for more softness and warmth, and by Green's own account he finally sang it the way the producer wanted just to end the ordeal. None of that backstage combat is audible on the record.

The single came out in 1971 and reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining on that chart for 16 weeks, and it topped the R&B chart for nine. Billboard ranked it the eleventh best-selling song of 1972. The author Peter Guralnick wrote that it was "the first full realization of Willie Mitchell's vision of soul music on a higher plane." Rolling Stone ranked it number 60 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2010. Pitchfork called it a vow, something to believe in, and noted that in 2015 it still ranked among the 50 most popular wedding songs on Spotify.

Live and covers

Green performed it on Later... with Jools Holland in 2010. On 19 January 2012 Barack Obama sang a brief phrase of it at the Apollo Theater in New York, at a campaign fundraiser where Green was the opening act. Tina Turner's version, produced by the British Electric Foundation team, was released by Capitol in November 1983 and reached number six in the UK, and it appears on Private Dancer. The song is heard in the films Pulp Fiction (1994) and Hellboy (2004).