Love and Happiness

Green wrote it with Teenie Hodges, who also co-wrote Take Me to the River and Here I Am (Come and Take Me), and Willie Mitchell produced it at the 1972 sessions for I'm Still in Love with You. In his 2000 autobiography Green said the song was like mixing explosive chemicals, with everything added at just the right time and dose, and that the tempo mattered most to Mitchell. Listen closely, he wrote, and you can hear Teenie counting off with his foot on a cardboard box on the take that nailed it. Howard Grimes told Rolling Stone that during the session Mitchell took Al Jackson Jr. off the drums and put Grimes on them. Mitchell told Jackson that he had wanted to play pretty but that Mitchell wanted the track funky. The Guardian heard in the song a driving pulse from Charles Hodges's organ and a breathy a cappella intro that sets up the duality between doing wrong and doing right.

Hi did not issue it as a US single while the album was selling. London Records put it out in the UK on 27 April 1973 backed with So You're Leaving, and Green sang it on Soul Train on 3 March 1973. An edited version reached the US only in the summer of 1977, backed with Glory Glory, and peaked at number 104 on the pop chart and 92 on the R&B chart. Rolling Stone ranked it number 98 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs. Pitchfork put it in its 2016 list of the 200 best songs of the 1970s, saying few love songs are more essential to soul music because it so naturally communicates the thrills of romance.