The happiest record in a darkening year
There is no simpler pleasure in the Al Green catalogue than Sha La La (Make Me Happy). It is three minutes of nonsense syllables and sunlight — a singer so pleased with love that words briefly fail him and he has to sing “sha la la la la la la” instead. Written by Green alone and placed at the very front of his 1974 album Al Green Explores Your Mind, it became the album’s one major hit, climbing to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week before Christmas 1974 and No. 2 on the soul chart. What almost nobody listening to it on the radio that December could have known is what its singer had survived that autumn. Sha La La is one of pop’s purest expressions of joy, and it reached its peak in the weeks when Al Green’s life was coming apart — the season that turned the King of Soul toward the pulpit.
Business as usual at Royal Studios
On the surface, the sessions for Al Green Explores Your Mind were a model of the machine working. Green returned to Royal Studios in Memphis, the converted theatre where he and producer Willie Mitchell had built the Hi Records sound. Mitchell and Green shared the producer’s credit, and the band was the family: Teenie Hodges on guitar, Leroy Hodges on bass, Charles Hodges on organ and piano, Howard Grimes on drums and congas, the Memphis Horns, the Memphis Strings, and the Rhodes sisters and Charles Chalmers on backing vocals. Green wrote every song on the album, and he led it with Sha La La — a deliberate piece of sunshine, built on a bouncing groove and a chorus that a child could learn in one hearing.
The strategy worked commercially. The album, released in October 1974, became Green’s fifth consecutive No. 1 on the soul albums chart and reached No. 15 on the pop chart, earning gold certification. The single entered the Hot 100 in late September and kept climbing through the autumn — No. 87 in its first weeks, into the Top 40 by November, and finally to No. 7 on 21 December, spending three weeks in the Top 10. In Britain it reached No. 20. Coming after the sophisticated ache of Call Me and Livin’ for You, Sha La La seemed to announce a simpler, sunnier phase of Green’s career.
Critics noticed the craft beneath the cheer. Al Green Explores Your Mind drew four stars from Rolling Stone and an A− from Tom Hull, and Robert Christgau graded it B+ — strong notices for an album that posterity would file as minor Green, largely because it contained “only” one major hit. But what a hit to be remembered by. Sha La La belongs to a lineage of soul records built on nonsense syllables — the doo-wop inheritance, in which joy is expressed precisely where language runs out — and Green, who had spent four albums perfecting the art of the meaningful murmur, was the ideal singer for it. His “sha la la” is not filler; it is the sound of a man too happy to bother with sentences, answered by Rhodes, Chalmers and Rhodes like a congregation that has heard the good news and intends to sing about it. Underneath, Howard Grimes keeps the beat crisp and unhurried, Charles Hodges’s organ glows at the edges, and Teenie Hodges picks out the guitar figures with his usual economy. Nobody on the record sounds like they are working. That was the trick of the Hi sound at its peak: enormous musicianship arranged to feel like a shrug.
October 1974
The announcement could not have been more misleading. In October 1974, as the album was released and the single began its climb, Mary Woodson — a former girlfriend of Green’s — came to his Memphis home while he was bathing and poured a pot of boiling grits over him, inflicting second-degree burns across his back, stomach and arm. She then took his gun and killed herself. Green was hospitalised, and the incident detonated inside his understanding of his own life. He had always been a gospel singer moonlighting in soul music, raised in a devout Arkansas family and torn between the church his father loved and the charts he had conquered. He read the attack as a sign — a warning delivered in the only language violent enough to reach him — and began, slowly and then completely, to reorder his life around his faith.
The timeline is worth sitting with. While Sha La La (Make Me Happy) was ascending the charts — a record whose entire lyric is a shrug of happiness — its singer was recovering from burns and contemplating the end of the career that had made it. The joy on the record is real, but it is the joy of a man photographed mid-stride, one step before the ground moves. Green cut the album before the incident, and there is no evidence he thought of the song any differently afterward. But listeners who know the story can never unhear it: the lightest record of his career, peaking in the darkest winter of his life.
The machinery of a three-minute smile
It is worth pausing on how the record is engineered to feel effortless, because nothing at Royal Studios was ever as simple as it sounded. The track opens the album at a walking pace, Grimes’s drums dry and close, the groove leaving deliberate holes that Green’s voice fills with those floating syllables. The backing singers do not harmonise so much as shimmer, repeating his title phrase back to him like sunlight bouncing off water. Mitchell, who liked his records to breathe, resisted the era’s temptation to thicken everything with horns; the Memphis Horns are present mostly as punctuation, short sunbursts between phrases, and the strings are mixed as atmosphere rather than argument. The result is a record that sounds like a first take of happiness — although everyone in the room, Mitchell most of all, was far too disciplined for that. As with all the great Hi singles, the looseness is composed. It is joy, rehearsed until it sounds unrehearsed.
The turn toward the pulpit
What followed Explores Your Mind traced the arc the incident had set. Al Green Is Love arrived in 1975, and by 1976 Green had bought a church in Memphis, the Full Gospel Tabernacle, and been ordained as its pastor. In 1977 he produced himself on The Belle Album — the record whose centrepiece, Belle, openly staged his argument between “the world” and God — and by the end of the decade he had largely left secular music, spending the 1980s recording Grammy-winning gospel albums and preaching on Sundays in Memphis. The man who sang Sha La La did not vanish; he was translated. Anyone who has heard Green preach, or heard the gospel phrasing inside even his most secular love songs, understands that the two voices were always one voice looking for its proper room.
Sha La La itself took its place in the permanent collection the following spring, closing the story on record: it was included on Al Green’s Greatest Hits in March 1975, the compilation that froze the Hi Records years into a single canonical volume. The album that bore it also hid a second legacy — its track Take Me to the River, written by Green with Teenie Hodges, which Talking Heads would take into the Top 30 in 1978 and Rolling Stone would rank among the 500 greatest songs of all time. For an album history remembers as having “only one major hit,” Explores Your Mind was quietly loaded.
There is one more statistic that frames the record’s place in his story. Sha La La turned out to be Al Green’s last Top 10 single on the Hot 100. The hits did not stop — L-O-V-E (Love) reached No. 1 on the soul chart in 1975, and Full of Fire and Keep Me Cryin’ followed him through 1976 — but the pop Top 10 never opened for him again, and the window that had begun with Tired of Being Alone in 1971 quietly closed with a song made of nonsense syllables. In that sense the record is a genuine farewell, even if nobody at Royal Studios knew it at the time: the final entry in the run of gold singles that had made Green, between 1971 and 1974, the most reliable hitmaker in soul music. The Greatest Hits album that collected them, with Sha La La riding near the front, climbed into the Top 20 and was eventually certified platinum — the era sealed in a single sleeve.
In the end, Sha La La (Make Me Happy) is the sound of Al Green’s secular career at its most weightless — a hit with no shadows in it, made by a man about to walk into the biggest shadow of his life and come out a minister. It needs no sorrow to justify it. But knowing what October 1974 held gives its three minutes an ache that pure joy rarely carries: the last uncomplicated smile in a catalogue that would spend the next decade asking, in song after song, what the soul is really for.