1973 · Behind the Songs
Never released as a single, this five-and-a-half-minute album cut carries the spiritual weight of Green’s 1973 masterpiece.
On the second side of Call Me, tucked between the love songs that made Al Green a star, sits a track that stops the album cold. “Jesus Is Waiting” runs five minutes and thirty-six seconds, was written by Green himself, and was never released as a single. It appears as the fourth track on side two, a position that in the vinyl era meant it would only be found by listeners who played the record all the way through. Those who did found something unlike anything else in Green’s catalog up to that point: a slow, deliberate meditation that trades romantic pursuit for spiritual patience, and in doing so reveals the depth of the gospel roots underneath even his most secular love songs.
The album around it needs little introduction to soul fans. Call Me was released on July 18, 1973, on Hi Records, recorded the previous year at Royal Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, and produced by Willie Mitchell and Al Green. It arrived at the absolute peak of Green’s commercial powers, the follow-up to the enormously successful I’m Still in Love with You. The record spun off three singles, each a substantial hit: “You Ought to Be with Me,” which reached number three on the pop chart and number one on the R&B chart in 1972; “Call Me (Come Back Home),” which climbed to number ten pop and number two R&B; and “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” which matched that number ten pop and number two R&B placement. Against that backdrop of chart dominance, “Jesus Is Waiting” stands apart precisely because it was not chasing airplay. It was not designed for the radio, and it does not sound like it was.
The Royal Studios Sound
The musicians on Call Me were the same core group that had defined Green’s sound across his early Hi Records albums, and their chemistry is one of the reasons the record holds together so well. Drummers Howard Grimes and Al Jackson Jr. anchored the rhythm section, with Charles Hodges on organ and piano, Leroy Hodges on bass, and Teenie Hodges on guitar forming the tight, interlocking groove that Willie Mitchell had honed into a signature. The Memphis Horns, including Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor sax, added brass punctuation, while the Memphis Strings supplied the lush beds that gave Green’s records their distinctive warmth. Background vocals came from Charles Chalmers, Donna Rhodes, and Sandra Rhodes, whose blended voices became as much a part of the Hi Records sound as the rhythm section itself.
What makes “Jesus Is Waiting” remarkable in this context is how the arrangement serves the song’s stillness. Where the singles from Call Me move with the confident stride of a man sure of his appeal, this track holds back. The tempo is unhurried, the instrumentation spare by Mitchell’s standards, and Green’s vocal — always the center of any record he made — takes on a hushed, almost conversational quality. The organ does not drive the song so much as cushion it. The guitar picks out sparse figures rather than the choked, rhythmic patterns that define Green’s uptempo work. The drums keep time without insisting on it. It is the sound of an artist who, even at the height of his romantic-soul fame, was unwilling to leave the church behind, and of a producer wise enough to let him follow that instinct.
A Prayer Between Love Songs
The placement of “Jesus Is Waiting” on the album repays attention. Side two of a vinyl LP in 1973 was where artists often put the material that mattered most to them personally, away from the commercial pressure of side one’s opening tracks. By situating this explicitly spiritual song at track four of side two, Green and Mitchell were making a quiet statement: this record about calling out to a lover also contains a call to something higher. The title itself inverts the album’s romantic urgency. Where “Call Me (Come Back Home)” pleads for a lover’s return and “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)” offers himself up, this song suggests a different kind of patience, a waiting that is not anxious but faithful.
It is important to be precise about what the song is and is not. It was not a single, so it has no chart story to tell. It did not cross over to pop radio or become a staple of oldies programming. Its significance lies entirely in what it reveals about Green as a writer and Mitchell as a producer at this specific moment. In the summer of 1973, Green was at the top of the soul world, and he chose to include on his most commercially successful album to date a five-and-a-half-minute song about waiting on Jesus. That choice tells us something essential about the artist: that the gospel impulse was not a phase he had outgrown or a detour from his “real” work, but a living part of his musical identity that could surface even in the middle of a secular triumph.
What to Listen For
Listen first to the space in the recording. Royal Studios was not a large room, and Willie Mitchell’s productions are famous for their intimacy — the sense that the band is playing in a small, warm space with Green standing just a few feet from the microphone. On “Jesus Is Waiting,” that intimacy becomes almost devotional. The organ, likely Charles Hodges, does not push the song forward; it surrounds Green’s voice like light through a window. The guitar, likely Teenie Hodges, offers single notes and short phrases where on other tracks it might have scratched out a full rhythm part. The Memphis Strings, so often the signifier of romantic grandeur on Green’s records, are used here with notable restraint, adding color rather than drama, warmth rather than sweep.
Then listen to Green’s phrasing. He was a master of the pause, of letting a line hang in the air before resolving it, and here he uses that gift in the service of reverence rather than seduction. Where on the love songs he might stretch a word to make it ache with desire, here the hesitations feel like breaths taken before prayer. The background vocals from Chalmers and the Rhodes sisters do not swell into the big choruses of the singles; they hover at the edges, they support, they affirm. There is a humility in the arrangement that is rare in pop music of any era, a willingness to be quiet.
Finally, consider the length. At 5:36, “Jesus Is Waiting” takes its time in a way that commercial soul rarely did. In an era when singles were routinely cut to under three and a half minutes for radio, an album cut of this duration was a statement of intent. Green and Mitchell were not worried about whether this song would get played on AM radio or whether it would help sell the album. They were making the record they wanted to make, and they trusted the listener to stay with them through the slow passages. That trust was well placed. Call Me remains one of the most celebrated soul albums of the 1970s, and “Jesus Is Waiting” remains one of its most quietly powerful moments — a reminder that even at the peak of his powers as a singer of romantic love, Al Green never forgot the other love that had shaped his voice, and that Willie Mitchell knew exactly how to capture it.