GirlSPIN Radio: Producer Series: WILLIE MITCHELL

Singer Al Green with Producer Willie Mitchell during recording session.

March 1, 1928 – January 5, 2010

R.I.P.

There are many reasons to note the passing of Memphis-based trumpeter
and producer Willie Mitchell (1928-2010), including his solid career
as a Rhythm & Blues performer in the 1960s and his ownership of
Royal Studios in Memphis. Mitchell, though, will forever be remembered
as the architect of the sound of Hi Records. In its heyday in the
mid-1970s, Hi-Records was home to musicians like Ann Peebles
(“I Can’t Stand the Rain”), Syl Johnson, O.V. Wright, Otis Clay
and most famously Al Green.

Willie Mitchell was born in Ashland, Mississippi in 1928 and began
playing music during high school . In his formative years in the 1950s,
when he settled in Memphis after a stint in the Armed Services, Mitchell
played with or behind a who’s who of Memphis based musicians including Al
Jackson, Jr. (future drummer for the groundbreaking Booker T. and the MGs)
and young jazz giants like Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Charles Lloyd.
By the end of the 1950s, Mitchell was a well respected session musician,
though he harbored a desire to be a leader in his own right.

In the early 1960s, Mitchell released a few instrumental singles on the
fledgling Hi Records, but also began to produce artists for the label.
At the time Mitchell, whose musical sensibilities were geared to Jazz,
began, like most of the nation, to become enthralled with the burgeoning
Soul sound that was exploding in places like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia
and of course Memphis, where the Stax label was a singular force.

Mitchell was touring in support his highest charting single, “Soul Serenade,"
a cover of the King Curtis track, when he first heard Al Green in Midland, TX.
Green was the opening act and still living off his one hit single at the time
“Back Up Train.” As Mitchell recalls upon hearing Green that first time,
“This guy has got the style, he’s got the sound to really be something.” Mitchell
brought Green into the fold and though it was an initial struggle to get the
singer on board with the style that Mitchell envisioned, they eventually hit with
Green’s idiosyncratic cover of the Temptation’s “I Can’t” Get Next to You” (1970).
With the follow-up “Tired of Being Alone” and then the classic “Let’s Stay Together”
the Hi Soul sound was fully developed.

Mitchell did, what few contemporary producers continue to do; he took a novice singer
and produced a fully-developed artist—arguably one of the greatest of the late 20th
Century. Mitchell deserves every accolade for what was a significant career in his own
right, but in the end it will be those sides he cut with Al Green that will make
him immortal.