A Love Song for Jeanie Greene
On Sunday 19 August, I lost a friend.
Jeanie Greene has been a favourite singer since my student days and about a decade ago via a YouTube documentary trailer, a call to Ardent Studios in Memphis and then a follow up call to fellow favourite musician Don Nix, we became good friends. Jeanie was in awe of my all-time favourite, Bonnie Bramlett, and what started out as an attempt to arrange for them to meet at a concert in Huntsville, AL, in 2010 turned out to be a shared experience when I jumped on a plane from England too. Jeanie wasn’t famous, though some of
her recordings are, most notably her backing vocals on some of Percy Sledge and Elvis’ biggest hits, including "When A Man Loves A Woman", "Suspicious Minds" and "In The Ghetto". That kind of work almost demands anonymity and Jeanie excelled in that area with several major artists, including Albert King, Lonnie Mack, Boz Scaggs, James Bur- ton, Willie Nelson, Carl Perkins, Joan Baez and many others besides. Jeanie's misspelt name is listed in the Alabama Hall of Fame and, with an alternative misspelling, features on a permanent street plaque across the road from where she cut “When A Man Loves A Woman” with Percy Sledge in 1966. George Harrison introduces her at his 1971 Madison Square Garden concert for Bangladesh as part of “a whole lot of singers”, though she’s prop- erly named in the rolling credits at the end of the film and in the album notes. Jeanie had been in a care home since
soon after my last visit in 2015 and, not knowing her end was so near, I watched the whole of the glorious Bangladesh concert in
Peter Cross and Jeanie Greene. (Photo Courtesy Peter Cross)
full last Saturday night, for the second time that week. The time before that had been with Jeanie a couple of years ago, complete with her running commentary to the DVD that I’d just bought her. What most attracted me in the first
place, however, was Jeanie’s only solo album, Mary Called Jeanie Greene, which carried the names of Muscle Shoals’ finest session players and surely had to be worth a punt for 50p at a second hand record store in another Sheffield, my English university town. It cer- tainly was. The Alabama Troupers’ live album with Don Nix soon followed and it was on these gospel infused recordings that Jeanie’s own voice could really be heard. I wish there was so much more. Decades later, it was almost surreal to
be talking with Jeanie on the phone for the first time, as if with a long lost friend and then soon after around the kitchen table as a newly found one. Cruelly, health issues meant that Jeanie had to prematurely abandon her
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