Saturday afternoon tunes: Won't you help me girl, as soon as you can?

Everyone remember where they were thirty-nine years ago yesterday?

There can be no question that anyone would have been shaken by the events that transpired in the Memphis, Tennessee, home of singer Al Green in the early morning hours of October 18, 1974, when an ex-girlfriend burst in on him in the bath and poured a pot of scalding-hot grits on his back before retreating to a bedroom and shooting herself dead with Green's own gun. Not everyone, however, would have processed the meaning of the incident quite the way that Green did. Believing that he had strayed from the righteous musical and spiritual course intended for him, Al Green had become a born-again Christian one year earlier. But after the attack by Mary Woodson on this day in 1974, he began a process that would eventually lead him to renounce pop superstardom and all that it stood for.

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