Introducing “The Essential Memphis Library.” The idea: If you wanted to build a home library of things relevant to Memphis history and culture, what should be in it? What books, movies, albums, songs, art prints, etc.? This indefinite series will build that library, one suggestion at a time. No hierarchy is implied in the order; each item just belongs. 

Released in the spring of 1973, “Call Me” was Al Green’s fifth album for Memphis’ Hi Records. It wasn’t his breakthrough; that was probably 1971’s “Al Green Gets Next to You.” It wasn’t his biggest seller; that was apparently 1972’s platinum “I’m Still in Love With You.” And it doesn’t contain Green’s biggest hit, which is probably the title track of 1971’s “Let’s Stay Together.”

But “Call Me” is both Green’s artistic apotheosis and arguably the last great moment of the fading era of classic Southern soul.

Cut at Royal Studios on South Lauderdale, under the direction of co-producer and engineer Willie Mitchell and with the Hi Rhythm house band in full command of a delicate groove all their own, the album features as fine a trio of singles as on any Green album. 

“You Ought to Be With Me” winnows Green’s sound to its essential parts. The title track, “Call Me (Come Back Home),” is a pleading consideration of the gulf between breakup and reconciliation. And “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” punchier and more percussive than anything else on the record, is one of Green’s grittiest rave-ups. 

But what makes “Call Me” not only Green’s greatest studio album, but perhaps the genre’s, is the rest: Six non-singles that are in no way filler, which come in purposeful, linked pairs.

There are the covers.

Green had already established himself as one of pop’s most audacious cover artists, tackling the Beatles (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”), Motown (“I Can’t Get Next To You”), the Doors (“Light My Fire”), the Bee Gees (“How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”), Roy Orbison (“Oh, Pretty Woman”) and Kris Kristofferson (“For the Good Times”). 

But what Green does on “Call Me” is a turf grab: A sharecropper’s son originally from east Arkansas, Green taps signature compositions from perhaps country music’s signature singer-songwriters — Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” — stretching the two songs out for more than three minutes longer than Williams and Nelson, letting them be templates for Green’s idiosyncratic vocal style. 

A decade prior, Ray Charles had taken a similar approach with his landmark “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” With its more subtle deployment of strings and backup vocals, Green’s synthesis has proven more durable.

There are the anthems.

The closest Green ever came to a political statement, “Stand Up” is a human rights/civil rights assertion as righteous and universal as the best of Bob Marley or Curtis Mayfield. 

And the closing “Jesus is Waiting” is a promise but also foreshadowing, cut three years before Green would take the pulpit at his own Full Gospel Tabernacle. As a composition, it was a kind of instant soul-gospel standard that you might wander upon in a Memphis church today. As a recording, Green’s part is brilliant, but maybe it’s Leroy Hodges’ bass that really brings you to the altar. 

But perhaps it’s fitting that the meek inherit the album.

At first, the least-assuming songs on “Call Me” — “Have You Been Making Out OK” and “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun” — are companions. “Did the morning sun warm your soul?” Green asks on the former, where the horns sigh, strings sway, and Green murmurs and whispers his concerns. The latter sounds like the scene it evokes, sunlight cutting through the blinds and onto the rumpled sheets of a lover’s bed. There may not be any popular music as tender. 

A perfect nine songs in 35 minutes.