Al Green was born in Dansby, Arkansas. The son of a sharecropper, he started performing at age nine in a Forrest City quartet called the Greene Brothers; he dropped the final "e" from his last name years later as a solo artist.

They toured extensively in the mid-1950s in the South until the Greenes moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when they began to tour around Michigan. His father kicked him out of the group because he caught Al listening to Jackie Wilson.