Songfacts®:

• "Here I Am" was written by Al Green and Teenie Hodges, who also worked with Green on his hits "Take Me to the River" and "Love and Happiness" Here, Green is practically begging his girl to come back, letting her know that he's hers for the taking despite all the times she broke his heart.
• The Call Me album is Al Green's magnum opus, and is widely regarded as one of the best Soul albums of all time. VH1 named Call Me the 70th in its list of all-time greatest albums, and it made #289 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
  If you sense a bit of the rebel in Al Green, consider that as a kid Al was singing with a quartet called the Greene Brothers, but his father yanked him out. The reason: he caught his son listening to Jackie Wilson's music. With Wilson being one of the pioneers of Soul, we can see that Al Green followed his call anyway. Far from resting on his laurels as a '70s Soul sensation, Al Green has gone on to comparable success even into this century; his 2008 album Lay It Down reached #9 on the Billboard album charts.
• Other artists to record this song include Jimmy Barnes, Marcia Griffiths, Al Jarreau, Michael Jackson, Seal and UB40.
• Green was one of the few performers to play live on Soul Train. He had a broken arm when he appeared on the show in 1974, but with one arm in a sling and another holding a rose, he sang an electrifying rendition of this song that became a musical highlight of the series.