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Ian Bartley
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Legendary soul singer Percy Sledge's career is often reduced to just one song. Sledge's 1966 hit, "When a Man Loves a Woman," carried the singer to stardom, and has kept him in the limelight ever since. "When a Man Loves a Woman" remains one of the most heavily played songs on the radio--estimates of its airplays range around five million. About 50 other artists have recorded their own versions of the ballad, and the song earned a Grammy award for pop crooner Michael Bolton in 1992. Though he enjoyed a number of lesser hits, including "Cover Me," "It Tears Me Up," "Warm and Tender Love," "Out of Left Field," "Take Time to Know Her," "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)," and "I'll Be Your Everything," "When a Man Loves a Woman" stands as the lone hit in Sledge's repertoire. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times declared that Sledge sings the song "with such passion and conviction that the single stands as one of the defining records in American soul music." Sledge was born on November 25, 1940 (some sources say 1941), in Leighton, Alabama. Like many successful soul singers, he grew up singing in church with his mother. He also was raised on a steady diet of country music. "The only radio station we got [in rural Alabama] was country music," Sledge said in a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "That's all I knew. We didn't hear rock 'n' roll but for about 15 minutes real late at night." Sledge absorbed the heartbreak of country music legends like Hank Williams, Jimmy Reed, and Marty Robbins, and it eventually influenced his own soulful style. After singing in church and in bar bands, Sledge teamed up with record producers Quin Ivy and Marlin Greene in Sheffield, Alabama. Sledge was working as an orderly in a Sheffield hospital when he met Ivy. Sledge used to hum the bars of "When a Man Loves a Woman" while picking and chopping cotton near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, according to Madelyn Rosenberg of Virginia's Roanoke Times. The song was released on the Atlantic record label in 1966. Though Sledge helped write the song, which was originally titled "Why Did You Leave Me?," he gave writing credit to Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, who were members of Sledge's five-man band, called the Esquires. When he agreed to give up the writing credit, Sledge later admitted, he had no idea how successful the song would be. "When a Man Loves a Woman" was not even Sledge's favorite song on his debut album. "I never did think the song would be anything," he told the Roanoke Times. "It was just something I made up." The song went straight to number one on the charts, though it only remained there for two weeks. While Sledge has estimated that he has sung "When a Man Loves a Woman" thousands of times since he first recorded it, he admits that the original recording is timeless. "It will be forever, it's a masterpiece," Sledge said in an interview with the Australian Sunday Times. "It'll never be cut like that again. Not me, not anybody, will sing it like that again. Everything was perfect in that song." He also claims to never tire of singing the ballad after more than three decades. "It's a beautiful song," Sledge told the Los Angeles Daily News. "I could never get sick of it." The single launched Sledge's career and sent him on his first national tour. Legend has it that, when he returned home after that first tour, Sledge checked into the hospital where he had worked so that his former coworkers could wait on him hand and foot. Two years after the song's release, Sledge sat in an Atlanta diner with blues legend B.B. King. Sledge told King that he would be happy if he could stretch his success out for another five years. According to Sledge in the Australian Sunday Times, King replied, "With the song you've got ... you're gonna last a lot longer than I have, because that song is going to keep going forever."
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