Alabama native Percy Sledge dies at age 73

Leighton native and Muscle Shoals music icon Percy Sledge died this morning at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to longtime friend David Johnson. Sledge was 73.

Sledge recorded “When a man Loves a Woman” in 1966 at Norala Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama. It reached No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B singles charts. It was No. 54 in the list of Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest songs of all time.

Sledge, who was born in Leighton, Alabama, was working as a hospital orderly when he began playing clubs and frat parties with the Esquires, a locally popular group, in 1965. As he recalls, “I was singing every style of music: the Beatles, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Motown,Sam Cooke, the Platters.” That broad exposure gave him a soulful versatility as a singer that is evident on his Atlantic recordings.

“When a Man Loves a Woman” was Sledge’s first single, cut by producers Quin Ivy and Marlin Greene at their modest studio in Sheffield, Alabama. Sledge had carried the song’s melody with him for a long time. “I hummed it all my life, even when I was picking and chopping cotton in the fields,” he recalls.

He improvised words to go with his melody one night while performing at a frat party at the University of Mississippi, and Ivy, who was then a college student, told him, “If you ever think about cutting a record, come on by, because I love that melody.”