Nobody's voice broke as many hearts as his did

Percy Sledge's When A Man Loves A Woman transcended time and place, says Mick Brown

Percy Sledge was a struggling 25 year-old soul singer, making ends meet by working as a hospital orderly, when, on the recommendation of a patient, in February 1966 he walked into a small studio in the town of Sheffield, Alabama, owned by a local disc jockey named Quinn Ivy to make his first record.

The song, When A Man Loves A Woman, had been written by Sledge and two members of the group that he sang with, Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, although Sledge, a modest man, grateful for their help, had declined to put his own name on the song. It was recorded in just two takes.

A haunting, beseeching ballad, suffused with an air of almost unbearable melancholy, When A Man Loves A Woman was in a particular tradition of country soul, a product of the rare fusion that was happening at that time in the American south, of black singers and white musicians collaborating across an often strained and vexatious colour line. The backing musicians were all moonlighting from the Rick Hall's Fame studios in nearby Muscle Shoals, among them Marlin Greene, who provided the sinuous truck-stop guitar figure that entwines the melody, and a lanky young keyboard player named Spooner Oldham, who played the descending organ figure, so evocative of Pachelbel's Canon. (When I met Spooner Oldham in Muscle Shoals two years ago he recalled that "the Percy thing" had just "happened naturally, because of the descending chord thing I heard in my head.") Marlin Greene's wife Jeanie provided the ethereal backing vocals.

But if When A Man Loves A Woman was very much a product of its time it was also, magically, a piece of work that transcended the moment and the place in which it was made: a song that seemed to have been circling the heavens, just waiting to be called down to earth. The greatest pop music has a magical capacity to speak to the heart, articulating the inchoate feelings that one can barely articulate oneself: This is how love feels, how love hurts. "When a man loves a woman, can't keep his mind on nothing else ..." You know that's right. From a small dusty town in northern Alabama, the song reached out to me, a love-struck teenager in South London, a textbook of all the longing I felt for the girl on the dancehall floor, whom I could never tell exactly how I felt, and never would.

Having recorded the song Quinn Ivy had little idea what to do with it. He asked Rick Hall if he could help place it. Hall called Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records in New York, the most important R&B label in America, and said he had a sure-fire hit record that Wexler might be interested in. It was a Sunday afternoon; Wexler was in the middle of a pool party and unhappy at being disturbed, but he told Hall to send him the demo anyway.

When A Man Loves A Woman went on to be number one around the world, and Percy Sledge never worked in a hospital again. (These are the wonderful stories that pop music used to throw up.) Remarkably, Sledge went on to make other records that were almost its equal. Sixties soul music was richly peopled with strong men made weak by love and poleaxed by painscreamers, shakers and weepers at the far edge of emotion, cast adrift on a sea of loneliness and despair, sometimes just a heartbeat away from total collapsemen who weren't afraid to cry, to show their passion, and their vulnerability. But even in this company, Sledge's plaintive, fragile voice was uniqueperfectly suited to ballads pledging love or yearning for it. Over the next two or three years he recorded a string of hitsWarm and Tender Love, It Tears Me Up, Out Of Left Field ... songs as delicate as warm breath on cold glass. Nobody's heart broke quite as poignantly, or as beautifully, as Percy Sledge's. And nobody's voice broke as many hearts as his did.

(China Daily 05/02/2015 page8)