"When a Man Loves a Woman" was the first song that Percy Sledge, who died earlier this week, at the age of seventy-four, ever recorded. His searing, anguished wail shot up from a studio in the small city of Sheffield, Alabama, to become the No. 1 hit single in America in May of 1966. Before that, Sledge had been a singing hospital orderly and the vocalist in a weekend bar band known as the Esquire Combos, which occasionally travelled as far afield as Mississippi. Suddenly, Sledge, with a bad haircut and a wide, gap-toothed smile, was in a much different place; his song spent two weeks atop the charts, preceded by "Monday, Monday," by the Mamas & the Papas, and followed by "Paint It Black," by the Rolling Stones.
It's the kind of pop marvel that people tell stories about. The song—which began its life with a different title, "Why Did You Leave Me Baby?"—was officially credited to two of Sledge's bandmates in the Esquire Combos, Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, both of whom were just teen-agers at the time. Neither man performed on the recording—and they never published another song, though they would receive royalties on "When a Man Loves a Woman" for years. Later, Sledge would say in interviews that the song had been mostly his, and that he had given it away out of equal parts generosity and naïveté. He explained that the lyrics had been inspired by a bout of real-life heartbreak, and that the basic structure of the song had been with him all his life—that he'd sung it to himself while picking cotton as a kid. "It was the same melody that I'd sing when I was in the field," he said in an interview for the documentary "Muscle Shoals." "I just wail out to the woods, and let the echo come back to me."
The recording sessions that yielded the track have been distilled down in memory to a moment of discovered genius—lightning in a bottle. Sledge got the attention of a local d.j., producer, and record-store owner named Quin Ivy. Their first meeting is another bit of disputed history: either Ivy discovered Sledge onstage around Christmastime, 1965, a revelation; or else the two were introduced at Ivy's store. Regardless, it was in Ivy's small studio, just down the road from the larger FAME Studios, in nearby Muscle Shoals, that Sledge loosed his voice on the world. The engineer at the deck recalled scrambling to keep the levels even as Sledge sang wildly. "All I had was a voice, I didn't know anything about no singing," Sledge later said.
Rick Hall, the Muscle Shoals producer, played a demo over the phone for Jerry Wexler, of Atlantic Records, in New York. In his autobiography, Wexler recalls telling his partner Ahmet Ertegun that he'd just heard the song that "was going to pay for our whole summer." More stories. Wexler loved the track, but noticed that the horns on it had been out of tune. The final single included parts from several instrumental recordings, but somehow the out-of-tune horns stayed in the mix. You can hear them at the end, blaring over Sledge's fading vocals.
It's those wonky horns that reinforce the idea of the song as a single fated moment in time—an imperfectly perfect object found whole, dug out of the north Alabama dirt. In the documentary "Muscle Shoals," Sledge recalls, "When I came in the studio, I was shaking like a leaf. I was scared." Maybe it was fear that gave the recording its particular virtuosic intensity: there is something scary in the vocal performance, real and unhinged. It's a love song, but a strange, sad one. There is room for discussion as to which line is the saddest, though "Lovin' eyes can never see" is a good place to start. Yet the melody is sweet and comforting—somehow, improbably, the song gets played at weddings.
So many movie soundtracks and commercials and oldies-radio listens later, it is hard to take apart “When a Man Loves a Woman” and hear it for its components, other than the famous fourteen-second church-organ opening, as played by Spooner Oldham. That alone spawned a top-five hit a year later, when the English rock group Procol Harum repurposed it on "A Whiter Shade of Pale." It is easy to miss the subtle percussion in the beginning, or the sneaky guitar that weaves through the middle. Lyrically, I suppose the song succeeds because it seems to be general, when any man loves any woman. But like a spurned lover who keeps retelling his own sad stories, the narrator can't help but interject his torment. It's a high-modernist deep-soul classic, with the singer switching perspectives, in lonely conversation with himself. Midway, when the lyrics change from the third person to the first, he goes from wise to desperate, and, later, near the end, the vocal fades beneath the horns at the singer's lowest moment: "When a man loves a woman / I know exactly how he feels, / ’Cause baby, baby, you're my world."
"When a Man Loves a Woman" helped make tiny Muscle Shoals a pop landmark: Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, and Paul Simon would later record there. The song was also Sledge's biggest hit, though he would contribute a handful of essential songs to the soul canon over the next few years, including "It Tears Me Up," "Warm and Tender Love," "Take Time to Know Her," and "Cover Me." This week, connoisseurs have lamented that every obituary for Sledge has devoted so much space to his lone No. 1—he was more than one single.
But what a single. Whoever wrote it, the song belongs to Sledge. It's a modern American standard with not even one good cover version. In the wrong hands, even in Sledge's later in his career, the song becomes saccharine and sentimental. The better the production values—Michael Bolton had a No. 1 hit version of it in 1991—the more bland and platitudinous it sounds. The song was sung right only once, and, in that way, all the creation myths about it might as well be true. It was a miracle, an echo out of the woods.
