Percy Sledge: He tore us up with soul songs

Think how your heart felt when you first heard that misery come pouring out of your hi-fi or transistor radio: This gentle, eternally devoted soul had just been blindsided by his woman, who'd left him broke, bleeding inside and sleeping out in the rain.

And still he pleaded for her return.

We'd all been there probably, at one time or another.

Now, think how you felt the next million times that Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman entered your consciousness in the 49 years since it hit the top of Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart in 1966. It still made you ache, right? Every dang time. And yet you never faulted the guy for yearning for her, because, well, some lovers just have that kind of crazy hold on you.

That was the genius of this indelible hit by Percy Sledge, who died Tuesday in Baton Rouge at age 74. The song captured in simple terms the universal yet inexplicable power of love. There was a funereal organ, deftly piercing guitar runs, swells from a horn section and backing singers, a breathless bit of silence and Sledge's plaintive voice — a bit over the top yet wholly relatable.

The song's precise authorship is sometimes disputed, but most accounts agree the lyrics were based on a real broken relationship that Sledge had just experienced while fronting an R&B band on the frat-house circuit.

"It was a perfect cut,'' Sledge told USA TODAY in 2010. "You only come by it once in a lifetime. Same with Brook Benton and Rainy Night in Georgia. Elvis never got another song like Love Me Tender or Sinatra with Strangers in the Night. ... I think it (When a Man) has that staying power as long as people have love in their hearts and minds. That will be forever.''

With each passing of the great soul singers of the '60s and early '70s, American culture feels a little poorer, festival stages seem emptier and Baby Boomers' hearts grow heavier. Today it was Sledge, a hospital orderly from northern Alabama who captured lightning with his signature song, and follow-up hits including Warm and Tender Love, Take Time to Know Her and Out of Left Field. He sang around the world for nearly 50 years, often more popular abroad than at home, and spent his later years playing casinos and festivals, mostly in the South.

Other now-departed soul titans — Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes among them — went on to bigger careers, but Sledge found a comfortable niche with deep-soul, sometimes country-inflected, ballads. When he sang It Tears Me Up, it tore you up.

His passing leaves a dwindling number of still-performing soul singers from the era, including Al Green, Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, Clarence Carter, Ron Isley, Aretha Franklin, Otis Clay, Bettye Lavette, Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, and Smokey and Stevie and their fellow artists from the Motown stable. They keep alive a legacy that is among the greatest in American popular music.

Sledge, who said he eventually got over that early heartbreak, seemed to keep his place in that tradition in proper perspective.

"I've been living a wonderful life,'' he said in 2010. "God gave it to me. I was never a rich man, but I've got food on the table, a happy marriage, kids in school. No bodyguards or nothing like that. ... I always wanted to be a free guy. Get up and go fishing and hunting, breathing the air, playing pool. Just an everyday guy, you know?''

If we're lucky, we've been there.