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Legendary soul singer to perform at Kuss

Percy now.

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Percy then.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 9:07 AM Friday, February 26, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — The next time “When a Man Loves a Woman” comes on the radio and your husband or boyfriend says, “God, I hate this song,” you pull the car over and slap the bejesus out of him.

That is a great song.

It’s not Percy Sledge’s fault that Michael Bolton turned it into a song loathed by 97 percent of men (and 45 percent of women who were turned off by the idea of a man with a better perm than them).

When Sledge comes to play Kuss Auditorium on Saturday night, Feb. 27, he’s coming to reclaim what’s rightfully his.

It’s his song.

As a Cincinnati Reds fan since the age of 12, he’s thrilled to be able to come do it here in Ohio.

Now if only he could think up a way to return to Muscle Shoals the night of Feb. 17, 1966 — the moment he recorded the original “When a Man Loves a Woman” — and take proper credit for what would become his biggest hit.

He gave complete credit for the song to the two members of his band who came up with the chords.

“Had I known what I had,” Sledge confessed this week from his Louisiana home, “I wouldn’t have given so much away. That shows you how much I knew about music.”

OK, sure, it’s 44 years after the fact, but 44 years from now, this song will still be with us.

It’s the sound of a man reaching into his own chest, pulling out his beating heart and wringing it like a wet washcloth — you don’t take a song like that and dismiss it as “some old song my mom likes.”

It’s meant to be felt.

Yesterday, today, 44 years from now.

It was the first of the Southern soul songs to hit No. 1 all those years ago on the pop charts — i.e., the stuff white kids bought — a feat that Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding or Solomon Burke couldn’t do.

It was, unbelievably, his very first single.

“It was one of those perfect songs,” Sledge said.

And yet the man didn’t take any credit for a melody he came up with while chopping cotton as a kid in the Shoals region of Alabama.

Oh, yeah, he regrets it.

“Not for my sake,” he explained, “but for my children’s sake. God has been good to me. But I hate that I gave it away on account of my children.”

All 12 of them.

And the 14 grandkids.

He gets a percentage of royalties — those other cats get the bulk.

Bolton took his cover version all the way to No. 1 in 1991.

There’s a reason Sledge is still out singing sad songs as he nears age 70.

“I get the same feeling I did when I first started,” he said. “It’s one of the great feelings. When you sing these songs, you get this deep feeling in your heart.

“You don’t want to stop, but you can’t sing all night.”

Sledge, who comes across as heartfelt and reflective as his ballads, still works three nights a week.

“I’m holding up,” he said, “and it’s good for my health, too.”

He might now be diabetic, but Sledge might also be more soulful now than at any other point in his life.

Think about it.

He was, what, 25 when his voice first came soaring out of the radio?

Well, a 69-year-old man has lived longer, experienced more.

“I feel ’em more,” he said of his songs. “I understand them more. I can see why I felt that way. You understand why now more than you did then.”

He might’ve been the first to have a top pop hit, but it seemed like he’d never get that call from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Sledge finally was inducted in 2005.

“I was hoping I’d be put in there before I was gone,” he said.

Being inducted into the hall of fame had the same effect on him that one of his songs has on everybody else.

“Everything in my mind just flipped,” he said.

Everything came pouring back.

The hard work. The places he’d been.

“I had the statue in my hand,” he said, “and it was like electricity going through my body.”

True, Sledge never came close to duplicating the success of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” but such songs as “It Tears Me Up” and “Take Time to Know Her” — both of which at least made the Top 20 — remain stone-cold soul classics.

He’s right up there with Wilson, Otis, Eddie Floyd, all those dudes.

“I worked in the field all my life,” Sledge said.

It was a different time — one that seems so far removed from how we live in 2010.

“All we did was hard work,” he said. “We were all born into the same style of life. We expressed ourselves in our songs.”

While Sledge prefers not to dwell on what’s now obvious — “Ain’t too many of us left,” he said — he’s right to keep performing as a senior citizen.

After all, somebody’s gotta try to remind people what it was like when soul came out of a man, not a machine.

“It’s just unbelievable the way technology is today in the studio,” he said.

It makes him think back to his first sessions in the ’60s.

“All you had was a razor blade,” he joked. “We were so natural. We didn’t have the technology, so we had to be completely natural.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.