Percy Sledge liked to say, “Most artists judge their success by how much noise they create. I prefer my audience to be quiet.”

It was a typically understated observation by Sledge. By all accounts, he was one of the humbler personalities in the music industry, lacking in diva tendencies and seemingly not bitter about failures or losses. “What a nice person in a miserable business,” his agent, Steve Green, told AFP. “He was just a decent, decent person.”

Sledge died in a hospice of liver cancer earlier this week, aged 74, after battling the illness for more than a year. And although some critics – like professor of popular music at New York’s University of Rochester, John Covach – argued that “Sledge’s impact after his hit single was limited”, Sledge always enjoyed a devoted following among serious soul aficionados. Legacy magazine called him “one of the most influential figures in the 1960s soul movement”.

There is a tendency in popular media to view Sledge as something of a one-hit wonder, being, as he was, best known for his hit ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’. He himself referred to it as the “granddaddy” of all his songs, acknowledging its place in his career as well as its lasting influence on his songwriting.

“‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard,” Rod Stewart said when he inducted Sledge into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

But this belies how hardworking Sledge really was; he resumed touring very shortly after undergoing liver surgery in 2014 and throughout his career, he averaged over 100 performances a year. Although none of his songs approached the success of his best-known single, he did manage 15 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, released nine full-length albums, 25 original singles, and reached respectable chart positions on the R&B top 100 with 11 songs, with five in the Canadian charts and three in the United Kingdom.

‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ was named one of Rolling Stone’s best 100 singles of the last 25 years and was 53^rd on the magazine’s top 500 songs of all time. Sledge was the first recipient of the Career Achievement Award by the R&B Foundation in 1989 and hit gold with five records and platinum with two. Unfortunately for Sledge, by the time the 1970s rolled around, punk and rock began to take the place of the previous era’s crooners, and he was one of the casualties of the change in tempo. But he did not disappear; he had a steady band of followers and remained in demand abroad, both among Swiss and German audiences and in United States military bases overseas. In 1994 he got a Grammy nomination and won a WC Handy award for the album Blue Night, which featured Bobby Womack, Steve Cropper and former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor, as well as Bee Gees Barry and Robin Gibb and Swedish singer Mikael Rickfors (the former Hollies vocalist).

His 2004 album Shining Through the Rain achieved positive reviews and in 2007, he got his spot in the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and the Delta Music Museum. A quadruple retrospective, The Atlantic Recordings, was released in 2010, and later that same year he was recognised by the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.

In 2011 Sledge recorded ‘I’m Your Puppet’, with Cliff Richard; his final album, The Gospel of Percy Sledge, was released in 2013, and he gave his last performance in 2014.

“I just couldn’t keep him out there,” Mark Lyman, his manager, told The New York Times. “He wanted to, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Although Sledge remained grateful for the success of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ – calling it a “miracle” – and often said that he never tired of it, he did admit to Blues & Soul’s Simon Redley that the shadow of being a one-hit wonder sometimes hung over him. He said he felt his other work was not always adequately recognised by wider audiences – especially after record label Atlantic revealed hesitation in keeping him on, concerned that he would turn out to be a one-trick pony.

“Well, you know, Atlantic records thought that about me when I first did ‘When a Man Loves a Woman,’” he said. “But thank God for Jerry Wexler, as he always believed in me. He spoke highly of me at Atlantic, when he was the big man there. Atlantic stuck with me through ‘Warm and Tender Love’, ‘Cover Me’… I found myself explaining it to a lot of my fans. Well, not fans; they are people, because my real fans know. I say I did ‘Cover Me,’ ‘Warm and Tender Love’, ‘Take Time to Know Her’… they say ‘Oh, you did all those songs? That was you?’ Some did not even know that. I feel empty in a way; that they don’t know.”

Sledge was one of the few international artists to brave South Africa’s shores during the Apartheid years. In 1970, his South African tour was met with widespread criticism and controversy; many performers of all races had been boycotting the country owing to its racist policies, but it was viewed as particularly unforgivable for a black artist to tour here. Sledge, however, was determined to give a number of performances around the country and make a concert film entitled Soul Africa, and although he was under the laws of the time booked only to perform for black audiences, numerous white fans sneaked in under hats, black makeup and other disguises in an attempt to gain entry, writes researcher Carol Brennan.

Despite criticism, Sledge defended his decision not to boycott, saying he performed for the fans alone. He told The New York Times in 1971: “I went to entertain all those people who buy my records; the people who keep me in bread.”

Listen: A rare recording of Percy Sledge in South Africa.

Sledge himself could not have been a stranger to racism, being born as he was in rural Alabama in 1941. He was raised in Leighton, in the middle of the racially segregated areas of Birmingham, Alabama and Huntsville, and grew up working in the cotton fields, having lost his father as a toddler. Sledge told reporters throughout his life that he had a normal childhood, but did allude to his relief at leaving a life of poverty and segregation behind when he found his niche in the music industry. “It was like a family,” he recalled. “There was no prejudice or anything like that with musicians in those days.”

It’s a statement that perhaps says more about Sledge’s widely reported easy-going nature than about the circumstances of the time. What made Sledge a game-changer was the impact that he had on bringing soul into the mainstream. Sledge’s was the first Southern soul record to top the pop charts, and in the words of music historian Peter Guralnick, “With ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, Southern soul had at last entered the mainstream of pop in the unlikely guise of the ultimate make-out song.” Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler called it a “transcendent moment”.

As Sledge himself recalled to the Los Angeles Times, “The only radio station we got [in rural Alabama] was country music. That’s all I knew. We didn’t hear rock and roll but for about 15 minutes real late at night.” He added to The Telegraph: “Where I came from in the country, there was no place to hear pop music like Little Richard and people like that. Later, I heard James Brown, Otis Redding, The Drifters, The Four Aces, [and] The Ink Spots.”

In fact, Sledge’s earliest influences were country – he joined an a cappella doo-wop group at 15 but said his favourite singers were performers such as Hank Williams, Jim Reeves and Marty Robbins – and he did actually try his hand at a country album in 1979. Percy Sledge Sings Country is relatively unknown but it’s not half bad, further flying in the face of the one-hit wonder myth. Rolling Stone calls Sledge “a skilled interpreter of many other songs, be they soul, R&B or country” and refers to the album as “entirely natural, as organic and honest as Ray Charles’ own seminal country release, 1962’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. But while Sledge’s album may not have been as successful, or as influential, as Charles’, it nonetheless helped solidify the connection between country music and soul — a bond that today’s artists, including Ashley Monroe, Chris Stapleton and even Gary Allan, are recognising in their own R&B-tinged music.” Sledge’s voice – pained without being excruciating – has the same echoing, lamenting quality found in some of the female country greats like Lacy Dalton and Patsy Cline, and has a versatility that one would not expect from listening to his soul hits. In some songs on the album, it is almost unrecognisable.

Sledge’s legacy may not be measurable, but that it lives beyond the chart success of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ is undeniable. From his early days, he ensured his skill singing in any style, and his versatility remains underrated. “I was singing every style of music: the Beatles, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Motown, Sam Cooke, the Platters,” he once said. Nonetheless, his better-known and uniquely sorrowful tone solidified the link between country and soul, and his gospel roots shone through in his entire career, providing a lasting influence on future soul and R&B artists that followed in his footsteps. It was not a coincidence that Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler called ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ “a holy love hymn”. The soulful, prayerful nature of the song had not gone unnoticed. As the Washington Post described his voice, “Mr. Sledge… possessed one of the most distinctive tenor voices in the Southern soul genre. With the ability to shift from a powerful shout to a softer, beseeching quaver, he gave each song an anguished delivery that suggested the lyrics – no matter how trite or clichéd – conveyed matters of life and death.” Moreover, the fact that Sledge was the first hit-maker on Alabama’s Muscle Shoals music scene paved the way for later legends like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones to record – not to mention his achievement of the first gold record for Atlantic Records.

He had a lasting influence, too, on the legendary Spooner Oldham’s work – Oldham and Sledge were responsible for the melancholy organ tones in ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ – and Oldham would not only use this as a template for many of Sledge’s later songs, but also went on to do similar work on another of the era’s lasting hits, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.

Nonetheless, Sledge remained down-to-earth. “I keep my feet on the ground because of my roots, and the way I was raised,” he said. Once, he recalled the first time he heard himself on the radio, when he was recovering from an appendectomy. He was still half asleep, and his mother was with him. He told Mojo magazine, “I was still under the ether, my mom was by the bed, and she said, ‘Son, wake up, they just called to say the radio is fixed to play your record’. I was still under that medicine, and it sounded like it was coming out of heaven, like floating clouds and stars.

“So when I finally woke up, my mom said, ‘Son, they played your record, and you know what? You can sing, can’t you? Ha-ha-ha! You can sing’.”

Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of Sledge’s life is the extent to which – like many artists – he mismanaged his finances. A basic generosity apparently was mixed in with a general sloppiness and ultimately he broke the law; in April 1994, Sledge pleaded guilty in federal court to tax evasion involving income from performances in the 1980s, after failing to report $260,000 in income earned. He was sentenced to six months in a halfway house, five years of probation, and was ordered to pay $96,000 in taxes and fines. He admitted his guilt, however, telling the judge, “I knew I owed more.” Realising that he could have spent up to 15 years in prison, he added: “Thank you, Jesus. I appreciate what the court has done for me.”

A lack of financial sense also manifested in his early career, which had lifelong consequences. Sledge never earned a cent in songwriting credits for ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, having handed over the credits to his two bandmates at the time, bassist Calvin Lewis and the organist Andrew Wright who – according to Sledge – helped him with “a couple of chords”. In the documentary Muscle Shoals, Sledge spoke of having sung the melody to himself from childhood, essentially waiting for years to give it a home. “It was the same melody that I sang when I was out in the fields. I just wailed out in the woods and let the echo come back to me,” he said. But, having had assistance with the recording and polishing of the song, he handed over the writing credits.

“Worst decision I ever made,” he said later. “But I am not at all bitter. I figure if God wanted me to do what I did, and say what I did to tell those guys they could have the song, then I’ll leave it thataway and I would never change it. No way. The way I feel, it was God’s will for me to give it to them. But if I had my time again, I wouldn’t do it. Because of my children. I wasn’t thinking about my kids, and giving away a lot of their rights when I done that. I wasn’t thinking. I was only 25 in 1966.”

He experienced a similar sidelining in 1991, when Michael Bolton covered the song, reached number one on the charts, won a Grammy, and neglected to credit Sledge for the original. Bolton, having been lambasted widely by fans and in the music industry for this, later remorsefully wrote Sledge a letter of thanks for the song and went on to credit him at every interview.

But Sledge never seemed to take any of it to heart. Inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he simply said, “God knows that I sung my songs so deeply from my heart from all the love that I could give to you.”

Not bad, in the end, for a hospital orderly who once dreamed of becoming a baseball player; and who was just gigging with two buddies at frat parties when – in the break of a lifetime – he was noticed by record producer Ivy Quin.

Ultimately, Sledge said, royalties or no royalties, he had no regrets. “That song was meant to be for the world,” he said once. “For the world to love it makes me feel like a king.” DM

Photo: A picture dated 18 July 2008 shows US singer Percy Sledge during the festival ‘Jazz at the Danube’ in Straubing, Germany. EPA/NESTOR BACHMANN