When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge Song Info
"When a Man Loves a Woman" is a song recorded by Percy Sledge in 1966 near Muscle Shoals, Alabama in Sheffield. It made number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B singles charts. It was listed 54th in the List of Rolling Stone magazine's 500 greatest songs of all time. The sidemen for this recording included Spooner Oldham, organ; Marlin Greene, guitar; Albert "Junior" Lowe, bass and Roger Hawkins, drums. According to the When A Man Loves A Woman Songfacts, Sledge had worked on the song for months before cutting a "final" version. One problem: he was out of tune. Atlantic Records' Jerry Wexler sent the musicians and Sledge back to the studio to recut the song, then accidentally released the off-key version instead. The song is credited to Calvin Lewis and Andrew Wright, who played bass and keyboards with Sledge. However, the song was in fact written by Percy Sledge himself, but he gave it to Lewis and Wright. (Sledge said this in an interview in the program series "The Sixties" on Swedish Television in 2008.) Sledge's version was also a top ten hit in the UK peaking at number four on its initial release and peaking at number two in 1987 after it was featured in a Levi's Jeans commercial. The song was used at the start of the 1992 film The Crying Game.
