Percy Tyrone Sledge

 Percy Tyrone Sledge (November 25, 1940 – April 14, 2015)

He is best remembered for the song "When a Man Loves a Woman", a No. 1 hit on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B singles charts in 1966. It was awarded a million-selling, Gold-certified disc from the RIAA. Sledge, sometimes called the King of Slow Soul, was a sentimental crooner and one of the South’s first soul stars, having risen to fame from jobs picking cotton and working as a hospital orderly while performing at clubs and colleges on the weekends.“I was singing every style of music: the Beatles, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Motown, Sam Cooke, the Platters,” he once said. “When a Man Loves a Woman” was his first recording for Atlantic Records, after a patient at the hospital introduced him to the record producer Quin Ivy. It reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1966 and sold more than a million copies, becoming the label’s first gold record. Sledge, spent much of the next 50 years recording and performing to international audiences, hitting the charts with songs like “I’ll Be Your Everything” well into the 1970s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, and his final album, “The Gospel of Percy Sledge,” was released in 2013. Sledge married twice and had twelve children, three of whom became singers. Sledge died of liver cancer at his home in Baton Rouge on April 14, 2015, at the age of 74. He is interred at Heavenly Gates Cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.