Percy Sledge - Honest As Daylight: Hits & Rarities - Extended Liner Notes
Percy Sledge - Honest As Daylight: Hits & Rarities
When your debut record just happens to be one of the biggest smashes in the history of soul music, what do you do for an encore? That was the dilemma facing Percy Sledge in the wake of his across-the-board 1966 chart-topper “When A Man Loves A Woman,” but he didn’t let it stop him. Percy kept on racking up hits for the rest of the ‘60s and made wonderful albums for several decades after that. Those later years in Percy’s discography are the focus of his new Sunset Blvd. collection.
It contains quality remakes of his biggest ‘60s hits: “When A Man Loves A Woman,” “Warm And Tender Love,” “It Tears Me Up,” and “Take Time To Know Her.” He tears into a few soul standards by his friends and peers—Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” James Carr’s “The Dark End Of The Street,” Luther Ingram’s “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right.” But positioned right alongside them are brilliant triumphs from later projects that poured his soul-steeped vocal intensity over more contemporary fare—more often than not achingly downbeat material oozing deep Southern soul goodness.
“That’s me. That’s Percy Sledge--just the ballads. I mean, I can do up-tempo, but ballads is my style,” said the late Sledge. “I always sing from my heart. I think it comes from the church, though, singing from church on into blues. Every song I sing, I sing from deep within, and I have to have very good lyrics before I can sing a song.”
Sledge definitely had good lyrics to sing right up to his final recordings. Take “She’s Too Pretty To Cry,” a moving ballad penned by George Soule and Ava Aldridge that expertly split the difference between soul and country. Sledge premiered the song on his 1983 album Percy! along with the rolling “Bring Your Lovin’ To Me” and an uncharacteristically upbeat “Hard Lovin’ Woman.” Soule and Aldridge contributed “Save Me For Last” to Percy’s ‘85 set Love Songs, an album that also introduced Sledge’s versions of the mellow “That Didn’t Hurt Too Bad” and an earthy “Do Me Baby.”
“Honest As Daylight” graced Carla Olson’s 1994 album Reap the Whirlwind and featured Sledge as Carla’s duet partner. “It was a real thrill. I’m a very fortunate person. I’ve gotten to do some things with people that were my childhood heroes,” says the Los Angeles-based Olson, who wrote “Honest As Daylight” with two members of her band, bassist Bobby McDonald and drummer Rick Hemmert.
“Bobby was the bass player we were playing with at the time, and he chimed in and wrote the instrumental bridge, and Rick sent me a lyric,” says Carla. “Rick used to write stories. He was a drummer, but he would write these incredible stories and send them to me, and I would write songs from his stories. It was certainly not an autobiographical story, but it was an observation of someone who had done something that wasn’t terrible, but they went to prison for it and they had to make amends. He would send me these stories that would just immediately—I would go through four or five lyrics, and I’d pick one that was just so vivid, and you’d sit down. It just writes itself.” Rick also came up with the song’s title. “It has nothing to do with the song lyric!” notes Olson.
“When Saul Davis and Barry Goldberg were producing Percy’s album in ‘94, Blue Night, which was being recorded at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, I had a couple songs that he was recording—two songs on the album that I had co-written,” says Carla. “I was just at the studio trying to be helpful, and everybody wanted to leave. It was getting kind of late. They were doing some technical stuff. And I said to Percy, ‘Do you want me to drive you back to the hotel?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’d love for you to.’ So we got in the car. He was staying at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, which is a musicians’ hotel here in the Valley.
“We were riding back, and we stopped off at Popeye’s to get something for him to eat in the hotel. And he said, ‘So I’ve been singing on all these other people’s songs, all these other people on this record. What can I sing on of yours?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a track, if you want to sing it!’ And I gave him my version of it, which had come out before on my solo album before this. And he really loved it, so he just wanted to do a duet with me on it. So it worked out really good.
“Percy sang the parts that we needed, and Mick Taylor played guitar on that particular song. Then we had the Texacali Horns on it, and a bunch of my former Textones members were on the song. It was kind of written in a soul tradition, so it worked out for him to sing the background part and also sing harmony with me.”
Reap the Whirlwind also contained a sleek revival of Alvin Cash & the Crawlers’ primarily instrumental Chicago-cut 1965 hit “Twine Time,” the remake sporting imaginative vocal input from Sledge. Carla had been performing the number since her early days in Austin, Texas. “There were a couple of break songs if you did four sets a night or three sets a night,” she explains. “There’d be a song that was an instrumental cut, and you’d announce, ‘Okay, we’re gonna take a break!’ You could go back or go get a drink, go outside and have a smoke, or whatever. That was one of the Austin break songs. Especially if you had horns, the horn players would get a little chance to stretch out.
“The idea to put Percy on it came after the song was done. He was still in the studio, and he was still here and recording. I said, ‘Percy, do you want to scat over the top of this song?’ And he went, ‘Oh, Carla, I’d love to scat over the top of that!’ So he gets in the booth, and we had no idea he was going to do that, all those little ‘Aaaahs!’” says Olson, who shared lead guitar duties on the cut with her longtime friend and musical cohort, the Go-Go’s’ Kathy Valentine. “We had a band in Austin called the Violators back in the late ‘70s, and she and I came to L.A. together,” says Carla. “I said, ‘Do you want to play a couple of rounds of solos?’ And she did. She just nailed it!”
Born November 25, 1940 in Leighton, Alabama, Sledge=s first musical adventures were of a strictly spiritual nature. “I started in church, like most all of us did,” he said. “I was singing with a little choir group that we put together. Then we’d go around singing at churches. Then I would sing in choir in church, growing up as a boy. It was something I enjoyed in my younger days.”
There weren’t any local R&B radio stations for Percy to tune into, so he located a suitable alternative. “I was raised up through country music,” he said. “That was the only music I could hear until I got about 14 years old. And then I could turn my radio to Ernie’s Record Mart down in Nashville, WLAC. But other than that, all I could hear was WLAY in Sheffield, Ala. We’d get a little bit of Birmingham through the long distance radio, and it was all country. Jim Reeves and Hank Williams, Sr. and all those type of singers, when I was a boy, was who I was in love with.”
As the decade progressed, rock and roll infiltrated Percy’s consciousness. “Oh, yeah. Elvis Presley, and like I said, Hank Williams and Jim Reeves. Marty Robbins was also a big artist of mine that I loved. Connie Francis in the women line, and Brenda Lee. All them was my favorite artists when I was growing up,” he said. While attending Leighton High School, Percy was a member of an acappella vocal group, the Bell Tones, singing songs by the Clovers and Drifters, but they broke up after graduation.
Percy had a slightly older cousin that provided bedrock inspiration by making it big in the R&B field before him. Jimmy Hughes started out singing gospel in his Leighton hometown with the Singing Clouds before crossing the secular divide; his intense original soul ballad “Steal Away” was one of the first major hits to come out of Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals in 1964.
“I believe it might have been the first song ever recorded in the new studio that Rick built,” said Norbert Putnam, the bassist on “Steal Away.” “It didn’t come out for a long time. I don’t think Rick was able to find anybody that wanted it.” So convinced was Hall that he had a surefire hit on his hands that he launched his own Fame label to release “Steal Away.” “Supposedly, Dan Penn talked Rick Hall into starting his own label, and they went out and drove around the South, taking it to black radio stations and getting it played,” remembered Norbert.
“Steal Away” deeply impacted Penn, one of FAME’s top young songwriters. “I stood there and watched Jimmy Hughes do ‘Steal Away.’ I saw him cut it. And it really affected me,” said Penn. “He was great. He was tough. I loved his vocals, because he had that little bright sound.”
Hughes did what he could to help his cousin out. “I used to worry Jimmy to death about trying to help me get a record. He cut a record before I did,” said Sledge. “But he did speak highly of me to different people like Rick Hall and Quin Ivy and everybody. And thank God, it finally happened.” Meanwhile, Percy, who had married young and had a child not long afterwards, had been biding his time in a series of day jobs, including a position at Colbert County Hospital in nearby Sheffield, Ala. where he’d occasionally sing to the patients.
“I had been working as an orderly for years,” Sledge said. AWhen it all happened to me, I was working construction at Davis Construction in Decatur, Ala. I’d been working there for about a year. I’d just left Colbert County Hospital. I got laid off, and Mr. Richard, James Richard, who was the music director at Sterling High School, called me up the same day I got laid off and asked me would I be interested in sitting in for his vocalist, because his vocalist was sick and he was doing a private party that Christmas Eve. And I told him I had never sung before in my life with no horns and guitars and drums. Which I hadn’t. I always sung acappella, just me and the guys on the sidewalk. He told me, ‘Well, I’ll pay you $50.’ I said, ‘Well, what time do you want me to be there?’ That was a lot of money in those days.”
Fronting the trumpet-blowing Richard’s band, the Esquires Combo (their membership included bassist Calvin Lewis and organist Andrew “Pop” Wright), propelled Percy onto the fraternity party circuit (the Muscle Shoals/Leighton/Sheffield region was dry so there were no bars to play). Precisely how Sledge hooked up with his longtime producer, Quin Ivy, varied depending on who was telling the story. In Peter Guralnick=s book Sweet Soul Music, Ivy, who had co-written “I’m Qualified” and “Lolly Pops, Lace And Lipstick” with Hall for Hughes, recalled Percy stopping by his Tune Town Record Shop and auditioning. Penn claimed he sent Sledge in Ivy=s direction when Hall proved uninterested in the young singer. Percy=s version of the story differed from both accounts.
“Quin Ivy heard me sing at this party that night,” said Sledge. ‘I made up this song, ‘Why Did You Leave Me Baby,’ and he liked the melody. For the lyrics, I just throwed something in there. He told me if I was to put some strong lyrics behind that melody that I was singing, I might have a hit record. ‘Cause Quin was a top disc jockey in those days at WLAY in Sheffield. But he was building a small studio right behind Abrams Department Store in Sheffield, and he asked me, would I be interested in cutting a record. And I told him yes. He said, ‘Well, you get some lyrics for that song, and when I get through with my studio, you’ll be the first!’
“So I went back to him, I guess about three or four weeks later, and he asked me, ‘Percy, have you got the lyrics for that “Why Did You Leave Me Baby?”’ I said, ‘No, I told you it’s about a girl I used to be in love with. You know how it is when a man loves a woman--he can’t think.’ He said, ‘Hey! That’s it right there! Hold it right there!’ So he thought that that would be a great title, that we could write around that. And that’s what happened.”
Ivy co-produced the epochal “When A Man Loves A Woman” at his fledgling Norala Sound Studios on February 17, 1966 with guitarist Marlin Greene, whose resume as a singer included a ‘57 debut single on the Tune logo in Florence, Ala., a couple of 1958 45s for RCA Victor produced by Chet Atkins, and early ‘60s follow-ups for United Artists, Delta, and Philips. Manning the Farfisa organ that added so much atmosphere to the song’s eerie intro was Spooner Oldham.
“‘When A Man Loves A Woman,’ that was the first time I’d heard him sing, the day he stood over there on the mic,” said Spooner. “It was me and Roger Hawkins was on drums, and Junior Lowe on bass. And that was the initial basic track. And he just sang it. You know, two or three times, we had it. He was happy about it.”
Through Rick Hall, Ivy made contact with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, who wisely judged the song a potential smash and released it on Atlantic. Wexler wasn’t happy with the slightly out-of-tune horn section and prior to its release paid Ivy to overdub a contingent of Memphis horn players (trumpeters Wayne Jackson and Gene “Bowlegs” Miller and saxist Andrew Love). But when the single was pressed, Wexler mistakenly used the original tape. Percy ended up with a pop and R&B chart-topper in the spring of ‘66 that sent him out on the road with some of the circuit’s leading luminaries, instantly thrusting Percy into the bigtime.
“Man, they was calling me from all over the world,” he said. “That was one of the greatest tours ever in this country. We started in, I think the latter part or the first of May, and we wound up in September. It was the longest tour ever, and the most richest tour, because they were sold out everywhere that we went, all that spring and summer. They had Otis (Redding), and they had Arthur Conley. They had Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles, the Five Stairsteps. It was just a hot tour, because they had Pigmeat Markham and Moms Mabley on that tour. You had so many great experienced artists with so many young upcoming artists, just like me and Arthur Conley.” The explosive revue was captured for posterity in an episode of deejay Bill “Hoss” Allen=s syndicated TV program The!!!!Beat; Redding acted as host that day, introducing Percy, Garnet Mimms, Mitty Collier, the Ovations, Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles, and for the big finale, Sam & Dave.
Unfortunately, Sledge’s primary lyrical contribution to the creation of “When A Man Loves A Woman” failed to be officially credited, no doubt costing Percy millions in writer’s royalties. Lewis and Wright of the Esquires Combo were listed as its sole writers, and they weren’t even on the session. “Yeah, I gave it to them,” Sledge admitted. “But I was the one that really discovered the song and wrote it.”
Ivy offered his protégé some sage advice early in their time together. “Quin told me, he said, ‘Percy, you can do anything. You can sing anything. But you’re really a smooth ballad singer. You’re gonna see it as your future career rolls along,’” recalled Sledge. “I was so glad that he did talk me into doing my style. And that’s what I am. I’m strictly a ballad singer.”
Quin and Marlin hustled Percy back into the studio for his debut Atlantic album that spring, naturally named after his smash. Along with a healthy helping of homegrown material, Sledge tackled an array of well-chosen covers of then-current hits by Solomon Burke, Deon Jackson, Joe Simon, and James Carr.
While enduring that endless tour, Sledge was handed his next hit. “Quin had come up from Alabama to see me at the Apollo,” said Percy. “He came to my dressing room. He said, ‘Percy, I think we’ve got a good song for you to follow up “When A Man Loves A Woman.”’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘It’s called “Let Me Wrap You In My Warm And Tender Love,” and the guy Joe Haywood that wrote it is gonna bring it up here tonight, and he wants you to hear it.’ And when I heard the song, I told Quin, I said, ‘Well, this song sounds so good, I don’t even know what to do with it!’ So he just told me, ‘Well, just mark it out your mind, and think of “When A Man Loves A Woman” and the way you just put it in your own mind. Wail it away!’ And I did. I was very fortunate, because I sung it completely different from the way Joe sung that song.”
The Spartanburg, South Carolina-reared Haywood had recently cut “Warm And Tender Love” himself for Harlem producer Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy logo, but Percy’s angelic reading, layered over sanctified organ, majestic backing vocals, and swirling horns, climbed to #5 R&B and #17 pop in Billboard that summer, proving Sledge was no mere one-hit wonder.
“You had people like Marlin Greene and Quin Ivy and Jeanie Greene there that gave me so much influence and so much strength to go on,” said Percy. “They thought I was one of the greatest artists they’d heard that was coming up, and they made me feel that. I got over the hump of being nervous, and I went on about my business.”
At the same May 18, 1966 Norala date where Sledge laid down “Warm And Tender Love,” he also cut his next smash. “It Tears Me Up,” a #7 R&B/#20 pop hit that fall, was the work of Penn and Oldham, its pleading lyric and slow-grind tempo a superbly eloquent example of deep soul. “Dan Penn, he’s another one that gave me a lot of power and strength and belief in myself,” said Percy. “Spooner was the masterpiece. I call him ‘Weird Fingers!’ He’s really great. All those guys, man, they’re unbelievable musicians. You know, they weren’t only great musicians. They were great people.”
Penn and Oldham were cranking out one Southern soul classic after another for artists recording at Hall’s FAME Studio: Joe Simon’s “Let’s Do It Over,” James & Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” Mighty Sam’s “I Need A Lot Of Lovin’,” Ted Taylor’s “Feed The Flame.” “People think there’s stories behind these songs, but really it’s just we would sit down to write, and we wrote, and most of those just came out of--a lot of that stuff we just made up. There never was a really big story behind too many songs,” said Penn. “We had a good time. We were young and really anxious to write, and trying to learn how to write.”
“In essence, we would just get together frequently and try to write a song, or a bunch of songs if we could--if we could stay awake and had the energy and wanted to,” said Oldham. “They would just sort of accumulate. Luckily, some people listened to ‘em and liked ‘em.”
The pair first crossed paths at the dawn of the ‘60s at Tom Stafford’s humble studio, located above City Drug Store in Florence, which served as a clubhouse for young white local musicians (Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were its resident songscribes).
“Tom Stafford managed a local theater, and had a piano and a recorder and actually a little mixing control room, which was the first one I’d ever seen, like a real studio with egg cartons on the wall. Or actually it wasn’t egg cartons. It was utility cartons that they packed electric meters in. But it had that effect of egg cartons on the wall. And I think Dan, I just remember his just poppin’ in one day,” said Spooner. “I knew he had written a song called ‘Is A Blue Bird Blue’ by Conway Twitty, so I knew he was a songwriter. And my inclination was, I was thinking about being a songwriter.
“We went down to James Joiner’s little studio, where they had a piano, one night. And I think we wrote two or three songs together. He played acoustic guitar and I played piano. Neither one of us today can remember what we wrote. We don’t think ever kept it or demoed it. But anyway, we had the personal chemistry thing. We knew we both wanted to write songs. And we continued that through the years.
“We eventually landed there at FAME Studio together. We wrote for Fame Publishing Company for three years, signed an exclusive agreement. And you know, we had access to the studio to do our demos, and musicians, and we had access to artists. So it was a pretty neat situation. We didn’t have to go looking too far to get stuff down.”
“We liked each other from the very beginning,” said Penn. “If you can’t like Spooner, you can’t like nobody. He’s a real nice guy. And he played great piano. We just started writing, hanging out once or twice a week and then later more, and then almost every night there for years. I was a writer at Rick’s and then Spooner became the piano player there in the studio, and then he became a writer for FAME. So we just hung together so many nights and wrote these songs, and it seemed like we just always had an affinity for each other’s moods. Without trying, we complemented each other. He played to my kind of vocalizing and beating around on the guitar, and I played to his piano playing.”
“Warm And Tender Love” and “It Tears Me Up” graced Sledge’s Atlantic encore LP Warm & Tender Soul, which was loaded with more beautifully rendered covers from the songbooks of Don Covay, Joe Tex, Edwin Starr, Jerry Butler, O.V. Wright, and the Miracles, along with Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “So Much Love” and a pristine reading of “Try A Little Tenderness” starkly contrasting with Redding=s superheated Volt version. While he was willing to tackle one of Tex’s songs, Percy wanted no part of sharing a stage with him. “He told me the only guy that he never wanted to open up for was Joe Tex, because Joe Tex could out-dance and out-sing anybody!” says Olson.
Ivy and Greene bucked the ballad trend on their protégé’s first 1967 chart entry, a churning Bobby Womack-penned “Baby, Help Me.” “Quin Ivy was interested in Bobby Womack back in those years,” said Percy. “He wanted to do some stuff on Bobby. And I think they was over there talking business, or Bobby was doing a session there with Rick Hall, or Quin was trying to set up a session with him or something. He might have been over there overdubbing guitar. So anyway, he brought us this song, ‘Baby, Help Me,’ and Quin said, ‘That might be a good song for Percy!’ Then when I heard it, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll try it!’ That was one of the first up-tempo songs I ever done.”
Penn and Oldham returned in March of ‘67 with another devastating ballad, “Out Of Left Field,” its narrative as uplifting as “It Tears Me Up” was brokenhearted. “That was written for me specifically,” said Percy of the #25 R&B seller. “Me and Spooner wrote those,” said Dan. “It was just a call, ‘We need a song for Percy,’ and here we go. I think ‘It Tears Me Up’ was not written for Percy, but it was just written maybe six months or a year before Percy cut it. But ‘Out Of Left Field’ was written directly for him the very week he cut it. They were both good songs.”
“One night, we finished ‘Out Of Left Field,’ and Dan said, ‘I’m gonna take this to Marlin in the morning,’” said Spooner. “And I thought, ‘Oh, okay. Percy Sledge.’ I mean, that’s what he was thinking. And that’s what he did. Of course, I played on most of Percy’s recordings, so I got to play on the session. He did a wonderful job with both of those, I thought.”
Next on the shelves that summer was Sledge’s utterly gorgeous recasting of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender,” which made a #35 R&B showing (Ivy and Greene continued to share production credit). “Oh man, Rick Hall thought that was the greatest record I ever cut,” said Sledge. “He liked that even better than ‘When A Man Loves A Woman.’ Can you believe that, coming from Rick Hall? So he really loved that song. He loved the way we done it.”
Along the same lines, Sledge=s third Atlantic album, The Percy Sledge Way, cut at Ivy=s new Quinvy Studio in Sheffield, consisted of nothing but covers rendered fresh by Percy’s magical pipes. Sources ranged from Sam Cooke, Joe Simon, Otis Redding, James Carr, and William Bell to Ray Charles, Mitty Collier, Chuck Willis, Aaron Neville, and Johnny Ace. Its remake of Solomon Burke’s “Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)” barely dented the Hot 100 for Percy that fall.
“I brought up all these songs to Quin Ivy and them, when we was sitting around and they was looking for material,” Sledge said. “They told me to write out a sheet of old songs that I would like to do. That’s how that album came out, The Percy Sledge Way. A lot of those songs--most of ‘em--I picked them myself.” Simon’s early ‘67 hit “My Special Prayer” was a special favorite. “I had told myself if I ever got to be a professional singer that I wanted to do that song, so that song, that had been in me for years and years. When I was working at Colbert County Hospital I used to sing that song for the patients. Then I turned pro, and before I knowed it, here comes ‘My Special Prayer.’”
Greene and guitarist Eddie Hinton collaborated on “Cover Me,” another magnificent ballad that was Percy’s last Atlantic chart item of 1967. His biggest seller of ‘68 came from a songsmith outside the close-knit Muscle Shoals fraternity, Steve Davis. “That ‘Take Time To Know Her,’ we almost gave up on that song. That guy come in there with about two pages of--man, so much junk in that song: ‘Came home early one night, caught her kissin’ on another man.’ He shot the woman,” said Sledge. “Quin looked at me, he said, ‘Percy, we can’t sing nothin’ like this!’ So we was doing one of Smokey Robinson’s old songs, it was about lunchtime. So he came in just in the middle of the song, so we had to stop, and by it being lunchtime, we all took a break and we met the guy and we looked at the song. So Quin told him, ‘We can’t do it.’
“Then Quin and all of ‘em, they all went to go eat lunch. Me and Marlin stayed back. Marlin said, ‘Percy, if you’d like to record this song, maybe me and you can eliminate some of all these trashy lines and stuff, and we might have us a song, then we’ll go to lunch later.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that.’ So when Quin and them got back, me and Marlin had changed it. The only thing that we kept in there was, ‘Came home early one night and caught her kissin’ on another man.’ We thought that was gonna hurt the song. So we shipped it out to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, and they shot it out.
“He called us up and congratulated us three weeks later and said, ‘You’ve got another smash! And guess what’s selling the song?’ We said, ‘What?’ ‘Came home early one night and caught her kissin’ on another man!’” Whatever the storyline adjustments, Davis’ lugubrious “Take Time To Know Her,” produced by Ivy and Greene on February 1, 1968, was a #6 R&B/#11 pop smash for Percy that spring.
Nashville songwriter Bobby Russell, riding high off “Little Green Apples” and “Honey,” was responsible for “Sudden Stop,” right in Sledge’s ballad wheelhouse and his last hit of ‘68. “I liked that song the time I heard it,” said Percy. “I went right and jumped on top of it. I didn’t know the guy that recorded it first (it was by “the Fantanstic Eddie Hayes” on Chattanooga), but I really liked the song, and I just jumped into it right away.” Decades later, Percy’s respect for Atlantic bosses Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler remained immense. “They’re fantastic. Some of the greatest guys I know in the record world,” he said. “I’m so glad that we got Atlantic, because I don’t believe no other company could have did no better job with Percy Sledge.”
Take Time to Know Her, Sledge’s last fresh long-playing collection for stateside Atlantic, was filled with his recent hits, along with a pair of Penn/Oldham compositions (“Feed The Flame” and a playful “I Love Everything About You”) and resplendent covers of the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly To Me” and the Classics IV’s “Spooky” (a remake of the latter is included on Percy’s new Sunset Blvd. compilation).
How “You’re All Around Me” managed to totally avoid the charts in 1968 remains one of the great mysteries of Sledge’s career. Hinton and Fritts wrote the sublime ballad, as moving a song as Percy ever tackled, but Atlantic inexplicably couldn’t make it a hit. “That’s really a great song,” noted Sledge. Its inclusion on Atlantic=s ‘69 LP The Best of Percy Sledge helped to hip his fans to what they’d overlooked.
After “My Special Prayer” did a little belated chart business as a single in early ‘69, Percy grabbed the Burt Bacharach/Bob Hilliard chestnut “Any Day Now,” a sumptuous uptown soul hit for Chuck Jackson in 1962, and came up with a #35 R&B hit that spring. Even better was its flip, a horn-leavened revival of the Crests’ ‘59 hit “The Angels Listened In” that possessed a real rhythmic punch. “That was one of my picks,” Percy said. “That came out when I was in high school, and I used to sing it for the kids on campus. I always said if I got to be a professional singer, I wanted to do that.”
Although Ivy (who established his own Quinvy and South Camp labels and issued splendid late ‘60s soul 45s by Don Varner, Bill Brandon, and Tony Borders) and Greene continued to produce fine Sledge singles for Atlantic, the hits dried up after that. A cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Kind Woman” didn’t go anywhere, nor did a personalized treatment of the Dallas Frazier-penned country number “True Love Travels On A Gravel Road” near the end of 1969. Kris Kristofferson=s “Help Me Make It Through The Night” would be huge for country chanteuse Sammi Smith in 1971, but Percy’s version went nowhere the previous year. The same sad fate befell “Rainbow Road,” a dramatic opus from Donnie Fritts and Dan Penn that Muscle Shoals soul pioneer Arthur Alexander also cut for Warner Bros.
It wasn’t politically correct to tour South Africa, but Sledge commanded a rabid following there, so he made the first of many jaunts to the continent in 1970. “They had to smuggle him off the plane in the food cart, because when they hit the tarmac, there were so many people waiting for him,” says Olson. “Thousands of people were waiting for him. And they had to put him inside one of the carts to get off the plane that you’d bring down the aisle. He was a little guy anyway. They had to put him in there and smuggle him off the plane because he was so popular over there.”
After a lengthy absence, Sledge finally reappeared on the U.S. R&B charts for Atlantic in 1973 with “Sunshine,” ending a four-year drought. He traveled all the way to Philadelphia to record it with producers Phillip Hurtt, LeBaron Taylor, and Bunny Sigler, known collectively as the Young Professionals. Even if he didn’t release any more fresh albums on Atlantic back home, the label’s South African arm kept Sledge long-players coming—a half-dozen in all from 1969 to 1971. Sadly, his fans at home wouldn’t get to hear them.
“Atlantic started sliding towards hard rock a little bit. A lot of the old guys were retiring, and Quin Ivy couldn’t get it together with Atlantic. And I had just signed a new five-year contract with Atlantic,” says Percy. “See, they wasn’t messin’ with nobody, nobody but Aretha at that time. I don=t think Wilson Pickett was hardly doin’ anything, ‘cause we was out there, three top R&B artists at that time. So Quin just offered a thing to Phil Walden and them over there in Macon, Georgia at Capricorn. Phil and them always had been good friends of ours, so we felt like we was making a big leap. We didn’t want to leave Atlantic, but they just completely got away from it, and we had a good album that we thought should come out.@
That classy 1974 album for Capricorn, produced by Ivy with Muscle Shoals’ top resident rhythm section (keyboardist Barry Beckett, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist David Hood, and drummer Roger Hawkins) on board, was I’ll Be Your Everything. Its George Soule-composed title track proved a #15 R&B seller late that year, but Percy thought it could have done even better. “That could have been a monster of a song, but I had a kind of what you might say a congested flu-like type of thing when that session was in,” said Sledge. “I went to London. I stayed over there for about six weeks. And I caught one of these definite colds, and they had to fly me right back to do this session. And I had to go right back out there on a real big tour. We often talked about that. We should have put it off and did it later.”
It was a long time before Percy had another fresh LP on American record store shelves--1983, to be precise, when Nashville=s Monument Records unleashed Percy! “That was the one that David Johnson did on me out of Muscle Shoals,” said Sledge. “That was a good album. That was the one that Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton were supposed to have financed, I think.”
Davis and Goldberg corralled Percy to cut Blue Night, which ended up on Virgin’s Pointblank subsidiary in 1994 and was nominated for a Grammy. “I happened to hear ‘Take Time To Know Her’ on the radio and thought, ‘Hmmm, I wonder what Percy Sledge is up to these days?’” said Davis. “And just kind of on a whim tracked him down through his agent and manager in Florida and started some conversations, wondering if he wanted to maybe make a new album. And it turned out that he did.” Bobby Womack and Steve Cropper guested on the set, which made it abundantly clear that Percy’s voice remained riveting.
AI worked with Barry Goldberg on Adventures in Babysitting,@ noted Percy. AWe did a little jingle song in that movie. That’s when I first met him. He had been knowing me way back in the ‘60s, because he was a good friend of Quin Ivy. And he said if a day ever come where he had the opportunity, he wanted to record an album on me.”
Davis and keyboard wizard Goldberg also produced Percy’s 2004 Varese Sarabande album Shining Through the Rain, another acclaimed collection dominated by southern soul-soaked ballads. “We’ve got five or six songs on there that’s very close to some of my older songs that I cut back in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” said Sledge at the time.
“I’d actually been gathering the songs for this project for years,” said Davis. “I think about seven or eight of the songs on this album I had picked in the late ‘90s, after I made the first record. So the album kind of is what it was going to be for a period of time. We just had to find the wherewithal to do it.”
Percy harked back to his Muscle Shoals beginnings on the CD for a spirited remake of Bobby Moore & the Rhythm Aces’ ‘66 smash “Searching For My Love.” “Barry Goldberg told me that that was one of Jerry Wexler’s favorite songs,@ Sledge said. “Me and Jerry have been friends for years and years. I tried to put a little touch on that just for him.” To recapture some of that old Shoals vibe, keyboardist Clayton Ivey journeyed to L.A. for the sessions, joining bassist Mike Glaub and drummer Ed Greene. “We recreated Muscle Shoals the best we could in L.A.,” said Davis. Shoals engineer Steve Melton came in to do the recording and mixing.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Sledge the following year. He continued to perform until liver cancer took his life at the age of 74 on April 14, 2015 at his adopted Baton Rouge, Louisiana home. Whether he was traversing fresh, bracing musical terrain or delighting his legion of fans in concert (witness his mesmerizing live rendition of “Blue Water” on this collection, which he first cut in the studio for his 1974 Capricorn album I’ll Be Your Everything), Percy Sledge was the very definition of breathtaking, spine-chilling southern soul—and a genuinely good man as well.
“Just a jewel. Just a joy,” exclaimed Oldham. “He’s like all great artists I’ve ever worked with.”
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
45cat website: HYPERLINK "http://www.45cat.com" www.45cat.com
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1988)
Liner notes, Percy Sledge—The Atlantic Recordings, by Barney Hoskyns (Rhino Handmade RHM2 526138)
Sweet Soul Music, by Peter Guralnick (New York: Harper & Row, 1986)
Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Sledge
You Tube website: www.youtube.com