Percy Sledge (1940 - 2015)

[Famspear]

One of the great soul singers, Percy Sledge, has passed on.

He had five top forty hits from April 1966 to the spring of 1968: When A Man Loves A Woman (which was number one for two weeks on the Billboard chart); Warm And Tender Love; It Tears Me Up; Love Me Tender; Take Time To Know Her.

"When A Man Loves A Woman" was used in the movie sound tracks for The Big Chill and Platoon and Michael Bolton won a Grammy with a cover of that song.

Sledge did have a federal tax conviction in the 1990s.

I never met him, but I talked with him by phone for a radio interview in the 1970s.

Percy Tyrone Sledge: Born Nov. 24, 1940, at Leighton, Alabama. Died April 14, 2015, at Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/arts/ ... .html?_r=0

EDITED: Once for typo.

[Famspear]

Some sources report his year of birth as 1940, others as 1941. Not sure which is correct.

[Arthur Rubin]

Some sources report his year of birth as 1940, others as 1941. Not sure which is correct.

Wikipedia reports 1940, and doesn't mention a contrary opinion.

[Famspear]

I had raised the issue on the talk page for the Wikipedia article, not noticing that it had already been addressed in that talk page a while back.

The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits (5th ed. 1992) by Joel Whitburn showed his birth year as 1941, as did one or two of the news reports on his passing.

[Pottapaug1938]

Some years ago, I bought three paperback books of "misheard lyrics". One of them took its title from a misunderstanding of the first line of Sledge's signature song:

"When A Man Loves A Walnut".

[Famspear]

Some years ago, I bought three paperback books of "misheard lyrics". One of them took its title from a misunderstanding of the first line of Sledge's signature song:

"When A Man Loves A Walnut".

Misheard -- or even unintelligible -- lyrics are a staple of popular music, it seems.

Even after years of playing records over and over on the radio, I occasionally will hear a song I played gazillions of times as a top 40 radio disc jockey, and I finally figure out what they're saying.

Some of the worst are the Stones' old hits. Everybody loves Mick Jagger, but sometimes it's um..... hard to figure out what he was singing......

[wserra]

Betcha didn't know that Jimi Hendrix was gay: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy".

[The Observer]

Misheard -- or even unintelligible -- lyrics are a staple of popular music, it seems

There is even a term for this phenomena: "mondegreen." As the Wikipedia entry describes it:

American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. The term was inspired by "...and Lady Mondegreen," a misinterpretation of the line "...and laid him on the green," from the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o Moray."[3]

[Famspear]

Betcha didn't know that Jimi Hendrix was gay: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy".

Yep.... Purple Haze......



There is an old Saturday Night Live skit with "Wayne and Garth" where they cover the "top ten misheard lyrics," and that was one of them.

Another from that skit as I recall was from Creedence Clearwater Revival, where the line "there's a bad moon on the rise" was warped into "there's the bathroom on the right...."

[Famspear]

Ah here it is. Actually, it was the "top 5" not the top 10:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akZxhhcwkR8

[JamesVincent]

Which explains why "Who are you?" by The Who has never been censored on the air.


edit: There is actually a ton of misheard lyric videos on Youtube. Some of the ones for System Of A Down are particularly entertaining.