On this day in Alabama history: Percy Sledge was born

Alabama native Percy Sledge sang "When A Man Loves A Woman" and the audience went wild at the Alabama Country Music Hall of Fame concert for the Inductees into the Hall of Fame, March 25, 2010. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Nov. 25, 1940
One of the most iconic voices in American music first cried out in Leighton, Alabama, on this day in 1940.
Percy Sledge did his first singing at the Galilee Missionary Baptist Church, and earned a living as an orderly at a hospital in Colbert County. He idolized the voices he heard on the radio from the Grand Ole Opry, and managed to fuse the sounds of country, soul and gospel.
In 1966, Sledge recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman” at the Norala Studios in Sheffield. Later that year, it became the first Billboard No. 1 to be recorded in Muscle Shoals, and checked in at No. 53 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in 2004.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.