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American soul singer Percy Sledge, best known for the 1966 hit When a Man Loves a Woman, has died at the age of 73, his longtime agent Steve Green says.

Sledge, who had been battling liver cancer for more than a year, passed away at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Mr Green said.

"We've represented a lot of artists here. Percy was one of our first," Mr Green, head of Artists International Management, said.

"What a nice person in a miserable business. He was just a decent, decent person."

Born in Alabama in 1941 when racial segregation prevailed in the South, he started his working life in the cotton fields before taking a job as a hospital orderly in the early 1960s.

A patient at the hospital heard him singing while he worked and recommended him to record producer Quin Ivy.

With his rich soulful voice, Sledge soon found himself in a recording studio in the small Alabama town of Sheffield where he recorded When a Man Loves a Woman.

Inspired by a woman who left Sledge for another man, it became an immediate worldwide hit for soul music powerhouse Atlantic Records, spending weeks atop the pop music charts.

Sledge once said that he had been humming the melody for years, "even when I was picking and chopping cotton in the fields".