Whitney Houston's hit voted best love song in US poll

With Valentine's Day just a week away, singer Whitney Houston's classic ballad "I Will Always Love You" has been voted the most popular love song in a US poll.

The signature song of the Grammy-award winning singer, who died suddenly a year ago, scored 38 percent of the vote among all adults in the Harris Interactive survey, and was the top pick among all divorced, separated or widowed Americans.

Houston's hit from her 1992 movie, "The Bodyguard" was a cover of a 1974 song written and recorded by country singer Dolly Parton.

The Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody," Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman," Joe Cocker's "You Are So Beautiful," and the Bees Gees' "How Deep is Your Love" rounded out the top five songs.

"Romance is about making an emotional appeal to the senses, and to the heart," Aaron Levine, of Sony Electronics Home Audio, which commissioned the poll, said in a statement announcing the results. "So, turn down the lights and turn up the sound."

More than 2,000 adults who voted in the online poll were asked to pick their favorite love songs from a list of more than 40 tunes spanning several decades.

Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" came in sixth, followed by Patsy Cline's "Crazy", Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is," Bryan Adams' "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" and "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye.

To mark the first anniversary of Houston's death on Feb. 11, organizers of the Grammy Awards said they will honor the singer with an hour-long TV special entitled "The Grammys Will Go On: A Death in the Family" that will air on Saturday, the day before the 2013 Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.