Award-winning Bill Withers created a number of hits that we still hear now, either as the original hits or as samples for some of today’s greatest hip-hop songs. Singles like “Lovely Day”, “Grandma’s Hands”, “Use Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” all came from the mind of Bill. But many didn’t know that the artist went through a tough time and that’s what inspired one of his biggest hits.
“Men have problems admitting to losing things,” he said. “I think women are much better at that. . . . So, once in my life, I wanted to forgo my own male ego, admit my own depression and to losing something, so I came up with… ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / It’s not warm when she’s away / Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / And she’s always gone too long, any time she goes away.’”
“Ain’t No Sunshine” gave Withers his first gold record, earned him a Grammy, and, with later hits such as “Lean on Me” and “Use Me,” forms the cornerstone of a small but indispensable section of the American songbook. A new documentary about Withers, “Still Bill,” is an no-nonsense, confident attempt to look inside the personality of a man who wrote so well and then walked away from it all in 1985, adding only a handful of songs to his legacy since then.
Actually, the bravery of Withers to admit that he needed help with others is what allowed him to write “Lean on Me,” maybe the best-known song to friendship and family, released in 1972.
If you remember, some of the lyrics go like this:
Sometimes in our lives we all have pain
We all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there’s always tomorrow
Lean on me, when you’re not strong
And I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on
For it won’t be long
‘Til I’m gonna need
Somebody to lean on…
At one point in his documentary, Withers says he would like “for my desperation to get louder.”
The sixth of six children, William Harrison Withers, Jr., was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, West Virginia. The town’s only viable industry was coal mining, and Bill, Jr., was the only man in his family who did not end up working in the mines. When he was three years old, his parents divorced, and Withers eventually moved eleven miles east, to Beckley, where he was raised primarily by his mother’s family; he was an asthmatic and a stutterer. Eager to leave West Virginia, he joined the Navy when he was seventeen, and spent nine years in the service. While stationed in Guam, he took to singing in local bars, favoring material by artists like…
… Johnny Mathis. After settling in Los Angeles, in 1967, and landing a job installing toilets on airplanes, Withers met the trombonist and pianist Ray Jackson, who helped him make the demo that got him signed to the independent Sussex label.
Withers says that he is an untrained musician, and his songs bear him out, not because they lack sophistication but because they ignore tendencies that deserve to be ignored more often. “Ain’t No Sunshine” is a two-minute song with only three verses, a bridge that repeats two words twenty-six times—“I know”—and no chorus to speak of. Withers likes to form guitar chords that he can simply move up and down the neck without altering the position of his fingers. This simple approach leaves room for his baritone voice to map out subtle, articulate melodies. As he put it, “it’s 1970, 1971 or something, you know, I’m this black guy coming out sitting on a chair with an acoustic guitar.”
Withers’s gift lies in the immediacy of his scenarios and in how few words he needed to turn around a thought: his common explanation for how he reached conclusions as a writer is “I was feeling what I said.” His willingness to express his most awkward emotions was matched by an intolerance for unsubstantiated shows of emotion. As he told Ellis Haizlip, the host of the television show “Soul!,” in 1971, “I’m sick and tired of somebody saying ‘I love you’ with both arms up in the air like that. I can’t believe that.” Withers made his vulnerable moments as sharp as his angry moments, and his angry songs were as complex as his love songs. “Just As I Am” and its follow-up album, “Still Bill,” will still reign as some of the best songwriting and heartfelt singing of his generation or the next.
Wither’s genius, in front of and behind the mic, was honored in 2015 as one of the inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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