As the United States of America celebrates Independence Day, one of its most celebrated musical sons also happened to be born on the 4th of July… in 1938, making it 85 years since his birth in a coal mining town in rural West Virginia.
When Bill Withers died in 2020, there were the usual — and justified — tributes to his artistry, with eulogisers quick to emphasise a body of work that amounted to much more than the handful of hits that became his signature songs, three of them later reconfigured for other black artists in the shape of Michael Jackson, Grace Jones and Club Nouveau.
“He’s the last African-American Everyman,” Questlove raved to Rolling Stone in 2015.
“Jordan’s vertical jump has to be higher than everyone. Michael Jackson has to defy gravity. On the other side of the coin, we’re often viewed as primitive animals. We rarely land in the middle. Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to a Bruce Springsteen.”
Possessed of a baritone as rich as it was comforting, Withers was not only an influential singer songwriter but his measured delivery conveyed absolute authority and sincerity with our ever resorting to histrionics (hi Adele!). As his AllMusic biography makes clear, he had a natural ability “to articulate a comprehensive range of emotions and perspectives – jubilation and gratitude, jealousy, and spite – with maximal levels of conviction and concision.”
We‘ll come back to the spite in a minute.
The man from the impossibly named Slab Fork is said to have written his first song at the age of four, but his talent wouldn’t truly manifest for another three decades. William Harrison Withers Jr. spent most of his twenties in the US Navy, where he served as an aircraft mechanic. Demobbed and relocated to California, he worked as a milkman, among other manual jobs, which makes the fact he gave his most famous song to a beyond cringy Mars telly ad (yes, they are actually singing “Marsy milk, I kid you not) all the more poetic.
In the early 1970s, Bill Withers came out of the gate with three smash hits in a 16-month span. Through the next ten years, Withers continued to meld soul, gospel, folk, and funk with rare finesse. But after that hot start he soon plateaued, remaining a mainstay on the R&B charts and urban radio but struggling to recapture his early success.
Needs must, he diversified his act, writing and producing for Gladys Knight & The Pips, cameoing for Quincy Jones, and, er, ending up singing backing vocals for Don Henley to keep the food on the table.
After he brought the curtain down on his recording career, Withers still performed live in small clubs and theatres. In his well-honed between-song patter he was capable of sending his audience into hysterics, using his comedic talents to mask that now was something of an embittered figure.
He was also an almighty homophobe.
At his shows in the late 1980s Withers exhibited something of an existential crisis. This was in the midst of his self-confessed “angry” period, where, during a particularly testy interview, he blurted out to the Los Angeles Times “I wish I had a bomb. I’d blow this building to kingdom come! That’d teach ‘em.”
And a smile of satisfaction lit up his face as he pictured the explosion. Similarly, in front of an audience he would demand, bellicosely, the assembled faithful ponder his work beyond its shiny surface, while frequently and fervently going into long-winded harangues, blaming society’s perceived moral decline on “homosexuals and bestiality’’ as a lead-in to Lean On Me, which usually closed out his set.
Recognising the failings of a public figure is not speaking ill of them. However, for such an everyman paragon who emoted empathy and soul in his music, whose output had a positive effect on huge numbers of people, including me, he really should have known better than preach discrimination.
Most dark sides can be attributed to some painful event – perhaps he was abused when he was a child, or in the Navy, who knows? We never know celebrities, so veering towards forgiveness and understanding rather than prolonging hate, I’m going to detail the Bill Withers songs that mean the most to me.
I still fondly remember the 3” CD single I purchased from my local music mecca, the Central Milton Keynes branch of Virgin Records, circa 1988, which contained three absolute essentials:
Ain’t No Sunshine
Lovely Day
Lean On Me
Let’s do this.
Ain’t No Sunshine
Just As I Am, Withers’ debut album, entered the US Billboard chart in June 1971, with its stomping opener Harlem chosen as his first 45. Alas, American radio favoured the mournful ballad tucked away on its B-side, an unfading ballad that made him a sudden and unlikely success story at the age of 33.
Was this blues? Soul? Country? It’s all of the above. This is the quintessential Bill Withers song. There’s no intro, no bridge, no solos — just raw emotion. Withers dropped any ego or facade and wrote about the pain of losing someone close to him.
Pre-empting the flipping that occurred with Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and (OK, stretching it a little) Wham!’s Everything She Wants, Sussex Records responded by switching designations, and the new A-side, Ain’t No Sunshine, scaled to No. 3 on the Hot 100, and won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Song, though Withers lost the Best New Artist category to vanity folkie Carly Simon.
In an orange turtleneck very much of the times, Withers performed a touching acoustic rendition on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, a sage-like figure almost delivering a benediction directly to camera on the machismo that makes men hold pain inside.
The intensely personal nature of Ain’t No Sunshine would define much of his output in the 1970s and beyond, and a newly teenage Michael Jackson was first off the mark in covering Withers, with his version recorded the same year and finally being released on his own debut album, 1972’s Got To be There.
Lovely Day
By 1977, Withers was on a detour from his trademark dark edged introspection and opted for a lighter touch by classing up a kind of mellow disco on his sixth studio set Menagerie. A Skip Scarborough collaboration, Lovely Day was chosen as the album’s lead single and put him back in the upper reaches of the charts. Buoyant and breezy, how could it fail to uplift?
In Britain, what most other people remember best about Lovely Day is that it was a top ten hit twice over (in 1978, and a ’88 Sunshine Remix by the DJ man of the moment, Ben Liebrand), as well as being famous for that bit in the chorus when Withers stretches the word “day” out for a full eighteen seconds toward the end – in addition to all the times he belts it out for seven or eight seconds.
A stunning vocal performance then, and it’s said Withers’ face turned a deeper shade of purple in the studio as he held the note. But the taller the skyscraper, the stronger the foundation must be, and outside of Walk On The Wild Side and Under Pressure few basslines introduce a song as well. That’s Ray Parker Jr. of future Ghostbusters fame on guitar too, though you won’t see him in this Top Of The Pops Clip from ’88, which is notable for coaxing Withers out of retirement, having put out his last new work three years earlier.
And when I said other people, what I meant was how I was slightly surprised when Adam Ant told the Christmas 1981 issue of Flexipop that it was one of one of his “fallout favourites” – the second favourite song chosen as one of the ten he’d take with him to the bunker in the event of a nuclear war: “Makes my heart bleed – personal romance,” the insect warrior offered, enigmatically.
Lean On Me / Use Me
In the 1980s, Bill Withers gained a whole new audience enjoying his work by doing virtually nothing. It was one such predominantly electronic recording that led to Withers’ third Grammy. Club Nouveau’s cover of Lean On Me became a huge hit in 1987 and Withers, as the composer, received the nod for R&B Song.
The original, a simple ode to friendship, dates from his sophomore set, 1972’s Still Bill. Collapsing the distance between folk and funk, gospel and AM gold, the album was even more successful than the debut, reaching number four.
The set’s singles Lean On Me and Use Me became consecutive hits that helped create a new lane of salt-of-the-earth R&B. The gospel-rooted former topped the charts, while the latter funk powerhouse peaked in second place. An altogether more complex proposition, Withers’ broad acoustic guitar strums leads the electric piano, repeated bass and axe licks as his rich treacly baritone fills the three minutes and 45 seconds to the brim.
Check out Grace Jones’ gender-fuck reworking, from her classic 1981 album Nightclubbing for the full android demonic disconnect.
BONUS BEATS
Now something of a twilight balladeer, Withers was finally able to strike gold again for perhaps the last time, when he teamed with celebrated saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. on the smooth soul-jazz ballad Just The Two Of Us, from Washington’s 1980 album Winelight.
Nominated for four Grammys (it made Bill Withers a two-time winner of the award for Best R&B Song), the track finds Withers at his most inviting, welcoming in both lyric and tone. The sax has always been the sultriest of woodwind instruments but, when paired with Withers’ hearty timbre, it turns majestic, soaring through the lower octaves and building castles in the sky.
The eighties was, however, when the ‘new jack’ sound of contemporary R&B was developing at breakneck pace. Drum machines and synthesizers were all but compulsory by the time Withers bowed out with 1985’s Watching You Watching Me, pieced together from sessions dating from the Washington era. When he got tired of his record company CBS Columbia’s A&R execs, or “Blaxperts” as he referred to them, he left, thus closing a songbook that has served as a bountiful resource for artists from a multitude of stylistic persuasions.
Notice I said songbook, I didn’t say legacy, importance. “Not only has he written great songs,” Stevie Wonder said of Withers when inducting him into the redundant Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “he sang them incredibly well.”
It’s just a shame that the brotherly love and solidarity he preached in his lyrics didn’t extend to those of a less heterosexual persuasion. But if you can still listen to Madonna, Michael Jackson and R Kelly then by all means give the songs I’ve listed a listen. Separating the art from the artist has become de rigeur in these trying times.
On with the show.
Steve Pafford
