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Bill Withers, the soul legend who penned timeless songs like “Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” has died from heart complications according to a statement from his family. He was 81.
“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved, devoted husband and father,” his family said in a statement. “A solitary man with a heart driven to connect to the world at large, with his poetry and music, he spoke honestly to people and connected them to each other,” the family statement read. “As private a life as he lived close to intimate family and friends, his music forever belongs to the world. In this difficult time, we pray his music offers comfort and entertainment as fans hold tight to loved ones.”
Withers released just eight albums before walking away from the spotlight in 1985, but he left an incredible mark on the music world and the culture at large. “He’s the last African-American Everyman,” Questlove told 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.”
Withers grew up in Slab Fork, West Virginia in the final years of the Great Depression. He was the youngest of six kids and struggled to fit in, largely due to his speech impediment. “When you stutter,” he told Rolling Stone, “people tend to disregard you.” He also had to endure incredible racism in the Jim Crow south. “One of the first things I learned, when I was around four,” he said, “was that if you make a mistake and go into a white women’s bathroom, they’re going to kill your father.”
He joined the Navy after high school and worked as a milkman in Santa Clara County, California after he left the service. He later worked at an aircraft parts factory. Music played a very small role in his life until he visited a nightclub in Oakland where Lou Rawls was booked to perform. “He was late, and the manager was pacing back and forth,” Withers said. “I remember him saying, ‘I’m paying this guy $2,000 a week and he can’t show up on time.’ I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting. Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”
That was all it took. He soon bought a cheap guitar at a pawn shop, taught himself to play and began writing songs between shifts at the factory. A demo tape got into the hands of Clarence Avant, an executive at Sussex records. And before Withers knew it, he was called into the studio to record an album with producer Booker T. Jones, bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, Stephen Stills on guitar. One of the first songs they cut, “Ain’t No Sunshine,” was a tale of lost love that Withers wrote after watching 1962 Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie Days of Wine and Roses on television
The album they recorded at that session, 1971’s Just As I Am, became an enormous hit and turned Withers into a star overnight. He followed it up with 1972’s Just As I Am. That was an even bigger sensation thanks to leadoff single “Lean on Me.” Amazingly, he wrote the song shortly after learning to play the piano. His didn’t think much of it, but his label disagreed and it became a worldwide smash.
Looking back decades later, Withers was still amazed all of this happened to him at a relatively late age in his life. “Imagine 40,000 people at a stadium watching a football game,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “About 10,000 of them think they can play quarterback. Three of them probably could. I guess I was one of those three.”
But fame didn’t agree with him. He hated life on the road, his marriage to TV star Denise Nicholas became fodder for the tabloids and his distrust of businessmen made him unwilling to work with a manager. “Early on, I had a manager for a couple of months, and it felt like getting a gasoline enema,” he said. “Nobody had my interest at heart. I felt like a pawn. I like being my own man.”
When Sussex records went bankrupt in 1975, he moved over to Columbia Records. It only added to his misery. “I met my A&R guy, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t like your music or any black music, period,’ ” Withers said. “I am proud of myself because I did not hit him. I met another executive who was looking at a photo of the Four Tops in a magazine. He actually said to me, ‘Look at these ugly niggers.’ ”
He recorded five records for Columbia and scored radio hits with “Lovely Day” and “Just The Two of Us,” but his heart was no longer in the work. After the release of 1985’s Watching You Watching Me, he had enough and decided to retire. Fortunately, wise real estate investments and royalties from his early work meant that money wasn’t a problem. As the decades passed by, many people forget he was even alive.
“One Sunday morning I was at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles,” he told Rolling Stone. “These church ladies were sitting in the booth next to mine. They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’”
In 2015, he made a rare public appearance when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I still have to process this,” he said shortly after learning the news. “You know that Billy Joel line, ‘Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still rock & roll to me?’ I’m happy to represent the old junk category.”
Featured via: Rollingstone
