“Ain’t No Sunshine” is quiet with a stripped-down 15-second riff on the phrase “I know” that turns Withers voice into an instrument performing its own solo. Withers’s sound reaches back to the austere roots of the blues and country music. “Ain’t No Sunshine,” originally a B-side, won a Grammy. One single off his 1971 album “Just as I Am” would guarantee that he had worked on his last airplane. Withers was past 30 and nothing could have predicted what happened next. Yet, he explains in “Still Bill,” a 2009 documentary about his life, that after hearing the story, he “decided it would be awfully nice to get in the music business.” He bought an acoustic guitar from a pawnshop and composed songs in his head while working at a Weber Aircraft factory the resulting demo would lead Clarence Avant, a Black record executive and the founder of Sussex Records, to sign him. Withers had never written a song and couldn’t play an instrument. And then, everything changed.Īs the story goes, Withers overheard a club owner complain about paying Lou Rawls $2,000 a week just for him to show up late. To get by, he toiled in a factory making toilets for Boeing 747s. Nine years later, in 1965, he left the military. He became the first Black mechanic most of his peers would know. Withers enrolled in aircraft-mechanic’s school to show that he was no fool.
And white folks is pissed off period.” He wanted out of West Virginia and at 17 left for the Navy. But I’m a little yellow boy, and so some Black folks is pissed off about that.
In a 2005 video interview that accompanied the rerelease of his first album, “Just as I Am,” Withers describes his world as a young boy with asthma: “I’m Black.
Plus, no one would claim that being a child in coal country is easy. Board of Education was decided and Emmett Till was murdered. Born in Slab Fork, W.Va., he grew up during the years when Brown v.
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He went from manual labor to musical stardom in a matter of months, but his earlier struggles were always there in the music.īill Withers sang like a man who knew something.
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