Bill Withers, a son of W.Va. who understood everyday lives and stuck to his songwriting muse, dies; his songs live on

Bill Withers (2006 photo)

For a guy who hadn't made a record in 35 years, Bill Withers got a great (and deserved) sendoff from writers after he died March 30 at the age of 81. The Rural Blog shares some of them here, because for the first 17 years of his life, Withers was a rural American -- born July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., where his father was a coal miner and his mother was a maid. When they divorced, he "was raised by his mother's family in nearby Beckley," Mark Kennedy reports for The Associated Press.

Withers joined the Navy, became an aircraft mechanic and factory worker and was inspired to become a musician when he saw Lou Rawls sing and attract women. He taught himself to play guitar, wrote dozens of songs and got a recording contract. Hits came quickly; he won a Grammy award in 1971 for “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and another in 1981 for “Just the Two of Us.” But he couldn't get along with Columbia Records, so when his contract ended he quit the business and lived off royalties from his often-covered songs; he won his third Grammy in 1987 for “Lean on Me,” re-done by Club Nouveau. The song was performed at inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and is the theme of a Walmart TV commercial responding to the covid-19 pandemic.

Withers "wrote some of the most memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s," and "had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that could embody loss or hope," Neil Genzlinger writes for The New York Times. But the deeper story in the Times is from the paper's longtime chief pop-music critic, Jon Pareles, who notes Withers' background and writes, "He hadn’t been sheltered from the everyday lives that he would write about," such as a Vietnam amputee in “I Can’t Write Left-Handed.” He wrote about his West Virginia childhood in "Railroad Man" and "Grandma's Hands."

Pareles puts Withers on a par with early 1970s "community-minded" soul artists like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Earth, Wind & Fire: "His voice was at the center of every song, reedy and gritty, strong enough for preacherly declamations and smooth enough to carry a lover’s endearments. Yet he chose to treat that utterly distinctive voice modestly — as a vehicle, not a centerpiece. He sang his stories with down-home fervor, but he was also more than willing to let the sense of the words dissolve into rhythm and incantation, into impulses and feelings. Withers made it seem — with deep-rooted knowledge and virtuoso skill — that each song was creating its own borderless style and groove on the spot, steeped in but never beholden to blues, gospel, country, jazz, folk, rock or any other defined idiom."

Slab Fork is about 11 miles from Beckley. (Google map)

"Withers went with his heart and his desire to write and record great songs, whether they would be pop hits or not," Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University, writes for NPR.

Ashley B. Craig reports for the Charleston Gazette-Mail: "Michael Lipton, the director of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, said Withers was, in many ways, the inspiration for the state’s music hall. Withers was among the first class of inductees and came to the inaugural induction ceremony in 2007. He also attended three other induction ceremonies, Lipton said, and . . .when Withers was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the morning after the induction ceremony, Withers hosted a brunch that was only attended by West Virginians."