Bill Withers, Who Sang ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ Dies at 81
A three-time Grammy Award winner, he had a string of much-covered hits within the 1970s but had not released an album since 1985.
Bill Withers, a onetime Navy aircraft mechanic who after teaching himself to play the guitar wrote a number of the foremost memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s, including “Lean on Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Use Me,” died on Monday in l. a. . He was 81.
His death was announced during a statement from his family. His son, Todd, said he had heart problems.
Mr. Withers, who had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that would embody loss or hope, was in his 30s when he released his first album, “Just as i'm ,” in 1971. It included “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a mournful lament (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/And she’s always gone too long/Anytime she goes away”) that cracked the Billboard Top 10. Other hits followed, perhaps none better known than “Lean on Me,” an anthem of friendship and support that hit No. 1 in 1972 and has been repurposed countless times by a good sort of artists.
There were also “Use Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the 2 of Us” (1981), among other hits. But after the 1985 album “Watching You Watching Me,” frustrated with the music business, Mr. Withers stopped recording and performing.
“I wouldn’t know a pop chart from a Pop-Tart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“Bill was a mystical man,” Leo Sacks, who supervised the rerelease of Mr. Withers’s catalog for Sony Legacy Recordings, including a 2012 box that won a Grammy for best historical recording, said by email. “Like a Greek oracle. But he let the songs represent themselves. He sang so conversationally and universally, like he was sitting next to you. His songs made every word count.”
William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on Independence Day , 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., to William and Mattie (Galloway) Withers. His mother was a maid, and his father worked within the coal mines.
At 17, wanting to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.
“My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I visited aircraft-mechanic school.”
He spent nine years within the service, a number of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got employment at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a nightclub to ascertain Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.
“I was making $3 an hour, trying to find friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and every one these women are lecture him.”
He bought an inexpensive guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avant, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to supply an album.
“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook filled with songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone within the studio, he asked to talk to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who goes to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting another vocalist to point out up.”
Mr. Withers was laid faraway from his factory job a couple of months before “Just as I Am” came out. After the album’s release, he recalled, he received two letters on an equivalent day. One was from his workplace asking him to return to figure . the opposite was from “The Tonight Show,” where he appeared in November 1971.
“‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ was the B-side to ‘Harlem’,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2015, pertaining to another track from the album, “until the D.J.s turned it over.”
The song, he said, had just come to him at some point .
“I was watching the movie ‘The Days of Wine and Roses,’ looked out the window and it crossed my mind,” he told The Plain Dealer. “Probably some girl had left me, but ego preservation has taught me to avoid inconvenient truths.”
“Ain’t No Sunshine” won the Grammy Award for best rhythm and blues song. “Lean on Me” and “Just the 2 of Us” (a collaboration with the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., written with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald) won an equivalent award.
Mr. Withers released six other studio albums within the 1970s, for Sussex then Columbia, and performed across the country and beyond. One memorable appearance was at the music festival in Zaire in 1974 that preceded the “Rumble within the Jungle,” the famed heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.
But he also played clubs just like the Bottom Line in Manhattan.
“Mr. Withers lyrics are among the foremost thoughtful altogether of pop ,” Robert Palmer wrote within the ny Times, reviewing a 1976 show there, “but his work also has its physical side. Many of his tunes simmer irresistibly, as if cooking over a coffee flame.”
Mr. Withers chafed at Columbia, clashing with executives, and after “Watching You Watching Me” in 1985, he was through with the music business. Years later he liked to inform stories about not being recognized. One such incident occurred at a l. a. restaurant.
“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles abreast of Pico,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015, “and these ladies seemed like that they had just come from church or something, and that they were talking about this Bill Withers song. So i used to be getting to have some fun with them. I said, ‘I’m Bill Withers,’ and this lady said: ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You too light-skinned to be Bill Withers.’”
Mr. Withers’s brief marriage to the actress Denise Nicholas within the 1970s led to divorce. In 1976 he married Marcia Johnson. She and their son survive him, along side their daughter, Kori, and a sister, Florence Mather.
In 2015, beforehand of a tribute concert in his honor at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Withers was interviewed at a restaurant by a reporter for the days . The talk turned to how, with no music training, he managed relatively late to fashion a career in music.
“It was just something i made a decision to try to to ,” he said. “If i made a decision to create one among these fountains” — he pointed to a decoration on the restaurant’s patio — “I could probably roll in the hay .”
He could also probably have resumed his career at any time.
“Late in life, he would tease us about recording again,” Mr. Sacks said. “But i feel he was truly ambivalent. He said he didn’t think anyone was curious about what an ‘old man’ had to mention . which was Bill to a tee: wily, cunning, self-effacing. Utterly disingenuous.”
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