Two amazing things happened to Bill Withers on a spring Saturday night in Cleveland five years ago.
The first was that he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The second was that he actually got more laughs than his fellow inductee, Ringo Starr, in his acceptance speech.
“This must be the largest AA meeting in the Western Hemisphere,” he drolly observed.
He then stood there and smiled, with his hands in the pockets of his tuxedo, while the audience in the Ohio city’s storied Public Hall howled in response.
Withers, the soul-pop Everyman from Slab Fork, Raleigh County, who spun AM radio gold in the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles.
He was 81 and suffered from cardiac issues, his family said in a statement. His wife, a son and a daughter survive.
A slightly skewed sense of humor wasn’t something people who bought his records associated with him.
Withers rolled out of the ether in 1971 with “Ain’t No Sunshine” — a quietly intense, evocative telling of love, loss and conflicted emotions that got him out of the 9-5 and onto “Soul Train” and “The Tonight Show,” with Johnny Carson.
Until then, he was installing toilet seats in passenger jets in Northern California.
He was stationed there in his last posting in the U.S. Navy, where he finished his hitch as a petty officer and chief mechanic.
Like a lot of young black men of his generation who grew up here, he left immediately after high school.
Mining songs
Not a lot of job opportunities, he said, so he enlisted.
He just knew he wasn’t going in the coal mines, he said.
His father was a miner who died when Withers was 13. He went to live with his grandmother in Beckley, where his ears became open portals of sonic diversity.
Growing up, he heard gospel music and the blues from his black friends.
His buddies who were white dug country, bluegrass, and, of course, rock ‘n’ roll.
And Withers filed it all away in the jukebox in his head. The original songs that would follow couldn’t have happened any other way, Michael Lipton said.
Lipton is executive director of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, which had ushered Withers in with its inaugural class in 2007.
“Bill is soul and he’s rock and he’s R&B,” Lipton said.
“He’s like West Virginia, where we’re northern and southern at the same time. It all layers together.”
When Withers bought a pawn shop acoustic guitar and taught himself to play, he began layering chords and melodies to all those tone poems he had long been writing down.
“Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Grandma’s Hands” and others, too, which, as Lipton said, just seemed to happen, organically.
That’s how the hypnotic, “I know, I know” refrain occurred in “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
Withers was singing it to fill time on the demo while he worked to flesh out another verse.
Booker T. who was producing the session — of Booker T. and the M.G.’s fame — told him it really needed to stay, and Withers listened.
Stevie, Alice and tying it all together
The red carpet at Public Hall was lined that late afternoon in 2015 with people who really listen.
As the sun was beginning to set, they assembled on either side, adorned in band T-shirts, suits and ties and evening dresses.
They name-checked every producer and performer who arrived for the ceremony and concert to follow.
“Whoa, look at that,” said Cindy Oxender, a schoolteacher from Parkersburg who was treating herself for her 50th birthday. “Alice Cooper, without eyeliner.”
The “School’s Out” singer gave a smile and tossed his hand.
A certain singer from Slab Fork came through in the next wave.
“Was that Bill Withers? I think that was Bill Withers.”
He responded in the most West Virginia of ways: A small grin, and smaller nod.
Stevie Wonder, who counted Withers as a personal friend, gave him a bigger nod as he did the induction speech.
“In every song of his I hear,” Wonder said, “I always say, I wish I could have written that song.”
Withers, in conversation, sometimes sounded like a guy who was writing an endless song.
He layered his patented, droll asides with rhyming couplets that came off as haikus from the hills.
The unique vocalization was on display in his home state three years ago in Morgantown when he was bestowed an honorary degree of music during a WVU commencement.
A career in the arts isn’t easy, he told the graduates, but there is sunshine to be found.
“If you’re half-right, you’ll be all right,” he said. “Just remember: Tie your shoes.”
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