VIBE MAGAZINE
PROPS
By Harry Weinger
April 1997

Twenty-five years after the success of his humble “Lean On Me,” singer/songwriter Bill Withers’s folksy realism and bittersweet romance are still flowing through modern music. “Lean On Me” revisited No.1 in 1987 when Club Nouveau remade it, and since then, others, including Me’Shell NdegeOcello (“Who Is He and What Is He to You?”), Sweetback (“Hope She’ll Be Happier”), and Mick Jagger and Lenny Kravitz (“Use Me”), have followed suit by covering Withers’s classics.

His catalog is a deep mine of sample-friendly beats. Just ask BLACKstreet, whose “No Diggity” bounced to No. 1 on the foundation of Withers’s “Grandma’s Hands.” And who can deny the impact he’s had on Babyface, whose songs tell stories with similar earthy arrangements and understated genius?

“These covers and sample have been very good to me,” Withers says, relaxing in his wife’s Sherman Oaks, Calif. Office. “I won’t give my approval if I think something is too low-down. I’ve said no more than I’ve said yes. But I’m grateful to the people who do them, because I know I’m gonna get paid.”

Withers seems to have lived the American Dream: He was born on Independence Day, 1938, in the coal mining town of Slab Fork, W.Va. Thirty-three years later, in 1971, the Navy veteran and airline toilet fixer finally found chart success with “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Strumming an acoustic guitar and singing in a melancholic yet warm voice, Withers continued to hit big throughout the ‘70s with honest stories like the funky “Kissing My Love,” the biting “The Same Love That Made Me Laugh,” and his last smash, “Just The Two Of Us” with Grover Washington Jr., in 1981.

Yet, like many of his songs, Withers has been something of a mystery. He virtually disappeared from music more than a decade ago. “I became a very serious parent,” he says. “That’s my full-time job. Day to day, I’m just an old guy trying to get stuff done.” But with his youngest child about to enter college, Withers, now 58, is ready to record again. “There’s enough of a twinkle left in my eye,” he says with a big laugh. “I sure would like to shake ‘em one more time.”