In telling stories from his time in coal country, he was matter-of-fact about the negatives and homed in on the positives. We have to be more civil than most people that we will encounter.”īy most accounts, Withers bore that out. In footage captured in the 2009 documentary Still Bill, he tells a group of young children who stutter that “one of the ways to deal with the fear is to approach people with a prepared forgiveness.
The impediment was a catalyst that helped shape both his confidence in himself and the piercing humanity with which he approached his lyrics. He stuttered as a kid and well into adulthood, though you’d hardly know it when he opened his mouth to sing and earthbound divinity spilled out. Withers, who died on Maat the age of 81, grew up in Slab Folk, West Virginia, where racial segregation prevailed but the coal mines could almost double as an equalizer. Thus, an air of mystery surrounds the album that also lends itself well to the legend of its creator. His songs were paradoxes, deceptively simple in the way they illuminated the interiority of the human experience, how they made the personal universal.Īs fate would have it, Sussex, his then-label, went under soon after +’Justments was released, and the album suffered in the fallout it existed only on vinyl, cassettes and 8-tracks (and perhaps later, bootlegged MP3s) for 36 years before it finally came out on CD in 2010. The Bill Withers who’d made “Lean On Me,” a monument to friendship that’s embedded in our cultural fibers. He was already the Bill Withers who’d made “Ain't No Sunshine,” a prototype of lovelorn lament for its era, and “Grandma’s Hands,” an ode to matriarchal nurture.
It was beloved, and even deemed a masterpiece, by listeners in the know, and for a certain kind of music fan, one of those albums that could confirm you’re amongst your kind - the ones who venture beyond charts the diggers and the excavators.īut in 1974, when the album was released, the famed singer-songwriter was still at the height of his powers.
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