Bill Withers, a pop star? Unlikely. A stuttering, asthmatic child in a West Virginia coal-mining town ranks low on prospects. As an adult, he nearly became a lifer in the Navy. For a while, he worked on an assembly line, making toilets for 747s.
Suddenly, in his 30s, he wrote (or co-wrote) and sang a string of hits: “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” He collected a Grammy for each. When you’ve become famous, he jokes, you start hearing yourself described in words you haven’t heard before, like “handsome.”
And then, just as meteorically, he returned to the ordinary. Today, in that L.A. way of retired entertainers, he lounges dressed in a tracksuit and spotless puffy sneakers, in a large but simple home, collecting checks from the songs he’s written. In the documentary Still Bill, we see him visit his hometown, walk the railroad tracks with its de facto mayor and look for family graves in a blacks-only cemetery overgrown with trees and weeds. They recall color lines but laugh that everyone’s black in a mining town. Bill travels, accepting honorariums and attending concerts during which other people sing his songs. He’s gracious, whip-smart and funny; I laughed a lot at his jokes, only a few of which were grandpa-like.
Although he hasn’t performed live since 1988, he putters around his home recording studio, where he claims to not even know how to operate the boards (his daughter, Kori, helps out; she sings, too, and her dad is her toughest critic). He builds songs on snatches of doggerel or poetry he writes down and springboards from (“Your love is like a chunk of gold/Hard to gain and hard to hold”). He doesn’t take himself seriously; he contributed two tracks to a Jimmy Buffet album and the documentary shows him in his studio flirting with reggaeton-style music, lyrics in Spanish, no less. Will those home recordings see release? The answer seems to be “not now,” perhaps not ever.
The documentary doesn’t pinpoint a moment that explains why the public hasn’t heard from Bill after all this time. Seeing him joke and chat with everyone from Cornell West to his old Navy buddies suggests he’s a capital-lettered Nice Guy, modest, self-deprecating, smart and real enough to have left the music business before it could inflate his ego or corrode his soul. (The movie avoids any direct coverage of the legal tussles Withers became involved with at each of the two labels he recorded for.)
He’s 71 now and retained that voice, like warm butterscotch. He stutters still, but only occasionally. The film’s most touching moment has him delivering a speech to a support group of kids who stutter. The “you can make it if you try” message, cliché by default, flows from him genuinely; the camera catches him crying.
He’s asked what he wants as his legacy. He’s silent for a long time and the movie leaves the question unanswered. I thought, he’s just that guy, you know? He wrote and sang a few songs most people have heard but his name isn’t household. And Bill would be cool with that.