STILL BILL, directed by Damani Baker and Alex Vlack, is an intimate portrait of Bill Withers, the artist behind the classics “Ain’t No

Sunshine,” “Lean On Me,” “Lovely Day” and “Just the Two of Us.” Through archival and new concert footage and interviews with music

greats, his family and closest friends, the film reveals the man behind the music.

Les Payne

February 11, 2010 

He is an American original, Bill Withers. The voice is as clear as the wind and just as carefree. Withers has that gift from the gods so overlooked in popular song-writers: a well-tuned ear.

Ringtones of his “Lovely Day” summon generation X to their cell-phones. Not bad for a singer/songwriter who walked away from the performing stage 25 years ago. He put words into songs that lasted and the unabashed senior citizen speaks even now in a timeless vernacular.

“I got tired of being somewhere else so I went home,” Withers said the other day of his month-long stay in Zaire back in 1974, when heavyweight Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman for the world boxing title. Such a line, and this one never made it into a song, is born of a well-tuned ear listening to common speech.      

Upon rushing on-stage to perform at the Apollo, Chuck Berry once found himself duck-walking in his lounging slippers instead of his patent leather shoes, which he left behind the curtains. His ear picked up a Harlem fan on the front row yelling: “You need you some shoes, Chuck!”

This ear of the popular song-writer usually comes with a conscience. This mysterious work of the musician is not that of the preacher who harasses, but that of the Recording Angel who observes and takes note. Chuck Berry was so ordained; as was Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and Paul McCartney writing Eleanor Rigby.

This consciousness guided Bill Withers during his gig at the “Rumble in the Jungle,” as Ali tagged the championship bout in what is now the Congo . “I had never been in a country where there was a dictator,” the singer/songwriter told Tavis Smiley on a recent show, “a place where there was such a disparity in wealth.” “A few people had all the money” and the “very opulent lifestyle” of President Mobutu unnerved the black southerner who had lived through the struggle for equality in America .

“Man this guy gives me the creeps,” he said of the brutal dictator. “Morally, I didn’t feel comfortable with [Mobutu],” hosting the world’s top writers and entertainers at his jungle Gomorrah. As for the Ali-Foreman fight, Withers reduced it to “two big guys going to fight each other [in the middle of the night]…and I could find that in some bar [back home].

“I split,” he said during a New York screening of a film about his life entitled “Still Bill.” “I didn’t stay for the fight.”

The documentary reveals a remarkable American singer/songwriter who after a late start at age 32 walked away from public, stage stardom at age 45. He wrote such classic tunes as “Lean on Me"; "Lovely Day"; "Ain’t No Sunshine"; "Use Me"; "Just the Two of Us", and scores of lesser tunes remembered for the feelings they stir and the story they tell.

Upon talking with a soldier who’d lost an arm in battle, Withers wrote: “I Can’t Write Left-Handed.” The wounded GI implores someone to “write a letter to my mother…to get a deferment for my younger brother.” The prayers of Rev. Harris’ were solicited because he may not “live to get much older,” The ex-Navy man then penned a flat, non-accusatory statement of a wounded soldier caught up in the full, deadly folly of that American war:

“Strange little man over here in Vietnam; I ain’t never seen; bless his heart; I ain’t never done nothing to; he done shot me in my shoulder.”

The “Still Bill” documentary, by two young filmmakers, plays near the surface of this complex man. There’s a moving account of the artists’ strong relations with his second wife and children, a devotion that all but explains why he left the performing stage. (Rumor-mongers with memories will be disappointed that the film skips over his reportedly tumultuous marriage to actress Denise Nichols.)

As with most earnest artists, the Withers’ gift is as mysterious as it is unmistakable. “I’m just a conduit,” he told one interviewer. “I walk around and sometimes I’m scratching myself and things cross my mind. So I don’t know where any of that stuff comes from. People ask about songs and things like that, so I don’t know. It’s just the way I am, I guess.”

The artist attributes much of the way he is to his grandmother, who is immortalized in one of his classic tunes, "Grandma’s Hands". In their “valuable role, grandmothers tend to gravitate toward the weak kid” as Withers saw himself as a stutterer among his many siblings.

“I wonder what it would have been like if my grandmothers had been on crack,” mused the song-writer activating his consciousness about the perils of urban street life. “You can tell how much difference it makes in people’s lives when they get good ones.”

There is a curious scene in “Still Bill” in which the earnest and frugal wordsmith from Slab Fork, West Virginia, neatly exposes the scholarly antics of Cornel West, PhD, and his sidekick Tavis Smiley. Pressing the question of authenticity, the duo, appearing for all the world as poseurs on the make, attempted to stake out territory that Withers cut from beneath them. After the songwriter rejected Smiley’s definition of a black “sell-out,” the nervy TV host handed off to the professor who further muddied the waters with quotes from Shakespeare.

Born on the 4th of July, Bill Withers is a prototype Omni-American of the sort described by Albert Murray, the great social critic. Living the show-business life for a dozen years, Withers refused to bend his art under the wretched demands of the corrupt music industry.

When asked to “cover” Elvis Presley’s 1969 recording, “In the Ghetto,” for example, Withers was “livid” and seemed so during the recent retelling of the request. Songwriter Mac Davis, who viewed the black community as a white mans’ burden, had Elvis singing a bill of particulars about an unwanted “ghetto” child growing up roaming the night streets where he buys a gun, steals a car, and then, running away, gets himself shot dead—only to have this vicious cycle repeated.

Saturday nights in Bill Withers’ Harlem, “the radiator won’t get hot,” true enough; yet, “ever’ry thing’s alright…You can really swing/ and shake your pretty thing/The parties are all out of sight.” Then “Sunday morning here in Harlem/now eve’rybody’s all dressed up/The hip folks getting’ home from the party/and the good folks just got up.”

Steering far clear of this Harlem (or what Mac Davis and Elvis Presley called the ghetto), white American artists are narrowed into a bland expression of self-exclusion. Blacks like Bill Withers, on the other hand, were saturated over the years with white, popular culture. Their art tends to synthesize the Omni-strains present in the national pattern.

In the case of Withers’ grandmother, Johnny Cash, a Native American, saw his in the hit song about the church-going black woman from Slab Fork, West Virginia. So did Barbra Streisand and Americans across the divide of race, color and immigrant origin. When penning hit lyrics for country singer Jimmy Buffet, Withers struck a chord because—unlike, say, Mac Davis and Elvis Presley—as a child the black artist listened to and absorbed hillbilly music along with the whole of popular, American culture.

The totality of his music appreciation comes, Withers says, from having grown up as an African-American in West Virginia . “Country music was on the radio,” he said. “We absorbed things as we walk around [if we allow ourselves]. So there was the blues and there was country music; then there was Frank Sinatra and Perry Como and I remember even Della Reese. So you absorb all that stuff, and somehow it gets all mixed up inside you and it comes out.”

As an Omni-American descendant of slaves, Withers, the creative artist, took full advantage of having absorbed the culture of other groups in America, including southern, frontier whites, New Englanders, Native Americans, and old-line immigrants from Europe, Ireland and elsewhere.

One can only ponder this Black History Month, whether African-Americans will key on the tactical assertiveness of Barack Obama and step forward to make the republic a better, more enlightened nation by demanding their full entitlements—as Americans in full.