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Bill Withers: A True American Original

Les Payne — 2010-02-11T12:00:00Z

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.

Obama's Big Week Reveals A "Privileged" Response

Les Payne — 2010-02-04T12:00:00Z

President Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber

of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 27, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Les Payne

February 4, 2009

Staring down Conservatives of both branches of government last week, President Obama confronted the steel teeth of powerful forces that, at bottom, consider him something of a squatter in the Oval Office that for 232 years had been reserved for white men only.

The Republicans at that House Caucus retreat in Baltimore, and the Supreme Court on the front row at the State of the Union Address gazed upon the first black president as if he had destabilized the group’s psyche about their entitlements. Obama’s ensuing call for a bi-partisan approach to solving the catastrophic problems facing the nation fell on the icy wasteland that is the heart of this brazen opposition.

It should be clear even to President Obama by now that this entrenched, government opposition—who know they’re backed by the 55-percent, white McCain-Palin majority that voted against him—will settle for nothing less than the kow-tow, or failing that, denying Obama re-election in hopes of reclaiming what they misguidedly consider their entitlement by dint of birthright.

This Black History Month calls for a frank assessment not simply of the challenges the first African-American president faces, but also an examination of the larger possibilities for those who dared elect him. Can they create a true Omni-America where for the first time democracy can be made to ensure “liberty and justice for all?”

There is a strong tendency to deny race as a key factor in such high matters of government; however, every other conclusion about the Obama encounters, misses the central point of the lathered-up GOP House members going bare-knuckles with a sitting U.S. president before TV cameras.

And most significantly, the U.S. Supreme Court has unleashed unlimited corporate spending as insurance against, among other things, a repeat at the polls of the will of the white majority getting over-ridden by a coalition from the un-moneyed classes.

As the world celebrated Obama’s inauguration last January, little was made of any violation of white privilege, except in e-mail blog traffic and on such media dung-heaps as Rush-Beck-O’Reilly and the Don Imus shows.

Polite public discourse cloaks this Obama race thing in euphemistic denial language about the articulate president and his sassy wife with the toned, over-exposed arms, who have replaced a foreign bust of Winston Churchill with a domestic one of Martin Luther King, Jr., and together with her bouncy two daughters and their black dog, Michelle has raised an outback garden without collard greens, imagine that, and managed to add a touch of well, sass, to the White House.

Let us now ponder those “unprecedented” challenges to Obama’s very authority aired on television last week; that up-close slap from Congress and the long-term maneuver from the Supreme Court.

As a poster child for the GOP opposition, one needs look no further than Rep. Marsha Blackburn questioning the president at the Caucus retreat. Peering over rimless spectacles, her nasty eyes brimming with contempt, the bleached Tennessee

Congresswoman proposed “starting anew” under GOP guidance and this, despite the ‘08

elections following eight disastrous years of Republican dominance.

Then there was the smug Tom Price, of Georgia, and the buttoned-down Jeb Hensarling, of Texas, whose questioning style approximated that of Count Dracula turning on Abraham Van Helsing. The shadowy Hensarling finally moved even the mild-mannered Obama to get out his hammer and stake.

“You’re making a whole bunch of assertions, half of which I disagree with,” the president cautioned the mop-haired Texan mid-rant. Flagging his frightful budget assertions to a halt, Obama declared them “factually not true and you know it’s not true.” [Fact-checkers say Obama outscored Hensarling on the accuracy card.]

The Washington Post reported that Obama’s confrontation with the Conservatives was a “muscular defense of his first year in office in the most hostile of territories.” The unique sentiments driving this historic hostility, however, have been generally misread by the overall media, a fact that does not bode well for the next three years.

Dramatic hostility was on display earlier when Justice Samuel Alito mouthed his dismissive, “not true” as the president delivered his State of the Union Address to the nation, a few feet away.

Justice Alito’s put-down was in response to the president’s bold, and some say ill-timed criticism of the court’s decision granting corporations the “free speech” rights of citizens that allow them to make unlimited contributions to influence politicians and national elections.

It was perhaps the Constitutional law professor, if not the first black president, in Obama that made him decide to not let pass uncommented upon, this stark Supreme Court intrusion into the Congressional responsibility for campaign electioneering.

“The Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections," Obama said in his Union Address. "Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America 's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill to correct some of these problems."

Coming on the heels of the “08 presidential election, the hasty decision in “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” is another example of this Conservative, white male court (and let’s not split hairs over the 5-4 majority including the lily black Clarence Thomas) crossing the lines of its judicial authority. The decision also bears tell-tale signs that the court is vesting this unheard of political clout in Corporate America, another bastion of white male power, to curtail such democratic voting expressions as the last one that issued up the first black president—over the objection of a wide, 55-43, national, white majority.

The Omni-American voters who got Obama elected consisted of African-Americans, a majority of young and highly-educated whites, some two-thirds of Hispanic and pluralities of every other irregular voting bloc on the register.

While this constituency was able to elect Obama, it is proving no match during the governing process for the awesome, entrenched economic power wielded by the juggernaut fronted by the GOP. This beast bared its steel teeth at that GOP Retreat last week, and it heckled from the front row at the State of the Union Address. Further, the Supreme Court has now entrenched corporate henchmen to adjust the levers of political access and to safeguard their shared legacy of presumed group entitlements.

President Obama has indeed waltzed into a death-dance with powerful forces bent on entrenching for the foreseeable: the rule of the moneyed few over the will of the striving many.

So goes the struggle for democracy.

Reflections on President Barack Obama's First Year In Office

Les Payne — 2010-01-22T12:00:00Z

Public Domain/Whitehouse.gov

Les Payne

January 22, 2010

A year to the day after President Obama was sworn in on that Lincoln Bible, the GOP elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts to step up its campaign, as G. K. Chesterton once said of Conservatives, to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

As Republicans over-hype their Brown decision, the filibuster-proof-breaking, 41st GOP senator has dimmed the hopes of Democrats counting on the clout of a 60-vote majority to correct such disasters of the Bush years as health care. Politics these days, save under dictatorships and in New York City, depends not on the bellow of the “strong man” but the grating interplay of opposing forces duly elected.

Thus, despite Americans’ support for health reform and even the “public option,” the minority GOP is hell-bent on obstructing change and freezing the status quo. And their hearts are gladdened this week by the D.C. arrival of the nude, male model from the Bay State.

This lone cock-robin from Massachusetts is said to bring not only spring but also summer and fall. No sooner had Brown’s lame opponent conceded prematurely in Boston, for example, than a few observers were concluding that, some 365 days into his first term, President Obama is a “lame Duck.”

The Democrats have lost their super-edge in the Senate, period. They have not lost their majority—and if their tactical skills hold, they likely will not lose the mid-term elections. All of this, of course, will be misread by the media as they impress their bosses and tilt public opinion to the delight of the Rush-McCain-Palin wing of the GOP.

Flapping his short arms like a bull penguin, Sen. McCain hasn’t been this exuberant since declaring after the Russian smack-down of his buddy “Misha” Saakashvilli, that “we are all Georgians” now.

This latest hooey from back-benchers is not surprising; however, Brown’s election also stirs concerns among progressive supporters of Obama and, for quite different reasons, from black Clintonite Democrats who were stung for supporting Obama late, if at all.

Progressives especially bemoan the prospects now of Obama pushing through the “change” agenda that drove African-Americans, Hispanics, and optimistic white youth to the polls in unheard of numbers. While the President accepts that half a loaf is better than no loaf on health care, progressives are troubled that he might think a half a loaf is better than the full loaf on other matters.

The residue of the wrong-headed Iraq War, for example, taken with Obama’s expansion in Afghanistan, and the looming prospects of Pakistan and Yemen as battle zones are all growing signs that the candidate of change may be a bit too steadfast at war.

The most curious finger-pointers among the growing Obama doubters are those black leaders in Congress, key churches and the media who fed too long at the trough of the Clinton’s. They ventured so deep into the swamp for the privilege of swatting Clinton’s flies that they are unable even now to extricate themselves from the quicksand.

At the slightest sign of a White House setback, these dusky Clintonites, who place their individual appetites above those of group needs, rush to the barricades to denounce Obama with alarm. Their chief aim is to pay back the brethren that taunted them as wimps during the ’08 Democratic primary when the Clinton’s went Arkansas trailer-park.

As with the progressives, much of this criticism about Obama’s shortcomings on racial matters is legitimate, without question. Journalists especially must press for accountability as with all such office-holders.

The point here is rather to separate such wheat from the chaff of those over-zealous, self loathing, “I-told-ya’ll,” black leaders and influence-peddlers who remain irredeemably predisposed to the Clinton’s come weal or come woe. Their faux accountable test for Obama centers chiefly on: the lack of welfare safety nets for blacks; wide, racially disparate prison populations; and the low impact of blacks in media ownership.

Each of these grave issues, while addressed by Obama has not yet been dealt with sufficiently by his Administration that inherited them.

During Clinton’s two terms in office, by comparison, he instituted, heavily reinforced or extended every single one of these Draconian measures exacting such a painful toll from the African-American community. Clinton’s verification and extension of the 100:1 sentencing ratio for crack and powdered cocaine offenses, for example, has so clogged up prisons with non-violent blacks and Hispanics that Clinton was moved to apologize—some eight years after he left office!

“I regret more than I can say that we didn’t do more on it,” Clinton was quoted as saying by USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham. "I'm prepared to spend a significant portion of whatever life I've got left on the earth trying to fix this because I think it's a cancer," the former president said of the devastating impact that his disparate crack-powdered cocaine sentencing imbalance has had on African Americans.

Despite all, these dusky Clintonites cling to the sulfur trail of the 42nd President and his wife. The Clinton’s apparently did well by this select and dependent few; but the duo seemingly advanced their careers and stake in life at the expense of the general welfare and best interest of the masses of independent-minded African-Americans struggling, not for handouts, but for self-sufficiency.

Not unlike Rush Limbaugh and far too many of those 55 percent of white Americans who voted for the continuing GOP resolution of McCain-Palin, these dusky Clintonites--for quite different reasons granted —would love nothing better than to see the Obama Administration falter, if not fail.

The first full year of the Obama Administration has indeed not reversed the havoc set in motion by Ronald Reagan and steered into a death spiral by Bush-Cheney. Some suggest that the Administration has slowed the descent with signs of leveling the republic into a glide.

The taking on of Scott Brown will not make things any easier as the GOP seems intent on working against the best interests of the majority of the American peoples, across lines of race, generations, gender, region, ethnicity and class.

It is increasingly difficult to associate patriotism with a GOP that would lend an ear to Limbaugh, a microphone to Sarah Palin, or pull up a senate chair for the likes of Scott Brown.

Buckle up; we’re into the wild blue yonder of Year Two.

Celebrating The Legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Les Payne — 2010-01-17T15:00:00Z

January 17, 2010

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Les Payne delivered a speech titled: "Civil Rights

and Politics: The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." at UJA-Federation’s

headquarters in New York on January 14th to honor and remember Rev. Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr.

Payne, who grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, offered that his speech was a personal

testimony about Dr. King’s tremendous effect on American politics. He spoke about

racist laws before Dr. King’s time, especially in the South, that made the lives of so many

African-Americans a “nightmare.” Payne recounted those laws that existed into the 1960s

dealing with public facilities, marriage, and cemeteries, adding, “From diapers to

shrouds, life was unequal.”

Payne — a reporter, editor, and columnist at Newsday for more than 40 years and a

longtime mentor of African-American journalists around the country — wondered what

Dr. King might think of this world were he alive in 2010 at age 82. “Still two years

younger than [former New York City mayor] David Dinkins, five years younger than

former mayor Koch,” and 32 years older than President Barack Obama — whose Nobel

Peace Prize, Payne says, Dr. King made possible.

Obama marks another step in fulfilling what Dr. King set in motion, Payne said. But as

he added, “It remains to be seen if we have made Dr. King proud.”

- as posted by UJA Federation of New York's website on January 15, 2010.

Lets go to the audio tape....

When Race Becomes Real

Les Payne — 2010-01-12T23:07:00Z

Near midnight eastern time, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2008. Kissimmee, Fl. Bill Clinton introduces Barack Obama at a late night rally. (photo by Lynn Sweet)

Les Payne

January 12, 2010

It is Bill Clinton, not Sen. Harry Reid, who comes off as the poster child for the nasty-mouth “white boy” attacking the racial fitness of the black presidential candidate. The new book “Game Change,” examines the maneuverings of both men on the ’08 campaign trail.

Major media, not surprisingly, choose to trail the GOP’s false pursuit of the Senate Majority Leader, comparing Reid’s favorable comments about candidate Barack Obama to Trent Lott’s segregationist vitriol from Mississippi of a century ago. News coverage can get down-right wacky when touching on race matters.

After the GOP strapped Sen. Reid to a chair, the media proceeded to pistol-whip an apology out of the wrong suspect, and for the wrong reason. Curiously, even the black commentators trotted out to testify dared not follow up on media critic Richard Prince’s early posting of Clinton’s trashy white dismissal of candidate Obama.

Praising Obama as a winnable candidate, Sen. Reid scored his acceptability by whites as owing to his lack of a “Negro dialect” and a dark register on the skin-tone palette. Try though I may, and I’m no novice at this; I cannot detect a violation here save for Reid’s bad manners in referring to African-Americans by the once-favored noun--never pejorative--that they no longer answer to.

As for the “Negro dialect,” one need only tune in the popular Steve Harvey radio show for a dose of this retrograde, aural trauma. What surprises is not that it’s not spoken by a Harvard-trained, presidential candidate, but rather that comedian Harvey is not brought up on charges for his daily mocking of the brethren in this obscene manner.

As for the acceptability of Obama’s skin tone, Reid’s assessment is a fair reach for the judgment of his white compatriots. [Incidentally, what African-Americans make of such skin-tone shading is quite beside the point here.]

The more urgent case against Bill Clinton, as addressed in “Game Change,” smacks of a felony and cries for a grand jury.

As posted, from page 218 of the book, by Richard Prince on his Journalisms site:

The day after Iowa , [ Clinton ] phoned [Massachusetts Sen. Ted] Kennedy and

pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on,

belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the

conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, A few years

ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."

Sounds familiar? Remember Clinton dismissing Obama’s victory in the solidly black South Carolina primary as child’s play of the sort engaged in by Jesse Jackson and his ilk. And, after Obama wins in Wisconsin and Hawaii, Hillary seconded her husband’s “fairy tale” notion of a black opponent gaining the White House, by chiding the Hunter College audience that “It’s time to get real about how we actually win this election.”

Clinton’s power move with Sen. Kennedy--not what Sen. Reid said in praising Obama as a presidential candidate--is the sort of negative stereotyping that constitutes, well, racism, pure and simple. We need look no further for the definition than Clinton himself. On the eve of his big San Diego speech to the nation on race, in 1995, I asked him to define racism during a White House interview.

“It is racist,” President Clinton said in the Cabinet Room, “to affirmatively discriminate against someone on the basis of race, to deny them some opportunity for which they are otherwise qualified or should be considered, simply because of their race; that’s racism”

Clinton elaborated about a “subtle form of racism that we all have to be careful about...to have presumptions about what kind of people you’re dealing with; what they think; what they feel; and what they are likely to do based solely on the color of their skin, and the absence of any evidence to the contrary. And that subtle form of racism still permeates a lot of our social intercourse in America and keeps barriers up between our people.”

In nailing a triple-canopy definition of racism back then, one including the power component that allows the privileged group to "deny opportunity” to the targeted one, Clinton prescribed his ’08 attempts to get Kennedy to act in white solidarity to deny Obama the nomination. This was not just politics as bloody usual.

How is Clinton’s action racist? The former-president asked Sen. Kennedy to endorse Hillary and help deny Obama the Democratic nomination--not as an individual but as an African-American.

Had Hillary’s husband petitioned Kennedy, say, to help defeat this skinny, relatively inexperienced, junior Illinois senator, born in Hawaii, reared part-way in Indonesia, who migrated through California and Harvard to work as a community-organizer for God’s sake; than the former, trailer-park, Arkansas Governor would have kept to the non-racial high-ground. As a loyal Democrat, Kennedy might have better understood.

Instead, the 42nd U.S. President approached Kennedy, as a white man dismissive of Obama’s candidacy not as an individual, but as a member of a race that Clinton obviously takes pride in looking down upon as drawers of coffee. This betrayal is consistent with all we have learned about the slick Bill Clinton. He has been hustling African-Americans for support since so many of his own kind rejected him as the scion of a dysfunctional, sweat-and-whiskey family from the wrong side of town.

Recoiling from the pernicious race-play of the Clinton’s of Arkansas, Sen. Edward Moore (Ted) Kennedy kept the faith that African-Americans have overwhelmingly bestowed upon his family dating back to 1960.

Camelot trumped trailer-trash. There is reason yet to hope.