The Ties That Bind

The best search engine in the world is still a box of books I saved from childhood. My father kept most of his; I kept most of mine, and some of his, and my wife has hers, and our new baby daughter will soon enough get to reckon with all of it—and a whole lot of music besides.

Just the sound of Bill Withers’ voice, playing back on the occasion of the re-release of Still Bill on Sony/Legacy, sends me digging into that box for Sterling North’s books. They are fused together, “Grandma’s Hands” (from Withers’ 1971 debut, Just As I Am) an echo of North’s So Dear to My Heart. Originally published in 1947, North’s novel of a rural Indiana lad raised by his Granny Kincaid might have been the story of Bill Withers, born in 1938 in Slab Fork, W.Va., raised by his mother and grandma. North went on to greater fame in the early ’60s with Rascal and other books about boys and young raccoons.

Bill Withers’ career was somewhat shorter, but he wrote at least as many great songs as North did books. Much like Harlan Howard, the late dean of Nashville songwriters, Withers worked from poverty to the military to a factory in Los Angeles to writing songs that—like the mostly country careers of O.C. Smith and Stoney Edwards—had little to do with race or genre.

“Grandma’s Hands” was Withers’ second hit, back in 1971, the follow-up to “Ain’t No Sunshine.” (Curiously, Sony/Legacy has chosen not to reissue Just As I Am, the album featuring both these early singles.) He sings easily with the placid warmth of Don Williams, moving around the beat much as Charlie Rich did. I did not then know what West Virginia was, except that John Denver was yearning for just that place that same summer, and it was a long way from my home in Seattle. As much as a 12-year-old understands yearning.

Still Bill, Withers’ second LP for the Sussex label, produced signature hits, the curiously juxtaposed “Use Me” and “Lean on Me,” and the less hopeful “Who Is He (And What Is He to You)?” After cutting several more albums for Sussex in the mid-’70s, Withers moved to Columbia Records. Menagerie, his third release for that label, yielded “Lovely Day,” his last pop hit, reaching No. 30 in January 1978. He quit recording after 1985’s Watching You Watching Me; tired of fighting with record labels, he took his songwriting royalties and became a gentleman carpenter.

When “Grandma’s Hands” came out, I was a child and knew only what Casey Kasem told me. By “Lovely Day,” I’d heard about girls and punk rock; Bill Withers and Sterling North were artifacts of the youth I was in such a hurry to abandon.

No, it turns out, they weren’t. Both wrote beautifully, both are a joy to rediscover. I did not then know that Withers was a black man, surely did not place him on the continuum linking Josh White to Al Green, though I was raised with a little of both in the air. Even knowing, he still seems as much a country songwriter as a soul singer.

Today Withers still sounds wise, a little weathered and kind—especially kind—the kind of man I would be proud to know, and prouder still to be. By Menagerie, he was more overtly (packaged as) an R&B singer, but his songs convey none of the promiscuity of more successful ’70s soul and disco. He’s not trying to get over for a night (witness “I Want to Spend the Night,” in which the next word is “forever”); his are the agonies and promises and ecstasies of a man struggling to form and keep the attachments of a lifetime.

I hope my daughter likes him too.

—Grant Alden