It is a stutter that couldn’t be steadier. Here, the repeated “I know” leads to a moment of self-chastisement that is really just a turnaround it brings us back where we started: “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” I guess what he knows is what he concludes on the other side of the loop: “I oughtta leave the young thing alone.” But this is not the wry wisdom of “Use Me,” where the speaker knows he’s being used, and owns it. The line is untethered from the others, so that the object of his knowing remains enigmatic. In the bridge, which is more of a cul-de-sac, Withers sings “I know” 26 times. And yet, there is a coil of repetition at its center. “Ain’t No Sunshine” might be the most efficiently poignant lament in American popular music. The two people share a home, it seems, from which the woman periodically departs to go stay somewhere else: Now the strings start to swirl, and the situation intensifies and gets more specific. Withers and his guitar just come right in: How long do you think the studio version of “Ain’t No Sunshine” is? Four minutes? Five? It’s two minutes and five seconds. That tenderness, as well as the will to make room for fear, uncertainty and pain, shapes Withers’s songs, even those that seem most cut-and-dry. It is kind of him to reveal the sort of vulnerability that comes from never knowing when an impairment might strike again, and of deciding the only way to control it is to forgive people for their callousness in advance. It is very kind of him to attend this event, to tell this story and share this advice.
Withers was not always nice, but he was evidently capable of disarming kindness. And I think that makes you a much bigger person.
Having had people not understand me … helped me wait a little beat to where I could extend something that hasn’t been given to me. We have to be more civil than most people that we will encounter. Well, one of the ways to deal with the fear is to approach people with a prepared forgiveness. There was fear-fear of the perception of the listener, this fear that makes us apprehensive right at the point of trying to speak that stops us. “And it brought back memories,” Withers says, brushing away tears,īecause there was a woman with him, and she started to laugh. In New York, he tells a small group of parents and kids about a party he attended the night before: he went up to a man to introduce himself, and got stuck after saying his name. Withers himself was afflicted by a stutter, especially as a kid, and was often mocked for it. But that version appears in a brief moment of the 2009 documentary Still Bill, when Withers goes to New York to be honored by a support group for kids who stutter. His down-home eloquence could mask the version of Withers we seldom saw. He could be a little scary, as in “Better Off Dead,” in which he stages a suicide by gunfire, and brutally funny: on the 1973 album Live at Carnegie Hall, he praises his grandmother’s church by telling the audience, “It wasn’t one of them sad churches where they sing them songs that make you wish you could just hurry up and die and get it over with.” There is the true-blue friend of “Lean on Me” the happy cuckold of “Use Me” the country boy of “Grandma’s Hands,” the song on which Withers most sounds like he hails from a town called Slab Fork, West Virginia. There are many versions of Bill Withers, the steady, complicated singer who died last week from a heart attack, at age 81.