… Johnny Mathis. After settling in Los Angeles, in 1967, and landing a job installing toilets on airplanes, Withers met the trombonist and pianist Ray Jackson, who helped him make the demo that got him signed to the independent Sussex label.
Withers says that he is an untrained musician, and his songs bear him out, not because they lack sophistication but because they ignore tendencies that deserve to be ignored more often. “Ain’t No Sunshine” is a two-minute song with only three verses, a bridge that repeats two words twenty-six times—“I know”—and no chorus to speak of. Withers likes to form guitar chords that he can simply move up and down the neck without altering the position of his fingers. This simple approach leaves room for his baritone voice to map out subtle, articulate melodies. As he put it, “it’s 1970, 1971 or something, you know, I’m this black guy coming out sitting on a chair with an acoustic guitar.”
Withers’s gift lies in the immediacy of his scenarios and in how few words he needed to turn around a thought: his common explanation for how he reached conclusions as a writer is “I was feeling what I said.” His willingness to express his most awkward emotions was matched by an intolerance for unsubstantiated shows of emotion. As he told Ellis Haizlip, the host of the television show “Soul!,” in 1971, “I’m sick and tired of somebody saying ‘I love you’ with both arms up in the air like that. I can’t believe that.” Withers made his vulnerable moments as sharp as his angry moments, and his angry songs were as complex as his love songs. “Just As I Am” and its follow-up album, “Still Bill,” will still reign as some of the best songwriting and heartfelt singing of his generation or the next.
Wither’s genius, in front of and behind the mic, was honored in 2015 as one of the inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.