Bill Withers, Who Sang ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Lovely Day,’ Dies at 81

Bill Withers, Who Sang ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Lovely Day,’

 Dies at 81

Bill Withers, a onetime Navy aircraft mechanic who after teaching himself to play the guitar wrote a number of the foremost memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s, including “Lean on Me,” “Use Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” died on Monday in l. a. . He was 81.

His death was announced during a statement from his family, which said he died of “heart complications.”

Mr. Withers, who had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that would embody loss or hope, was in his 30s when he released his first album, “Just as i'm ,” in 1971. It included “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a mournful lament (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/And she’s always gone too long/Anytime she goes away”) that cracked the Billboard Top 10. Other hits followed, perhaps none better known than “Lean on Me,” an anthem of friendship and support that hit No. 1 in 1972 and has been repurposed countless times by a good sort of artists.

ImageMr. Withers’s first album, “Just as I Am” (1971), included his composition “Ain’t No Sunshine,” which cracked the Billboard Top 10.

Mr. Withers’s first album, “Just as I Am” (1971), included his composition “Ain’t No Sunshine,” which cracked the Billboard Top 10.

Credit...J.P. Roth Collection

There were also “Use Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the 2 of Us” (1981), among other hits. But after the 1985 album “Watching You Watching Me,” frustrated with the music business, Mr. Withers stopped recording and performing.

“I wouldn’t know a pop chart from a Pop-Tart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on Independence Day , 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va. His father worked within the coal mines.

At 17, wanting to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.

“My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I visited aircraft-mechanic school.”

He spent nine years within the service, a number of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got employment at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a club to ascertain Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.

“I was making $3 an hour, trying to find friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and every one these women are lecture him.”

He bought an inexpensive guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avent, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to supply an album.

“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook filled with songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone within the studio, he asked to talk to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who goes to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting another vocalist to point out up.”

He was laid faraway from his factory job a couple of months before “Just as I Am” came out. After the album’s release, he recalled, he received two letters on an equivalent day. One was from his workplace asking him to return to figure . the opposite was from “The Tonight Show,” where he appeared in November 1971.

xf He released six other studio albums within the 1970s, for Sussex then Columbia, and performed across the country.

Mr. Withers ultimately won three Grammy Awards. But he chafed at Columbia, clashing with executives, and after “Watching You Watching Me” in 1985, he was through with the music business. Years later he liked to inform stories about not being recognized. One such incident occurred at a l. a. restaurant.

“Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles abreast of Pico,” he told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015, “and these ladies seemed like that they had just come from church or something, and that they were talking about this Bill Withers song. So i used to be getting to have some fun with them. I said, I’m Bill Withers, and this lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You too light-skinned to be Bill Withers.’”

He is survived by his wife, Marcia; a son Todd; and a daughter, Kori.

Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.

A complete obituary are going to be published shortly.