Bill Withers, Who Sang Lean on Me and Aint No Sunshine, Dies at 81

Bill Withers, a former Navy aircraft mechanic who, after learning to play the guitar, wrote some of the most memorable and frequently covered songs of the 1970s, including Lean on Me Aint No Sunshine and Use Me, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81 years old.

His death was announced in a press release from his family. Her son Todd said he had heart problems.

Mr. Withers, who had an evocative and grainy R&B voice that could embody loss or hope, was in his thirties when he released his first album, Just as I Am, in 1971. It included Aint No Sunshine, a lugubrious lamentation (Aint no soleil when she left / And she is always gone too long / Each time she leaves) which made crack the Top 10 of the Billboard. Other successes followed, perhaps no better known than Lean on Me, a hymn of friendship and support that hit number 1 in 1972. and has been reused countless times by a wide variety of artists. .

Picture

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

I do not know a pop picture of a Pop-Tart, he said to Rolling Stone in 2015, when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Bill was a mystical man, Leo Sacks, who oversaw the reissue of Mr. Witherss’ catalog for Sony Legacy Recordings in 2012 (a package that won a Grammy for Best Historic Recording), said by email. Like a Greek oracle. But he let the songs speak for themselves. He sang in such a conversational and universal way, as if he were sitting next to you. Her songs made every word count.

William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on July 4, 1938 in Slab Fork, W.Va., to William and Mattie (Galloway) Withers. Her mother was good and her father worked in the coal mines.

At 17, eager to avoid a career in coal mining, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.

My first goal was not to want to be a cook or a steward, he told Rolling Stone. So I went to the aircraft mechanics school.

He spent nine years in the service, part of which was in Guam. He left the Navy in 1965 while stationed in California and eventually got a job at an aircraft parts factory. A visit to a nightclub to see Lou Rawls play was a life-changing catalyst.

I was earning $ 3 an hour looking for friendly women, but no one found me interesting, he said. Then Rawls came in and all these women were talking to him.

He bought an inexpensive guitar from a pawnshop, started learning to play it and write songs, and finally recorded a demo. Clarence Avent, a music director who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set it up with keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MGs, to produce an album.

Bill came straight from the factory and appeared in his old sneakers and old car stuff with a notebook full of songs, Jones told Rolling Stone. When he saw everyone in the studio, he asked to speak to me in private and said, Booker, who’s going to sing these songs? I said, you are, Bill. He expected another singer to show up.

Mr. Withers was fired from his factory job a few months before the release of Just as I Am. After the albums were released, he recalls, he received two letters the same day. One came from his workplace asking him to return to work. The other was from The Tonight Show, where it appeared in November 1971.

The fact that Aint No Sunshine became a hit on this album was somewhat unexpected.

Aint No Sunshine was the B side of Harlem, he told the Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2015, referring to another track on the album, until the D.J.s turned it over.

The song, he said, had just happened to him one day.

I was watching the movie Days of Wine and Roses, I looked out the window and it crossed my mind, he told The Plain Dealer. A girl probably left me, but the preservation of the ego taught me to avoid embarrassing truths.

Aint No Sunshine won the Grammy Award for best rhythmic and blues song. Lean on Me and Just the Two of Us (a collaboration with saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., written with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald) won the same award.

Mr. Withers released six other studio albums in the 1970s, for Sussex and then Columbia, and has performed across the country and beyond. A memorable appearance was at the music festival in Zaire in 1974 which preceded the Rumble in the Jungle, the famous heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

But he also played in clubs like the Bottom Line in Manhattan.

Mr. Withers’ lyrics are among the most thoughtful in pop music, Robert Palmer wrote in the New York Times, reviewing a 1976 show, but his work has its physical side too. Many of his tunes simmer irresistibly, as if they are cooking on low heat.

Mr. Withers rubbed Columbia, confronting executives, and after Watching You Watching Me in 1985, he was done with the music industry. Years later, he loved telling stories of non-recognition. One such incident occurred in a Los Angeles restaurant.

Roscoes Chicken and Waffles on Pico, he told NPRs Morning Edition in 2015, and these ladies seemed to have just come from church or something, and they were talking about this song by Bill Withers. So I was going to have fun with them. I said, Im Bill Withers, and that lady said, You’re not Bill Withers. You too have fair skin to be Bill Withers.

Mr. Withers’ brief marriage to actress Denise Nicholas in the 1970s ended in divorce. In 1976, he married Marcia Johnson. She and their son survive him, as well as their daughter, Kori, and a sister, Florence Mather.

In 2015, before a tribute concert in his honor at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Withers was interviewed in a restaurant by a journalist for The Times. The interview turned to how, without musical training, he succeeded relatively late in shaping a career in music.