But that is precisely why Bill Withers was an extraordinarily well-educated and divinely seeded portrait of the singer as a liberty-seeking soul. Because he humbly strummed the universe—acoustic guitar in hand, piles of songs in his head and on paper, broad shoulders bravely squared—as if he were Frederick Douglass fleeing that plantation, Muhammad Ali footloosing that draft, or Langston Hughes funneling breath itself from that highway of any ‘hood America.

Yes, like abolitionist Frederick Douglass and boxer Muhammad Ali and poet Langston Hughes, Bill Withers was an unapologetically self-made man, and a dreamer, determined to be free.

Which is to say there is not a righteous technique to discuss Bill Withers’ very first album, the sonic masterpiece titled Just As I Am, without understanding what begat this brother of the dust.

As a matter of fact, if I could mold, with my own bare eyes, from the sum of bodily flesh, a manhood example and an indisputable fatherly superhero I wish I’d had as a dad-less youth, it would be the person of William Harrison Withers, Jr., born as such on America’s declared birthday, July 4th, during the Great Depression time of 1938, in the tiny and largely segregated coal-mining hamlet of Slab Fork, West Virginia. Beginning in the early 1900s, African Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Scotch-Irish immigrants flooded this dot embedded in the Appalachian Mountains to toil, albeit at the risk of sickness or premature death, as the contaminated rocks methodically blackened their faces and their insides.

Slab Fork is the place that bookmarked Bill Withers, the youngest of six offspring of Mattie and William. At three his parents were divorced, leaving him to be raised mainly by his mother and grandmother. But Bill’s daddy, also a barber and local union treasurer, religiously saw Bill on weekends, forming a bond. At thirteen Bill’s father was himself dead, gone from ailments likely acquired in the coal mines. Somewhere in the middle of these boyhood traumas Bill developed a severe stutter, one which persisted to a mere couple of years before Just As I Am was released in 1971. This stutter rendered the youngster Bill Withers a dissed outsider amongst a dissed outsider group.

Because, like countless American communities in the era of Jim Crow, railroad tracks stonewalled and separated Whites and Blacks, and preserved a pyramid scheme of Whites on top of everything and Blacks at the bottom of everything. His disability meant Bill was, in some respects, regarded as below the bottom dwellers. He was the kid who did not fit.

But what did fit Bill, and what could not be legally mandated, was music he digested here there everywhere, as a boy, as a teenager, as he also battled asthma, in that smokey bend of West Virginia: the mournful ebbs and flows of the Black church’s acapella pleas for salvation, and the thunderous claps of the Lord showing up and showing out in those sweaty, swaying silhouettes; the beer-kissed mist of the blues spraying Bill’s imagination with unclothed recollections of what it is to be damaged goods making love to life on the other side of midnight; the banjo- and guitar-driven muscle and mustiness of country-western yearnings riding atop regional twangs and destinies deferred; and the rousing restlessness of all of the above tongue-twisted into a game-changing shot heard ‘round the world: rock and roll.

Yet, Bill Withers had no clue he would become a captivating singer and songwriter in those wonder years, but he did know he needed to split, to see something else, to be something else. So he spent nine years in the Navy, joining at 17 in 1956, as he never finished high school.

That approximately decade of military service would behold America and the planet bursting at their jagged seams. There was the steady and dogged march of the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes peaceful, nonviolent, victorious; other times bloody, ugly, an ugly bloodiness, the losses insurmountable. There were the awful assassinations of Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. There was the seething cauldron of the Vietnam War. There was the seemingly sudden independence of numerous African, Asian, and other countries of color amidst the Cold War of the U.S. and the then Soviet Union. And there was the arrival of youth culture in styles never before seen, as evidenced by Motown, the British Invasion, and soul and folk as the sounds and furies of young America.

Somewhere during his Navy stint Bill Withers began scripting songs, began thinking of himself as a singer, as a writer, despite co-existing with that stutter. Out of the Navy in 1965, Bill re-invented himself, two years afterward in 1967, there at the sandy bluffs of sun-splashed Los Angeles, shadowing a vision the way a carpenter might shadow a hammer and nail. He was a laborer, yes, with his sturdy paws, putting together “housing” for airplane bathrooms; but he also bet on himself, making and shopping demos which were repeatedly rejected. Record labels wanted what was hot, what was happening: hip, shiny outfits, mushy love songs, copy-and-paste dance steps, and tons of various gimmicks.

Bill Withers wanted to be Bill Withers, just as he was. He did not gig around Los Angeles a lot, he did not woodshed a lot. He wrote, and he wrote and he wrote, a roving reporter and a people’s poet from the jump, as Slab Fork, West Virginia had never deserted the hungry heart of its native son.

Fate, luck, and ancestral vibrations carried him to the eardrums of Clarence Avant, the pioneer Black music executive who had only recently unveiled his Sussex Records. Not completely sure what he had in Bill Withers, Avant requested that celebrated melody-maker Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the M.G.s peep Bill’s music. Yes, that Booker T.: prodigal child multi-instrumentalist; one of the chief architects of Stax Records’ Memphis grit and groove; silky smooth conductor of the million-selling hit “Green Onions.”

Newly estranged from Stax, Booker T. was now based in Los Angeles, on a mission to be a full-time producer. For sure, Booker T.’s circle marqueed Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Joe Cocker, and the vast L.A. music landscape of the 1970s. That scene bustled with soon-to-be legends like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Sly Stone, James Taylor, Neil Young, The Eagles, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, and Linda Ronstadt.

Booker T. invited Bill Withers to his Malibu ranch. Bill appeared in farmer overalls he might have worn in West Virginia, and sang and plucked tunes for Booker T. Bill had a huge batch of pieces, far more than an album’s worth. Thus the partnership for Just As I Am was instantly activated. Clear he was watching a unicorn on a rocket ship, Booker T. quickly secured studio space with engineers like Bill Halverson, and locked in musicians such as Stephen Stills, Al Jackson, Jr., Bobbye Hall, and Donald “Duck” Dunn. At their first session, Booker T. would tell me, Bill Withers was so nervous and embarrassed by the fanfare over him that he went to the producer and asked who would be singing his songs. When Booker T. responded, “You are,” Withers dutifully spun around, like the Navy sailor he’d been, and got to recording.

The first session commenced in 1970, but the bulk of the project was recorded in 1971, with its debut on May 1st. The 27-year-old Bill Withers, who had left the Navy when rebellion perpetually heated the nation’s streets, was currently nearing his 33rd birthday as America was frantically attempting to answer the elusive question, where do we go from here?

Here, as in 1971, a number, another stunner. It was three short years since the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, two years since a man walked the moon, and barely 12 months after the fatal shooting of students at Jackson State and Kent State. A very paranoid Richard Nixon was president; the Black Panther Party was under assault, chapter after chapter, from every angle by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; and 1971 was the same year that Melvin Van Peebles released his landmark film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, about a Black stud on the run as he resisted “the man.” 1971 was likewise the year iconic shows like “All in the Family” and “Soul Train” and “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family” broadcast on American television. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights era had morphed into Black Is Beautiful and the Black Liberation Movement. And music artists as diverse as Carly Simon, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, David Bowie, Gil Scott-Heron, and a deceased Janis Joplin would drop LPs in 1971. And that year, painfully, meant there was still Vietnam.

This was the fragile atmosphere upon which Bill Withers constructed, with Booker T. Jones as producer, Just As I Am. But rather than look mostly out, as Gaye was doing with What’s Going On, Bill was gazing and grazing within, at his exposed and vulnerable self, at his lifetime of witnessing the magic, messiness, meanness, melancholy, and musicality of our shared human drama. And so Bill knew, in the manner which Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison knew, that the best things any writer could do is be uncompromisingly real, brazenly free, and sketch, fearlessly, the stories of everyday people.

Alas, the first story of Just As I Am, has no words and no music. It is the album cover, of Bill Withers at his actual place of employment, the Weber Aircraft factory in Burbank, California. He is wearing a pale yellow tee shirt, washed and worn blue jeans, his right hand clutching a black lunch pail, as he leans, with a cheerful smile, against a bleached out brick wall. 8 of the record’s 12 song titles tag that brick wall like graffiti on a 1970s New York City subway. Photographed by Norbert Jobst, the image is a stunning nod both to Bill’s proud working-class roots and the mercurial fickleness of the music industry. Yes, today he is a recording artist, but tomorrow he might not be, so he will never detox himself of the uniform and spirit of the everyman. This singular photo would foreshadow fellow blue-collar truth-tellers as different as rocker Bruce Springsteen and rapper Kendrick Lamar.

The tone set and the microphone checked, Just As I Am kickstarts with a triangle of cuts which are not only Bill Withers’ initial three classic compositions but furthermore, I would argue, the creative bar for this offering and his entire Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career. “Harlem” is a steaming pot of collard greens that cooks slow, then scorches. A metaphor for himself and Black America, “Harlem” merges the colorful patterns of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings with the unflinching milk-crate musings of James Baldwin. In other words, Withers did not have to thrust, publicly, a clenched fist to the sky to make clear his social views. It is everywhere in his unpretentious poetry. And his poems are a revolution of love for the forgotten foot soldiers of this here earth, some of whom might not readily love themselves.

“Ain’t No Sunshine” is absolutely one of the greatest and most mesmerizing songs ever created. It begins, as if an operatic overture,with Bill’s throaty baritone lament and a rhythmic tapping that renders an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of a debilitating sadness. Think the solitary poetry of Sylvia Plath, think the strange-fruit jazz of Billie Holiday. That Bill Withers said “Ain’t No Sunshine” was organically inspired by the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, about an alcoholic couple, played by Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, speaks to the singer’s remarkable gift of transforming even a fictional tale into universal truths about love and loss. The magnificent string arrangement frames the raw, open sore as if a wounded Frida Kahlo self-portrait, and Bill’s desperate and unintended spitting of “I know” 26 times in a row solidifies the track’s haunting beauty. Terrified he had no lyrics for that fragment as rock star Graham Nash sat in front of him as a spectator, it was Booker T. Jones who suggested later to Bill, wisely, forcefully, to keep the ad-lib as is. It has become a signature cry, vital oxygen for the American songbook, and a piece performed by artists like Michael Jackson, Kenny Rogers, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Sting, and Prince.

Indeed, his music appealed to a cross section of the masses, including his musical peers, because Bill Withers was a soulful folk singer in a country Black man’s blues body who became a pop and R&B superstar with the emergence of Just As I Am. Or, more accurately, Bill gathered what he grew up with in Slab Fork and, akin to an ultra-adventurous hip-hop deejay, he sampled what he possessed in his gut, because all music belonged to him—there was no one category that could contain a Bill Withers. Which is why “Grandma’s Hands” is such an enduring praise-song not solely for his grandmother, but for the down-home traditions and rites-of-passage lessons dispatched across generations. So much so that Bill’s humming and the guitar riffs on “Grandma’s Hands” were interpolated by Teddy Riley and Blackstreet on the jam “No Diggity” in the mid-1990s. It featured Dr. Dre and Queen Pen cameos, became a number 1 pop hit, and won a Grammy. Because, like his grandma Lula, Bill Withers’ hands have looped and stirred several worlds.

Ultimately, I genuinely feel the world Bill Withers craved everyone to inhabit was love. I cannot guess which selections on Just As I Am were definitely autobiographical, because Bill had a gigantic capacity to embody unprotected emotions of characters and stories as if he were the audio version of Marlon Brando or Denzel Washington. What I do know is love shape-shifts Bill’s African griot voice in potent and unorthodox ways. Heed with your heart, and you will decipher the angelic sensitivity of a Shakespeare sonnet (“Sweet Wanomi”); or the red stacks of tears in the room with Smokey Robinson (“Hope She’ll Be Happier” and “In My Heart”); or the bruising ache and sorrowful longing of a man who didn’t know he was a father (“I’m Her Daddy”); or the bedroom sensuality of joy-filled physical eruptions (“Moanin’ and Groanin’”); or the layered epic of diseased addiction, battered manhood, and mental illness (“Better Off Dead”).

As for the two cover songs, we encounter boisterous quests for self-love, with one a side ode to Bill’s mother downloaded as a Pentecostal tent revival (The Beatles’ “Let It Be”); and the other a honkey tonk therapy meet-up fast forwarded and reframed, subliminally, as if he knew a very uncomfortable fame was coming (Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”).

Global celebrity certainly arrived, plus a Grammy and other accolades, which is probably why his cookout invite—“Do It Good”—feels, in this 21st century revisit of Just As I Am, like a pre-Nike improvised vow. Because Bill Withers may not have understood, totally, what he was doing when he made this first album that changed his life, for the rest of his life. But I do believe Bill knew, as he stretched his vocal cords like an elastic band and emptied his just-walking-around education into these dozen tunes, that if the little outsider boy from Slab Fork, West Virginia was ever going to be free, and his authentic and whole self, then that freedom was going to come from singing these simple, and simply beautiful, songs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kevin Powell is a Grammy-nominated poet, humanitarian, author of 17 books, filmmaker, public speaker, music historian, pop culture curator, and journalist. He has written for many outlets, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Ebony, Essence, Complex, Vibe, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Esquire, The Washington Post, Politico, and British GQ. Kevin is presently writing a biography of Tupac Shakur. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.