Eighteen Seconds on a "Lovely Day"
On “Lovely Day”, recorded in 1977, Bill Withers held a high E note for somewhere around eighteen seconds.
Is this, or should it be, the crowning achievement of his varied and legendary career? No. Is it notable, still, in the annals of recorded music? Yes, actually, it most likely is. On the American charts, arguably nothing like it has ever been done again - even barring one or two possible contenders, it’s still pretty awe-inspiring. Does this fact, as seemingly trivial as it is, somehow vault “Lovely Day” to the top of Withers’ output? That’s a matter of opinion. Many would say “Ain’t No Sunshine” is a stronger and more direct song, others might argue for “Just The Two Of Us” for its sunshining vibes of unionhood and togetherness.
Pontificating on the side of either single holds a lot of water, but coming out on either side emphatically would be odd at the very least. Because as good as they are, they come up a bit short. Withers was also famous for arriving effectively out of nowhere to record his first album Just as I Am after having retired from the military and worked in assembly plants for years beforehand. He made his way by singing in nightclubs and recording demos with his own money. He also released “Lean on Me”, and “Grandma’s Hands”, and the breakup album that none other then ?uestlove has sited as an example of reality TV for the Jeffersons set, +’Justments.
The point is this: Bill Withers achieved more than most, though he was still outshined by some of his contemporaries in a crowded field (Al Green, Marvin Gaye, etc). He accomplished so much in fact that one could be easily forgiven for not realizing he got his start relatively late in life. A late bloomer in some ways, Withers had grown up with a stutter. The youngest of six, he put his nose to the grindstone at a young age and kept it there for a while. While in the military, he developed an affinity for words and music and decided that this would be his path after he was back in the states. But even after he became serious about becoming a musician/performer, his uncertainty in the viability of the music industry’s favor led him to keep his blue-collar jobs. He underwent trials and tribulations, but he kept an eye on the prize and ended up being one of the brightest stars of 70’s/80’s Soul and R&B - several of his songs have persevered into the future, in as much as we know the future at this point.
The point is also this: I didn’t know any of this until I took time and looked into his legacy. A long note held on a song is perhaps little more than a bit of star-chasing superfluousness, but his repeated struggles with labels to release the music he wanted to release are intrinsic artistic matters that resonate even today. He even referred to Columbia’s A&R people as “blaxperts” for deigning to tell him which of his songs would be popular, which would resonate with the audience. The record-buying audience was thought of as being predominantly white in those days, so the implications of the term are both layered and obvious. The folklore is that some of those contentious songs were released on later albums and did very well, despite the opinions of Columbia’s best and brightest.
In 1985, Withers stopped recording new music. We can interpret this in multiple ways, either he 1) became (rightly) frustrated with the industry and decided he’d had enough; or he 2) had decided that he had done what he had set out to do and that it was as good a time as any to get out. After eight studio albums, a live album recorded at Carnegie Hall, and many compilation albums to his name, the latter seems like a more than reasonable take.
But still. I have to wonder what things may have been like if the world was, or had been, different. Would Withers be relegated to some visible but dim periphery of Soul music in a world where he hadn’t been stifled creatively by his label, forced to wait until they folded before he could do what he wanted? Would Withers have perhaps recorded a couple more LPs in the time after he decided to get some rest and back off of creating new work? I shouldn’t have only figured this stuff out by researching him after he died, and I wish the landscape of American music had done better by all of us music fans who grew up with only the ability to see him in retrospect.
Right now, I find myself listening to Freetown Sound by Blood Orange and the osmosis with which Withers managed to make his soulful vibes and pleasing sounds pervade the world has me realizing that having a few more Bill Withers albums in the world would have been a good thing. His influence is impossible to deny, even if one feels they can mitigate it somehow by diluting it against the deafening success of other Black music coming out of MoTown and Stax (and others) around the same time. Bill Withers represents a success story not so much for what he achieved, but in how he achieved it. He did it by being true to himself and never kowtowing to labels or to those who claimed they knew some mythical “better way”. He did it by having an amazing voice that he brought with him through years of strife and difficulty. He did it by holding a note for eighteen goddamn seconds on a song.
Objectively speaking, that’s pretty awesome. Even if it were all he’d ever done. But it wasn’t. Not nearly.
