Bill Withers – Ain’t No Sunshine (1972)

Bill Withers left a hole in Ain’t No Sunshine for a verse he meant to write later, and the most famous musicians in the room told him to leave it.

Twenty-six times. In the middle of Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers repeats a single two-word phrase that many times in a row, and he never intended to. The space was a placeholder for a verse he planned to write later. The musicians around him at the 1971 session, among them Booker T. Jones, Stephen Stills, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Al Jackson Jr., told him to leave it exactly as it was. Withers later described himself as a factory worker puttering around a room full of reputations, and he did what they said.

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The factory part was literal. Withers was building lavatories for Boeing 747s when he wrote the song, and Jones, the Stax organist whose band had cut Green Onions, produced his debut album around him with three members of Booker T. & the MG’s and Stills on guitar. The idea came from a movie. Withers had watched Days of Wine and Roses, the 1962 drama about a couple destroying each other, and came away thinking about how people miss the things that were never good for them.

Sussex Records released Just As I Am in May 1971 and did not treat the song as the lead. It went out on the B-side of Harlem. Disc jockeys turned the record over, and the side Withers himself later called the throwaway slot became his first hit. Billboard ranked it as high as No.3 on the Hot 100 and No.6 on the R&B chart, then placed it at No.23 on its year-end list for 1971. It became the first of his three US gold records.

A B-side on German television

The Recording Academy gave Ain’t No Sunshine the Grammy for Best R&B Song in 1972, a songwriting award for a man with one album out. That same year Withers took his touring band to Bremen, West Germany, to tape a set for Beat-Club, the Radio Bremen show that had spent seven years bringing British and American acts onto German television and would leave the air in December 1972.

The band on screen is not the band on the record. In place of Stills and the MG’s, Withers had Benorce Blackmon on guitar, Ray Jackson on keyboards, Melvin Dunlap on bass, and James Gadson on drums. The set they taped ran about half an hour and included Use Me and Lean on Me alongside this song, and at one point between numbers Withers told the room he had a cold.

Withers stopped recording in 1985, fourteen years after his debut, and died in Los Angeles on March 30, 2020. The Library of Congress added Ain’t No Sunshine to the National Recording Registry in 2024. The part of the song listeners wait for is still the part its writer meant to replace. It became a standard because a room of established musicians trusted an unfinished idea more than the man who had it, and Withers never went back to write the missing verse.