Bill Withers won a Grammy for “Lean on Me” — for a recording he had nothing to do with.
Bill Withers won a Grammy for Lean on Me in 1988. His own recording of it, which spent three weeks at No. 1 in the summer of 1972 and sold in the millions, had won nothing. The award came fifteen years later, for a version made by four people from Sacramento who put a go-go beat under it, and Withers collected it as the man who wrote the thing rather than the man who sang it.
He was born in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a coal camp, and raised in Beckley nearby. He stuttered badly enough as a boy that talking to people was something he avoided. At eighteen he joined the Navy and stayed nine years. Afterward he delivered milk, worked as a mechanic, ran a computer at IBM, and ended up in California on a Lockheed assembly line making fittings and bathrooms for 747s. He did not record a song until he was in his thirties, by which point most people who intend to make records have either made them or stopped intending.
The song came out of missing the place he had left. Withers has been direct about it — he could only have written it because he came from Slab Fork, somewhere he described as a place where people were a little more attentive to each other. He was in Los Angeles, a long way from that, and the distance is what produced the song. He worked the phrase out at a keyboard while running through scales, liked the way it sat against what he was playing, and then deliberately kept every line in it plain. There is not a clever word anywhere in Lean on Me. That is the craft.
Three weeks at the top and no award for it
The record was cut at the Record Plant in Los Angeles with several members of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, plus a string section. Sussex released it on April 21, 1972 with Better Off Dead on the flip, ahead of the album Still Bill. It reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 on July 8, pushing aside Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue, and held for three weeks before Gilbert O’Sullivan’s Alone Again (Naturally) took over. It topped the soul chart at the same time. Billboard ranked it the seventh-biggest song of the year.
What plays on this page is not that record. This is the BBC, May 11, 1974, from a concert broadcast filmed a couple of years after the single peaked, with Withers touring behind +’Justments and his relationship with Sussex already heading toward the courts that would keep him out of a studio for the next several years. He is looser here than on the single, the tempo drifts where the record holds firm, and the room sings the chorus back at him. The studio version is tighter. This one shows you what the song was actually for.
The second time it went to No. 1
In March 1987 Club Nouveau took the song back to the top of the Hot 100 for two weeks, rebuilt on a go-go rhythm and a drum machine, and it reached No. 1 on the dance chart as well. That made Lean on Me one of only nine songs to have topped the Hot 100 in versions by two different artists. At the Grammys that followed, Best R&B Song went to Bill Withers.
He had by then more or less stopped. The Sussex litigation, then an unhappy stretch at Columbia, had drained whatever appetite he had for the business end, and he walked away in the mid-eighties without much ceremony and never came back. He spent the rest of his life declining to make records and appearing perfectly content about it. He died on March 30, 2020.
The 1972 recording went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007. It has been sung at funerals, in classrooms, on hospital balconies, and at every kind of gathering where people needed something everybody already knew the words to. Withers wrote it about a coal camp he had moved away from, using the simplest words he could find, and it turned out that was the version of the sentiment the whole world had been waiting for.
