Bill Withers

Bill Withers is one of those artists who makes you feel like he lived ten more lifetimes than most people, and yet he only released records for about eighteen years before quietly walking away from the industry in the mid-1980s — on his own terms, which honestly makes him cooler. He came up from Slab Fork, West Virginia, worked as an assembly line worker at an aircraft parts factory well into his thirties, and then just showed up with "Ain't No Sunshine" and blew everyone away. Songs like "Lean on Me" and "Lovely Day" feel less like pop hits and more like things your grandmother would have stitched into a sampler — they're that timeless. Getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 felt overdue, but then Bill never seemed to care much about that kind of validation, which is exactly why his music still hits so hard.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Bill Withers

Name (Japanese)

ビル・ウィザース

Reading

びる・うぃざーす

Born

July 4, 1938 – March 30, 2020

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Tiger

Origin

Slab Fork, West Virginia, United States

Occupation

singer / singer-songwriter / composer / guitarist

Awards & achievements

• 2015 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

• Official sitehttps://www.billwithers.com
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/realbillwithers/
• Xhttps://x.com/RealBillWithers
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill%20Withers
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%93%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B6%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B9
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q346565

Tags

• West Virginia
• singer
• singer-songwriter
• composer

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.