The hit song Bill Withers refused to sing unless he could change the lyrics: “I’m a little snobbish”
As it happens, one of soul legend Bill Withers’ biggest hits wasn’t even under his name.
We’re talking pop ubiquity here, not critical consensus. Counting some of the most loved soul hits of all time, numbers like ‘Lean on Me’, Ain’t No Sunshine’ and ‘Lovely Day’ stand tall in the R&B canon, all his work imbued with that uniquely blue-collar earthiness that grounded even his biggest hits to an organic and universal footing.
Yet, Withers’ most recognisable hit landed on his plate just as he was near ready to pack in the music business for good. After a string of successes across the 1970s, a stifling relationship with Columbia Records resulted in numerous songs of his being blocked by the label’s bigwigs, and a perennial pressure to conform to top-down stylistic demands saw Withers leave his singing career for good after 1985’s Watching You, Watching Me.
During the latter end of his career, Withers signed up for numerous collaborative projects due to fatigue with Columbia’s dragging heels. French singer Michel Berger enjoyed Withers’ baritone croon on the disco-tinged ‘Apple Pie’, and The Crusaders and Ralph MacDonald doubled up with Withers behind the mic for ‘Soul Shadows’ and ‘In the Name of Love’ respectively.
It was his partnering with one of the biggest names in smooth jazz that secured Withers his last bona fide hit, however. Written by MacDonald and bassist William Salter, soul-jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr was eager for some caramel vocals to front a little piece he was fleshing out called ‘Just the Two of Us’ for 1980’s Winelight. Withers agreed, but not without some stipulations.
“I’m a little snobbish about words, so they sent me this song and said, ‘We want to do this with Grover, would you consider singing it?’” Withers revealed to Songfacts. “I said, ‘Yeah, if you’ll let me go in and try to dress these words up a little bit.’ Everybody that knows me is kind of used to me that way.”
He added, “I probably threw in the stuff like ‘the crystal raindrops’. The ‘Just the Two of Us’ thing was already written. It was trying to put a tuxedo on it. I didn’t like what was said leading up to ‘Just the Two of Us’.”
It’s hard to know if the team was quite aware of its hit potential initially. On the original Winelight version, ‘Just the Two of Us’ runs over seven minutes long, yet someone had the good sense to edit a single version and release it to the world in February 1981, climbing to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and scoring Withers his last pop hurrah.
Withers, Salter and MacDonald would win a Grammy Award for ‘Best R&B Song’, but Withers knew he was nearing the end of his late-life brush with fame. Eking out several more songs around his final LP, Withers walked away from the singing gig and the music business and reportedly never once looked back, expressing no regrets right up until his death in 2020.
