Bill Withers, who died this past week, and John Prine, now hospitalized with COVID-19, rose from working-class roots to become touchstone singer-songwriters.
Bill Withers, known for acoustic soul hits “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” died Monday of heart complications, his family said Friday.Both songs — the former from Prine’s self-titled 1971 debut, the latter from Withers’ 1973 “Live at Carnegie Hall” — are vivid reminders of an era when Americans were forced to weigh the value of human life against the perceived need to defend our individual freedoms.
The first thing to consider about John Prine and Bill Withers is how unlikely their stardom can seem by modern standards. With family roots in the coal-mining country of Kentucky and West Virginia, both men served in the military and worked blue-collar jobs — Prine was a mailman, Withers an airplane mechanic — before busying themselves fully with music.
Nowadays we like our beginners to appear out of nowhere or to emerge from the pop-star polishing school of reality TV. But from the get-go these two wore their real-world experience on their real-world faces. Take a long look, if you haven’t in a while, at the cover of each man’s debut — Prine on a hay bale, Withers with his lunch pail — then try to imagine a singer from the last two or three decades in a similar setup. The best he or she could expect would be kudos for a parody well done.
This pre-fame living fueled the empathy in Prine’s and Withers’ songs. They knew what it was to struggle; they knew what it was to be overlooked. And that established a moral framework that held steady even as each man’s circumstances grew increasingly comfortable.Pop songwriting since the Beatles has implied that a singer is telling his or her own story.
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