Bill Withers

Singer-songwriter Bill Withers took soul music in a radically introspective direction in the early '70s, reviving the world-weary storytelling of the blues and embracing the autobiographical intimacy of folk rock.

Already shaped by a lifetime of racial injustice and emotional upheaval by the time he first entered the studio in his early thirties, the West Virginia-born Withers applied hard-won, humanistic wisdom to sketches of striving city dwellers (\