Bill Withers (born July 4, 1938 in Slab Fork, West Virginia) is an American
singer-songwriter who performed and recorded from the late 1960s until the mid 1980s. Bill's father died when he was thirteen. He joined the US Navy at seventeen, and stayed there for nine years, before he moved to Los Angeles in 1967. While in Los Angeles, he worked full-time in a Lockheed assembly plant in the day, making toilets for Boeing 747 airliners, then recorded demo tapes and performed in juke joints during the night.