William Harrison Withers Jr. grew up in the small mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, where families and neighbors relied on each other through hard times, a memory that later became the basis for "Lean on Me." He came to music relatively late, after time in the Navy and other work in his twenties, and built a recording career that, despite lasting only fifteen years, moved comfortably across acoustic singer-songwriter, R&B, disco, and mainstream jazz idioms. "Lean on Me" topped both the pop and R&B charts in the summer of 1972 and stayed there for three weeks.

In the mid-1980s Withers partnered with jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. on "Just the Two of Us," a song that reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Withers his second Grammy Award, in 1981. Grover Washington Jr.'s own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile. The pairing of Withers's warm, conversational vocal with Washington's smooth-jazz saxophone became one of the most enduring crossover recordings of its era.

Withers stopped recording in 1985, fourteen years after he began, but continued performing occasionally alongside Washington and sang at both Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's presidential inaugurations. He died April 3, 2020, at age 81, from heart complications.

Withers's plainspoken, deeply personal songwriting and warm vocal delivery gave "Just the Two of Us" its emotional directness, a genuine collaboration between a soul singer-songwriter and a jazz saxophonist rather than a jazz artist simply backing a pop vocalist.