Beyond the colossal impact and little revelations of his most well-known songs, there is gorgeous portraiture across his catalog. There’s a tactileness to “Grandma’s Hands,” soothing an unwed mother, picking the young Bill up each time he fell, warm to the touch and embracing. On “Make a Smile for Me,” you can feel the infectious, awe-inspiring, mood-altering power of the simplest gesture. “Hello Like Before” has in it the reanimating glow of lost love made new again by a chance encounter, the nostalgia-induced bliss of old feelings welling up to the surface.

He released seven albums in eight years in the 1970s—among them, his commercial apex, 1972’s Still Bill, his break-up album, 1974’s +’Justments, and his groovy comeback, 1977’s Menagerie. He released an epilogue of sorts in 1985, and then he abandoned the music industry for good. He had been in a cold war with CBS A&R man Mickey Eichner, who was flat-out avoiding him and dodging his calls for about three years, and he’d had enough. “I just felt confined that this one guy that really had nothing to do with any black music at all could just shut me down like that. It bothered me. So, I’ve never signed with another record company since,” he told NPR in 2007.

Withers clearly resented the idea that the soul music he created was governed by a force that didn’t truly understand it. His departure from the industry had something to do with the many white gatekeepers policing black art. “You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddamn blues. Look at me,” he said in the As I Am doc. “Shit, I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddamn blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.” He referred to such figures as “blaxperts,” white execs who insisted they knew more about black music than he did. He dissented. He would not produce his secular spirituals under such circumstances—which was to say, he wouldn’t make music at all.

“If you truly look at anyone in black entertainment who has declared a next level thinking of genius there has been some complications along the way,” Questlove postulates in the documentary, Devil’s Pie: D’Angelo. ​“Either in early exits, jail, religion, and some just stall, or use time, chronic lateness or just not showing up at all as a way to control things. These are just some of the symptoms. Anyone who is black that started in meager or so-so conditions that are not of the privileged of the world—when they finally transform to a higher level, it is guilt they feel. And that is one thing that every black genius wrestles with.” Artists like D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill have used time to forgo the pressures of their genius. But for Withers, not showing up at all was a form of control, and he never seemed to feel any guilt in doing so. After all, his expectations were always modest. He broke free from the constraints of his genius to live a normal life. In this way, his career is a triumph over the debilitating fog of celebrity. He left an indelible mark on music, and on American culture, and then rode off into the sunset.

Despite his decision to cut his career short, his truncated discography, and the many “what ifs?” about what could have been, Bill Withers still reached rarefied air—not just for a stuttering boy from Slab Fork, but for any great musician of the modern era. In 2005, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Ten years after that, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, somewhat to his surprise—and by the virtuoso Stevie Wonder, no less—but anyone who has really listened to his songs knows they are a part of the bedrock of the soul music canon. Withers was a singular purveyor of the relationship between physical and intangible sensations; the vacuums that distance and space create; how the image of having a shoulder to cry on begets the comfort of support. In a tribute, Brian Wilson called him “a songwriter’s songwriter,” and he was, but he was the people’s songwriter, too. Anyone could identify with his songs. The music he made will always be universal in its ability to speak for and to the soul.