Ain't No Sunshine

Stephen Stills played guitar on "Ain't No Sunshine", the 1971 single that made Bill Withers a recording star. The track appeared on Withers' debut album Just As I Am and was produced by Booker T. Jones, who also arranged the strings. Donald "Duck" Dunn handled bass guitar and Al Jackson Jr. played drums, while the engineer Terry Manning cut overdubs in Memphis after the basic session in Los Angeles.

Withers wrote the song after watching the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses. He thought about the characters played by Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, two alcoholics who were alternately weak and strong, and reflected that sometimes people miss things that were not good for them. At the time he was 31 and working at a factory that made lavatories for Boeing 747s. For the bridge he had planned to write more lyrics, but the other musicians advised him to leave the repeated phrase "I know" as it stood. He later said that as a factory worker puttering around, he did as they suggested.

The single was first released as the B-side to "Harlem", but disc jockeys preferred the flip and it became Withers' first hit, reaching number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and number six on the U.S. R&B Chart. When the record went gold, the record company gave Withers a golden toilet seat. It won the Grammy for Best R&B Song in 1972.