How did Bill Withers learn about kindness and compassion as a child in a coal mining community?

Bill Withers was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, a small coal-mining town in a poor, rural area of West Virginia. His father, a coal miner, died when Withers was 13 years old, leaving his mother and grandmother to raise him and his five older siblings in nearby Beckley, West Virginia.