Which soul singer recorded the 1972 number-one hit "Lean on Me"?

Which soul singer recorded the 1972 number-one hit “Lean on Me”? Bill Withers recorded it.

Withers released “Lean on Me” in April 1972 as the first single from his second studio album, Still Bill. The song topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and the soul chart; its Hot 100 reign lasted three weeks in July. Withers wrote and produced the recording and played piano on it.

The song grew from Withers’s memories of Slab Fork, West Virginia, the coal-mining town where he was raised. After moving to Los Angeles, he missed the close community spirit of his hometown and shaped that feeling into a plainspoken message of mutual support. The recording features musicians associated with the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, along with a string section.

A common mix-up is confusing Withers’s original with Club Nouveau’s 1987 cover, which also reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Withers’s version was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007, and the song became one of the rare Hot 100 chart-toppers to reach No. 1 in recordings by two different artists.