Something from Nothing — The Billy Preston Story
When Billy Preston composed “Nothin from Nothin Leaves Nothin,” he was onto something.
The late Billy Preston never took a music lesson but somehow acquired a first-rate education in striking the right note. Preston’s early years were like a formless void, the definition of chaos. His parents divorced when he was barely a year old. His mother, Robbie Lee Williams, left Houston for a squalid apartment in south central Los Angeles where she hoped to land a job in the entertainment industry. They were flat broke by the time the Greyhound bus pulled into the terminal and accepted a position as a secretary in a funeral home to pay the rent. They had no friends and knew no one. She readily accepted when the Victory Baptist Church invited her to perform at the Sunday service. There was one condition. Billy had to sit on her lap. She couldn’t afford a babysitter.
One particular Sunday, Robbie returned home from church and something strange happened. She was in the kitchen when she heard Billy climb up on their home piano bench and played the song she had just performed — from memory. Billy was age three. He had never played before. He learned by watching while sitting on her lap. The head of music noticed Preston imitating the baton motions of the choir conductor. Billy was asked to be the new director of the 150-voice choir. By age ten, Preston was backing gospel giants like Mahalia Jackson. Next thing, he performed with Nat King Cole and sang a Blueberry Hill duet with Fats Domino. He was eleven by then. Preston started touring with two of R&B’s biggest stars by age fifteen, Little Richard and Ray Charles.
In 1962, Preston dropped out of high school at age 16. It wasn’t to hang around a shopping mall. Little Richard invited him on a concert tour of Europe. In Hamburg, Germany, Preston met four members of a warm-up act from Liverpool, England. One of them asked if he could help out with some sessions. His name was George Harrison. Later, the Beatles asked Preston to play keyboards during the rooftop recording of Get Back for their Let It Be album, which ended up being the Beatles’ final performance. It was the only time a co-performer was credited, “The Beatles with Billy Preston.” He remained close with George Harrison and appeared on the subsequent solo albums All Things Must Pass and My Sweet Lord. Then in 1971, Steve Stills asked him if he could use the lyrics “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
Making sense of Preston’s extraordinary life and rise to musical legend begins with a look at the biographical statements in the sleeve notes of his final album: “Music is my life. I may not be the best, but I’m surely not the worst. I learned to play and sing since the age of three; you don’t know how glad I am that God laid his hands on me.” He ascribes his success to a spiritual gift. While the importance of faith is not difficult to appreciate, as ‘successologists’ we aren’t allowed to jump off the train at that particular station but must continue on to see where it goes.
Digging deeper for answers, it appears that two sparks lit the fuse. While it’s true that even under close self-examination we are not always aware of the things that inspire us to do great things, Preston’s songwriting offers a clue. In two of his hit songs, “That’s the Way God Planned It,” he expressed his debt to the African American church community, and in “You Are So Beautiful To Me,” written in honor of his mother, Robbie Lee Williams, he underscored the fundamental catalysts in his rise from grit to grandeur. A mother’s love gave him assurance. The African-American gospel tradition gave him a sense of purpose. These two factors illuminated a three-year-old’s pitch-black chasm and gave him the ability to create ‘something’ out of ‘nothing.’
In his greatest hit of all time, Preston reawakened a protracted philosophical debate when he wrote ‘Nothin’ from Nothin’ leaves Nothin’, which peaked as the #1 hit single in 1974. If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it goes back more than two thousand years. Undoubtedly you’ve heard of Moses, the fellow with the tablets that tell us what to do (or not to do more accurately). He was not only was he among the most revered wise men in Judaism and Christianity, Islam, the Druze, and the Baháʼí faiths, but also the author of the Book of Genesis. The word comes from Hebrew and translates to “in the beginning.” Moses pointed a prophetic finger at the problem that has plagued humankind and Billy Preston, how to recover after a lousy start:
“… The Earth was a formless void shrouded in darkness… “
The creation myth opens in gloom. It suggests the world began with nothing — and symbolically recalls the state of children like Preston born into divorced, poor, and dysfunctional families in so many ways. Their lives appear without hope like the Earth did at one time.
“Let there be light.”
Fortunately, the author of Genesis was a gifted scriptwriter. He gave the plot a twist ending, “Let there be light,” making it clear that how you begin does not matter nearly as much as what you do after you arrive. Some may oversimplify that to mean ‘it’s all up to us.” True but not entirely. Too frequently, after a stumbling start, we experience helplessness or despair, paralyzing us exactly when we need to take a step forward. The key to conquering the fear of succeeding is finding the people who inspire us to leap ahead as Preston did.
In conclusion, two pieces of good news. Especially for those feeling slightly out of place by accident of birth, race, gender, talent levels, and IQ, wealth, or lack thereof. Preston shows us that the thing that will have the greatest impact on our lives is the continuous search for the kind of person willing to teach us how to make the right choices. Second, they are everywhere. We find them in the oddest places, a loving parent, a helpful coach or neighbor, a colleague or a boss, or in Preston’s case, an orchestra conductor. The number willing to lend a hand is matched only by the number of paths to be taken.
The Genesis Paradox describes this concept of “creating something out of nothing,” or in biblical Latin, Creatio Ex Nihilo. Our study of extraordinary success led us to conclude that the two-thousand-year-old secret may depend on how and when we interact with the right people who point us toward “something” and away from “nothing.” In the broadest sense of the word, they are mentors and our lives are richer for them. As he reminded us, ‘You gotta have something if you wanna be with me.”
