NEW YORK - At 84 years old, William Salter is finding himself in the limelight again as a viral sensation on Tik Tok, where his granddaughter has put a new audience on to his connection to a classic song he wrote decades ago.
"The fact that she threw me out there and people have started grabbing on to it, it has blown me away" said Salter.
The Harlem native is the songwriter and musician behind the Bill Withers classic "Just the Two of Us." When the song found new life as a trend on Tik Tok, Jada Salter, 24, saw it as an opportunity to let the world know where it came from.
"I did a little video and I just kept showing 'oh this is my grandfather, he wrote the song,' and I was showing family pictures of us, and old pictures of him and I did not expect it to go viral overnight," said Jada. "I was shocked."
But it did, with hundreds of thousands of comments, likes and shares. The college senior is proud to brag on her grandfather, which she's been doing ever since she was eight years old and was surprised to find out his connection to the Will Smith cover she loved in the nineties.
"He's like 'yeah I originally wrote this song' and I was like 'what?!'" she remembered. "So, I was just like, wow for somebody like Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, to be covering this song, he must be big."
Now, she's hoping to make a documentary on Salters' career and his work penning other hits like the Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack classic "Where is the Love."
"He's written this song and it's timeless, people are still listening to it today so I feel like it's really important for people to know who wrote that who is behind it."
For his part, William Salter is still writing songs everyday and happy that people still appreciate his work all these years later.