The Traits and the Triumphs held several Battle of the Bands events in the early 1960s. During his senior year he made friends with Roy Head of Roy Head and The Traits. Before his solo career, he sang in a church choir as a teenager, then joined the musical group The Triumphs. Thomas was raised in and around Houston, Texas, graduating from Lamar Consolidated High School in Rosenberg.
His best-known recording is the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head". He is particularly known for his hit songs of the 1960s and 1970s, which appeared on the pop, country, and Christian music charts. His book Home Where I Belong came out in 1978 and was co-authored by Jerry B Jenkins, later famous for the Left Behind religious novels written with Tim LaHaye.Billy Joe "B.J." Thomas (born August 7, 1942) is an American popular singer. He and his wife worked on a 1982 memoir, In Tune: Finding How Good Life Can Be. Thomas married Richardson in 1968 and had three daughters: Paige, Nora and Erin.
He planned to record in 2020 in Muscle Shoals, Alabama but the sessions were delayed by the pandemic. Recent recordings included Living Room Music, featuring Lyle Lovett, Vince Gill and Richard Marx. He also acted in movies including Jory and Jake’s Corner. In the late 1970s and early 80s he was a top gospel and inspirational singer, winning two Dove awards and five Grammys.įans of the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains heard him as the singer of the theme song. Thomas had few pop hits after the mid-1970s but he continued to score on the country charts with such songs as Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love and New Looks from an Old Lover. He cited a “spiritual awakening”, shared with his wife, Gloria Richardson, with helping him get clean. “I was at the bottom with my addictions and my problems,” he said in 2020. By 1976, while (Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song was hitting No 1, he felt like he was “number 1,000”. He was touring and recording constantly and taking dozens of pills a day.
Thomas would say the phenomenon of Raindrops exacerbated an addiction to pills and alcohol which dated back to his teens, when a record producer in Houston suggested he take amphetamines. Raindrops has been heard everywhere from The Simpsons to Forrest Gump and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013. Thomas wasn’t the first choice to perform the whimsical ballad composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David but his warm, soulful tenor fit the song’s easygoing mood. Thomas’s signature recording was Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, a No 1 pop hit and an Oscar-winner for best original song as part of one of the biggest movies of 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I will miss him as I know so many others will as well. The same year, Home Where I Belong became one of the first gospel albums to sell more than a million copies.ĭionne Warwick, who duetted with Thomas, tweeted: “My sincere condolences to the family of one of my favorite duet partners, BJ Thomas. He reached No1 with pop, adult contemporary and country listeners in 1976 with (Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song. He went on to sell millions of records and have dozens of hits. A Hugo, Oklahoma-native who grew up in Houston, Billy Joe Thomas broke through in 1966 with a gospel-styled cover of Hank Williams’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.
0 kommentar(er)
