Thomas didn't write "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head." He did, however, define it. It's always been an important part of my emotions.B.J. But I had that little piece of lightning from that song.
"What a roadblock and heartbreak and times of failure these addictions have caused me. When you open yourself up to drugs and alcohol at such a young age it becomes something you have to deal with the rest of your life," he told The Huffington Post in 2014. "I was raised in a fairly dysfunctional situation and I went through years of intense alcoholism and drug addiction so the song was always a touchstone for me. He enjoyed Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams and other country performers his parents liked, but on his own, he was inspired by the soul and rhythm and blues singers he heard on the radio or saw on stage, notably Jackie Wilson, whose hit ballad To Be Loved Thomas later covered and adopted as a kind of guide to his life. Queen frontman Freddie Mercury's life to be turned into a graphic novel By his teens, he was singing in church and had joined a local rock band, the Triumphs, whom he would stay with into his twenties. He and his wife worked on the 1982 memoir In Tune: Finding How Good Life Can Be. His book Home Where I Belong came out in 1978 and was co-authored by Jerry B Jenkins, later famous for the million-selling Left Behind religious novels written with Tim LaHaye.īesides music, Thomas loved baseball as a child and started calling himself BJ because so many Little League teammates also were named Billy Joe. Thomas married Richardson in 1968, and had three daughters: Paige, Nora and Erin. He had planned to record in 2020 in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but the sessions were delayed because of the pandemic.Īmerican singer BJ Thomas performs on stage at Loop Alive at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, on February 14, 1982. Recent recordings included Living Room Music, featuring cameos from Lyle Lovett, Vince Gill and Richard Marx. He also acted in a handful of films, including Jory and Jake's Corner and toured often. Thomas had few pop hits after the mid-1970s, but he continued to score on the country charts with such No 1 songs as Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love and New Looks from an Old Lover. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was also a top gospel and inspirational singer, winning two Dove Awards and five Grammys, including a Grammy in 1979 for best gospel performance for The Lord's Prayer.įans of the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains heard him as the singer of the show's theme song. "I was at the bottom with my addictions and my problems," he said in 2020 on The Debby Campbell Goodtime Show. He cited a "spiritual awakening", shared with his wife, Gloria Richardson, with helping him to get clean. Redford, meanwhile, doubted the song even belonged in Butch Cassidy. Thomas was recovering from laryngitis while recording the soundtrack version and his vocals are raspier than in the track released on its own. But, at first, not everyone was satisfied.
Raindrops has since been heard everywhere from The Simpsons to Forrest Gump and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013. But Thomas's warm, soulful tenor fit the song's easygoing mood, immortalised on film during the scene when Butch (Paul Newman) shows off his new bicycle to Etta Place (Katharine Ross), the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford).
Thomas wasn't the first choice to perform the whimsical ballad composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David Ray Stevens turned the songwriters down. 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 the soundtrack to one of the biggest films of 1969, the irreverent Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. ❤️ /JUxh5jJ5Fh- Dionne Warwick May 30, 2021 I will miss him as I know so many others will as well. My sincere condolences to the family of one of my favorite duet partners, BJ Thomas.
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