He enjoyed Ernest Tubbs, 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.
By his teens, he was singing in church and had joined a local rock band, the Triumphs, whom he would stay with into his 20s. because so many Little League teammates also were named Billy Joe. Jenkins, later famous for the million-selling “Left Behind” religious novels written with Tim LaHaye.īesides music, Thomas loved baseball as a kid and started calling himself B.J. 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. 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. Recent recordings included “Living Room Music,” featuring cameos from Lyle Lovett, Vince Gill and Richard Marx. He also acted in a handful of movies, including “Jory” and “Jake’s Corner” and toured often. 1 songs as “Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love” and “New Looks from an Old Lover.” In the late 1970s and early ’80s, 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. Thomas had few pop hits after the mid-1970s, but he continued to score on the country charts with such No. “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. By 1976, while ″(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” was hitting No.
He was touring and recording constantly and taking dozens of pills a day.
Thomas would later 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 to keep his energy up. “At the time, it seemed like a dumb idea. “When the film was released, I was highly critical - how did the song fit with the film? There was no rain,” Redford told USA Today in 2019. 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 for 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 his warm, soulful tenor fit the song’s easygoing mood, immortalized 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). 1 pop hit and an Oscar winner for best original song as part of the soundtrack to one of the biggest movies of 1969, the irreverent Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Thomas wasn’t the first choice to perform the whimsical ballad composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David Ray Stevens turned the songwriters down. His signature recording was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” a No.
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