So he brought pop and country songs back into the mix and found a wide audience with “As Long as We Got Each Other” (1985), the theme song from the sitcom Growing Pains.īilly Joe Thomas was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, to Geneva (née Talbot) and Vernon Thomas, and grew up in Texas, first in Houston, then in Rosenburg, where he attended Lamar high school and was given the nickname BJ while playing baseball. He complained that Christians “can’t seem to hear somebody sing – it’s always got to be some kind of Christian cliché or Bible song”. It topped the gospel chart, won a Grammy Award and resulted in the singer landing a $1m contract with MCA Records.Īlthough he found a new audience, he had a love-hate affair with gospel music. Thomas’s 1976 album, also titled Home Where I Belong, was credited with launching “Jesus Rock”. On arriving home in early 1976, his wife told him that she had embraced Christianity and introduced him to an evangelical rodeo worker who helped him to turn his life around. “She responded: ‘God must want you to accomplish more here in this world.’” “I remember asking the nurse why I was still alive,” Thomas wrote. In his autobiography, Home Where I Belong, he recounted waking up in hospital after one such occasion three years earlier. He was spending thousands of dollars on cocaine every day and overdosed several times. More concerning for Thomas at the time was a drug habit that became a threat to both his life and his relationship with Gloria (née Richardson), whom he married in 1968. Like the film, starring Newman and Robert Redford, the song won an Oscar, but Thomas’s single peaked at only 38 in Britain – after Sacha Distel’s cover version came out a month earlier and reached No 10. Lloyd Price: R&B pioneer and early rock’n’roll star.Roger Hawkins: Drummer whose beats appeared on many soul and R&B hits.He is survived by his wife Gloria, three daughters, and four grandchildren. Thomas was also known to TV fans as the singer of the theme song to "Growing Pains" (1985-1992). His last major award was a 2014 NARAS Grammy Hall of Fame induction for "Raindrops." Though Grammy-nominated in his pop/country career, it was when he segued into gospel music that Thomas won his five statuettes. "Raindrops," written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David as the theme for the Paul Newman/Robert Redford buddy western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), proved especially potent, winning the Oscar for Best Original Song and becoming one of the most-played songs of the 20th century on American radio. Entitled "On My Way," it marked the beginning of a career with 14 Top 40 hits that included such evergreen numbers as "Hooked on a Feeling" (1968) and the #1 smashes "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" (1969) and "(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song" (1975). Thomas's solo album on the Scepter Records label was released in 1968.
The band also tasted success with the follow-up single, "Mama." Thomas & the Triumphs, released a debut album in 1966 that featured its hit cover of the Hank Williams song "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," which went on to become a gold record. Thomas, a Grammy winner, sold over 70 million albums across his 50 years in entertainment.īorn Billy Joe Thomas on August 7, 1942, in rural Hugo, Oklahoma, he was first a member of the Triumphs in high school.