B.J. Thomas, the Grammy-winning singer who enjoyed success on the pop, country and gospel charts with such hits as "I Just Can't Help Believing," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" and "Hooked on a Feeling," has died. He was 78.
Thomas, who announced in March that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, died from complications of the disease Saturday at his home in Arlington, Texas, a statement released by his representatives said.
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"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. "At the time, it seemed like a dumb idea. How wrong I was."
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. He was touring and recording constantly and taking dozens of pills a day. 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."
"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.
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A five-time Grammy winner who sold more than 70 million records, Mr. Thomas blended country, soul, gospel and soft rock, singing warm and occasionally wistful songs about love, family and looking for sunshine on a rainy day. By the late 1970s, when he turned toward Christianity and got sober after years of drug addiction, his subject matter was more religious, even as his sound remained the same.
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Mr. Thomas never fully committed to a genre, flitting between styles while his reassuring voice remained a constant. He cracked the Top 10 a second time with the idiosyncratic 1968 love song “Hooked on a Feeling,” which opened with an electric sitar solo and became an even bigger hit six years later when it was recorded by the pop group Blue Swede, who incorporated a primal “ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga” vocal intro.
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“We could talk about music for 24 hours straight and never really capture what that mystery is about,” Mr. Thomas told HuffPost Canada the next year. “Music cuts through all the literature and all the sermons and all the discipline and everything. It cuts right through to your spirit.”
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