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. It also hit the No 1 spot in Australia.Īfter going solo, Thomas was a major attraction at nightspots such as New York’s Copacabana, San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel and Los Angeles’ Century Plaza, and a regular in the American charts with singles such as “Hooked on a Feeling” (1968), “I Just Can’t Help Believing” (1970, a British hit for Elvis Presley a year later), “Rock and Roll Lullaby” (1972), which featured Duane Eddy and his “twangy” guitar, and “Don’t Worry Baby” (1977).Billy Joe "B.J." Thomas (born August 7, 1942) is an American popular singer. BJ Thomas & The Triumphs made the American Top 10 with “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (1966), the most successful version of a much-recorded heartrending country song written by Hank Williams.
Thomas was spotted by a record company’s talent scout and signed to a contract, with his band backing him for the first few singles. They had local hits such as “Lazy Man” in 1965. He joined his church choir at the age of 14 and, shortly afterwards, became featured singer in his high school choral group before forming a group called The Triumphs with his older brother, Jerry, to perform at parties and dances. 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.
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