Sad news - B.J. Thomas have just passed away from the lung cancer and this really makes me sad because he was one of my all-time favourite singers and the voice I kept returning again and again. He would forever be associated with this particular song and a special moment in the late 1960s/early 1970s when country and pop music somehow merged - maybe later he fell a little bit under the radar but in fact he continued to record and perform long after initial success and has quite a nice and rewarding discography. I have no idea how and where I came to discover him but it was a love at first hearing and to this day I genuinely love his style, his recognisable voice and the honesty about it.
B.J. Thomas already had some big hits under his belt ("The Eyes of a New York Woman", "Hooked on a Feeling") when he was offered to perform two songs in the upcoming movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" that turned massive hit - it was quite sharp choice from Burt Bacharach who was at the top of the world back than and could have any singer he wanted and it certainly opened all the doors to the young guy from Oklahoma who was recording for relatively small recording company. By this point "Scepter Records" was really treating him with respect and long gone were the early days when he was kind of orphaned country boy with pop potential - from the start, it was obvious that he was extremely versatile and it was just a matter of the right producer and the material to catapult him into charts.
"Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" was a culmination of the path young singer took with two previous albums ("On My Way" and "Young And In Love") where he was branching more and more into the pop waters, with just a slight tinge of country. To my ears he is a quintessential "Rhythm Country And Blues" and if you remember that beautiful 1994. album where soul and country singers duet together, well B.J. Thomas was that kind of artist. On his very first studio album he was equally good in covers by Hank Williams, Tom Jones AND Wilson Pickett - basically, he could do everything. But it was a unforgettable, lilting little song that placed him into pop Olympus and the whole planet will know him ever since. No less than four producers worked on this album (Chips Moman one of them) and not only it had a huge crossover appeal, it had songs by Jimmy Webb, Joe South, a latest Jack Jones cover and a brand new song by fellow Scepter songwriter Mark James called "Suspicious Minds". Even though Elvis had much bigger hit with it, he always kept an eye on Thomas and later covered his ""I Just Can't Help Believing". Everything that B.J. Thomas recorded during that first decade of his studio work is highly recommended and there is a lot to discover.
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