B.J. Thomas

During his 55-year career, B.J. Thomas recorded a variety of country, pop, Christian, and rock hits, including the enduring classics "Hooked on a Feeling," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," and "(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song." Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on August 7, 1942, he moved at an early age to Houston, Texas. There, he spent his first musical years in a local church choir before branching out from sacred to secular music by joining the group The Triumphs. The band's debut album was released under the artist name B.J. Thomas and the Triumphs in 1966. The following year, Thomas released his first solo album and earned a Number 8 pop with his cover of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." "Hooked on a Feeling" became another pop hit in 1968, but its success paled in comparison to B.J. Thomas' cover of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," which was released in 1969 and sold more than a million copies after being featured in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After topping the adult contemporary charts with "I Just Can't Help Believing" and "Rock and Roll Lullaby" during the early 1970s, B.J. Thomas began earning a country music audience, kicking off a string of twang-filled hits with the 1975 release of "(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song." He also released the first platinum-selling Christian album, 1976's Home Where I Belong, and became one of the highest-selling gospel artists of the 1970s. "Whatever Happened to Old Fashioned Love" and "New Looks from an Old Lover" both climbed to Number 1 on the Billboard country charts in 1983, and the rest of the decade found B.J. Thomas embracing the full range of his sound. "As Long as We Got Each Other," his theme song for Growing Pains, became a Top 10 hit in 1988, and he continued releasing new albums well into the 2010s. The Living Room Sessions, which featured remastered songs as well as duets with Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and others, arrived in 2013 and marked his final time cracking the Top 40 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart. Less than a decade later, B.J. Thomas passed away at 78 years old, succumbing to lung cancer on May 29, 2021.