NO MORE RAINDROPS –
May 29, 2021 – “Ever since the beginning I’ve tried to do positive music, even though it has meant a lot of struggles against record companies and producers,” he said in a 2006 interview with Pentecostal Evangel, a Christian magazine. “I want my music to have a positive effect on people. When I perform live I hope the audience will leave with their heads lifted up.”
Mr. Thomas launched his solo career with an uncharacteristically downcast single, a cover of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that he initially recorded with the Triumphs, a Houston-area band. Released when he was 23, the song reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966 and led to an album of the same name.
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.
