Timmy Thomas, Singer Whose Biggest Hit Was an Antiwar Anthem, Dies at 77

In the summer of 1972, the singer and keyboardist Timmy Thomas was watching the “CBS Evening News” and heard Walter Cronkite tick off the day’s death count of American and Vietcong soldiers.

“I said, ‘what?!’ You mean that many mothers’ children died today?” Mr. Thomas told Spin magazine in 2015. “In a war that we can’t come to the table and sit down and talk about this, without so many families losing their loved ones?’ I said, ‘Why can’t we live together?’”

His question became the title of his best-known song: a soulful, plaintive statement against the Vietnam War which he sang to his own accompaniment on the electric organ and drum machine. With a sentiment similar to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” from a year earlier, Mr. Thomas sang on “Why Can’t We Live Together”:

No more wars, no more wars, no more war
Umm, just a little peace in this world
No more wars, no more war
All we want is some peace in this world
Everybody wants to live together
Why can’t we live together?

The song, released on the Glades label, a subsidiary of the Miami-based TK Records, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 3 on its Hot 100 chart in early 1973 and sold upward of a million copies.

Mr. Thomas never again had a hit anywhere as big as “Why Can’t We Live Together,” but the song had a lasting impact. Forty-two years later, Drake sampled it on “Hotline Bling,” his hit about late-night cellphone calls from a former lover, which rose to No. 1 on the Billboard rap chart and No. 2 on the Hot 100.

“He had an opportunity to use Snoop Dogg beats, Dre beats, all these new beats,” Mr. Thomas told Miami New Times in 2018. “He went all the way back … and used my original.”

“Why Can’t We Live Together” has also been covered by artists including Sade, Joan Osborne, Santana, Steve Winwood and Iggy Pop, who recorded it with the jazz organist Lonnie Smith for Mr. Smith’s 2021 album, “Breathe.”

Mr. Thomas died on Friday at a hospital in Miami. He was 77.

His wife, Lillie (Brown) Thomas, said the cause was cancer.

Timothy Earle Thomas was born on Nov. 13, 1944, in Evansville, Ind. His father, Richard, was a minister, and his mother, Gwendolyn (Maddox) Thomas, was a homemaker. By the time he was 10, he told Blues & Soul magazine, he was playing organ at his father’s church. “I always had a good ear for music,” he said. “I was one of 12 kids and most of them were into music, but I guess I pushed a little harder.”

After graduating from high school in 1962, he spent a week studying at a Stan Kenton summer music clinic at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his teachers included the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the trumpeter Donald Byrd.

While attending Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., from which he would graduate in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in music, Mr. Thomas recorded a few songs in Memphis for the Goldwax label and was a session musician at Sun and Stax Records.

Even as he pursued a career in music, he worked as a financial aid director at Lane and a vice president of development at Jarvis Christian College, in Hawkins, Texas, and Florida Memorial University, in Miami Gardens.

He later shifted his focus to teaching. In 1993 he became the choir master at Miami Norland High School, and from 1996 to 2005 he taught music at Shadowlawn Elementary School in Miami. He earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale in 1997.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Thomas is survived by his daughters, Tamara Wagner-Marion and Li’Tina Thomas; his sons, Tremayne and Travis; 12 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; his sisters, Diane Winton, Mary Davis and the Rev. Velma Thomas; and his brothers, Ray, Kenneth, Roland, Jerome and the Rev. Jeffery Thomas.

More than a dozen of Mr. Thomas’s songs landed on the Hot R&B chart between 1973 and 1984, but the outsize success of “Why Can’t We Live Together” cast him as a one-hit wonder. And he understood that it was difficult to replicate the success of his megahit.

He recalled that he once asked Henry Stone, the co-founder of TK Records, what he thought the problem was.

“He said, ‘Timmy, your major problem was what you said was so profound that you could never back it up,’” Mr. Thomas said, recalling the conversation to Spin magazine. He added, “I thought about it, I said, ‘You know, that’s tough. … ’ I had some nice regional records after that, but nothing that worldwide.”