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    B.J. Thomas, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ Singer, Dies at 78

    Mr. Thomas, who won five Grammys, helped introduce a smooth, down-home sensibility to the AM radio airwaves in the 1960s and ’70s.B.J. Thomas, a country and pop hitmaker and five-time Grammy winner who contributed to the Southernization of popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Arlington, Texas. He was 78.The cause was complications of lung cancer, said a spokesman, Jeremy Westby of 2911 Media.Mr. Thomas’s biggest hit was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which was originally featured in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and spent four weeks at the top of the pop chart in early 1970. Written and produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, “Raindrops” — a cheery ditty about surmounting life’s obstacles — won the Academy Award for best original song later that year. Mr. Thomas’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.Mr. Thomas placed 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977. “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” a monument to heartache sung in a bruised, melodic baritone, reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1975. “Hooked on a Feeling,” an exultant expression of newfound love from 1968, also reached the pop Top 10. (Augmented by an atavistic chant of “Ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga,” the song became a No. 1 pop hit as recorded by the Swedish rock band Blue Swede in 1974.)Mr. Thomas’s records helped introduce a smooth, down-home sensibility to the AM airwaves, an approach shaped by the fusion of country, gospel, rock and R&B in the music of Elvis Presley. Also recognizable in hits by singers with similarly expressive voices like Brook Benton and Conway Twitty, this uniquely Southern mix of styles became common currency on radio playlists across the nation.Mr. Thomas’s biggest hit single,“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.J.P. Roth Collection“I try to give the soft pop sound a natural relaxed feeling,” Mr. Thomas said in “Home Where I Belong,” a memoir written with Jerry B. Jenkins. “I guess that’s why my records always cross over and are good sellers on the pop and rock charts, as well as country.”His debt to Presley’s romantic crooning notwithstanding, Mr. Thomas cited the music of Black R&B singers like Little Richard and Jackie Wilson as his greatest vocal inspiration.“We all loved Elvis and Hank Williams, but I think Wilson had the biggest influence on me,” he said in his memoir. “I couldn’t believe what he could do with his voice. I’ve always tried to do more with a note than just hit it, because I remembered how he could sing so high and so right, really putting something into it.”Mr. Wilson’s stamp is certainly evident on “Mighty Clouds of Joy,” a rapturous, gospel-steeped anthem that reached the pop Top 40 for Mr. Thomas in 1971. His command of musical dynamics is especially impressive on the chorus, where, lifting his voice heavenward, he goes from a hushed whisper to a flurry of ecstatic wailing before bringing his vocals back down to a murmur for the next verse.Mr. Thomas came by his sense of redemption the hard way: He struggled for the better part of 10 years with a dependence on drugs and alcohol that almost destroyed his marriage and his life. After getting clean in the mid-’70s, he enjoyed parallel careers as a country and gospel singer, releasing three No. 1 country singles over the ensuing decade and winning five Grammy Awards in various gospel categories.Mr. Thomas had 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977.Reed Saxon/Associated PressBilly Joe Thomas was born on Aug. 7, 1942, in Hugo, Okla., the second of three children of Vernon and Geneva Thomas, and raised in Rosenberg, Texas, some 40 miles southwest of Houston. The family was poor, a condition exacerbated by his father’s violent temper and drinking. As an adolescent, Mr. Thomas began singing in the Baptist church his family attended.He and his older brother, Jerry, joined the Triumphs, a local pop combo, while in high school, with Mr. Thomas singing lead. In 1966, after three years of playing at area dances and American Legion halls, the band had its first hit with a rendition of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that reached the pop Top 10.Credited to B.J. Thomas and the Triumphs and issued on the small Pacemaker label, the record was eventually picked up for distribution by the New York-based Scepter Records, home to major pop artists of the day like Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles. With sales of more than a million copies, it secured Mr. Thomas a place on the bill of a traveling rock ’n’ roll revue hosted by Dick Clark, the “American Bandstand” host and producer.Despite the persistence and severity of his alcohol and drug use, Mr. Thomas’s recordings remained a constant on the pop chart for the next decade. “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” a Top 40 hit in 1972, featured Duane Eddy on guitar and backing vocals from Darlene Love and the Crystals. Three years earlier, Mr. Thomas had enjoyed an extended run at the Copacabana in New York, brought about by the runaway success of “Hooked on a Feeling.”Mr. Thomas started on the path to recovery after converting to Christianity in the mid-’70s, a period in which he also reconciled with his wife, Gloria, after repeated separations. In 1977, following a year or so in recovery, he sang at the memorial service for Presley, whose death that year was due largely to his excessive use of prescription medications.Mr. Thomas continued to make albums and tour into the 2000s. Over the years, he also sang and testified at the crusades of the evangelist Billy Graham and at other large religious gatherings.He is survived by Gloria Richardson Thomas, his wife of 53 years; three daughters, Paige Thomas, Nora Cloud and Erin Moore; and four grandchildren.At its smoothest and most over-the-top, Mr. Thomas’s music could border on schmaltz. But at its most transcendent, as on the stirring likes of “Mighty Clouds of Joy,” he inhabited the junction of spirituality and sentiment with imagination and aplomb, making records that invariably had listeners singing along.“The greatest compliment a person could pay my music is to listen and sing along with it and think that he can sing just as good as me,” he said in his memoir, alluding to the accessibility of his performances. “He probably can’t, of course, or he’d be in the business, but I want it to sound that way anyway.” More

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    Alix Dobkin, Who Sang Songs of Liberation, Dies at 80

    She broke new ground in 1973 with her album “Lavender Jane Loves Women,” recorded and distributed by women for women, which sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia.Long before K.D. Lang transformed herself from a country artist into an androgyne pop idol and sex symbol, smoldering in a man’s suit on the cover of Vanity Fair being mock-shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford; long before Melissa Etheridge sold millions of copies of her 1993 album, “Yes I Am,” and in so doing came out as a gay rock star; and long before the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit the Billboard charts, the folk singer Alix Dobkin chopped her hair off, formed a band and recorded “Lavender Jane Loves Women.”Released in 1973, it was the first album recorded and distributed by women for women — arguably the first lesbian record. Ms. Dobkin started her own label, Women’s Wax Works, to do it.Once a folk star playing Greenwich Village clubs with Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ms. Dobkin turned to writing songs like “View From Gay Head” (“Lesbian, Lesbian/Let’s be in No Man’s Land”). Her lyrics sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia and also poked fun at its vernacular and customs, as she did in “Lesbian Code,” which contained lines like “Is she Lithuanian?,” “Is she Lebanese?” and “She’s a member of the church, of the club, of the committee/She sings in the choir.”Her music was the soundtrack for many young women coming out in the 1970s and ’80s, a rite of passage spoofed by Alison Bechdel, the graphic memoirist, in her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (A panel titled “Age 21” showed a young woman with cropped hair and pinwheel eyes, smoking a bong and reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology,” another feminist touchstone, as the lyrics from Ms. Dobkin’s “The Woman in Your Life Is You” waft around her, a Lavender Jane album cover propped up in a corner.)“I can’t tell you how cool it was as a young dyke to see those album covers,” said Lisa Vogel, founder of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, otherwise known as Michfest, where Ms. Dobkin would perform for decades. “To see someone not trying to pass one bit.”Ms. Dobkin died on May 19 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., after suffering a brain aneurysm and a stroke. She was 80. Her former partner Liza Cowan announced the death.She was a star of the women’s festivals that were an expression of the alternative economy lesbian feminists were building in the ’70s — a byproduct of second-wave feminism — with their own books, publishing companies, record labels and magazines. Michfest was the biggest, an entire city built from scratch each season in Oceana County, complete with health care clinics, crafts, workshops and food for thousands. It was a complete matriarchal society. No men were allowed.When the festivals began in the mid-’70s, there were no safe spaces for lesbians, said Bonnie J. Morris, a historian and archivist of feminist music and the author of “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “You weren’t welcome to have a double bed in a hotel; there were no Disney Gay Days. Festivals were a way to get together, share information and recharge.”It was backstage at a women’s festival in 1983 that Ms. Etheridge first met Ms. Dobkin. “She was in the tradition of the classic folk troubadour, changing the world through song and cleverness,” Ms. Etheridge said in an interview.“She made an impact,” she added, “and she did it with humor. Until I heard Alix, I had no idea I would be an out lesbian performer; I just wanted to be a rock star.”“When I told her I was thinking of recording an album, she said, ‘Oh, Melissa, there’s no radio station that’s going to play a lesbian.’ After ‘Yes I Am’ came out — and I came out — she said to me, ‘Damn it, you proved me wrong. I’m so grateful.’”Alix Cecil Dobkin was born on Aug. 16, 1940, in New York City. She was named for an uncle, Cecil Alexander Kunstlich, a womanizing, drug-addicted ne’er-do-well who cleaned up his act and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents, Martha (Kunstlich) and William Dobkin, were, like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Communist Party members and social activists. Alix grew up listening to the folk music of Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, as well as the Red Army Chorus and Broadway show tunes, and singing at home with her parents.Ms. Dobkin at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1980.Liza CowanAlix was 16 when the F.B.I. began investigating her. She had joined the Communist Party that year, but her parents had become disillusioned and left; there were too many F.B.I. informants, her father told her later.The F.B.I. followed Ms. Dobkin until she turned 30, noting in her file that she had become a housewife and mother. The file, which Ms. Dobkin retrieved in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, proved useful decades later, when she was writing her memoir, “My Red Blood” (2009). It recorded her many addresses and helpful dates, like that of her wedding in 1965, though it had the venue wrong.Ms. Dobkin studied art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1962. A fellow student and Communist Party member was also a booker at a local nightclub, and he began to manage her, often along with a young comic named Bill Cosby. He found the pair regular work at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where she met her future husband, Sam Hood, whose parents owned the place, as well as Mr. Dylan and other folk luminaries. When Ms. Dobkin married Mr. Hood, her career as a performer took a back seat to his as a producer. They divorced amicably in 1971, when their daughter, Adrian, was a year old.Like many women in that transitional time, Ms. Dobkin was frustrated by her role as a housewife and had joined a consciousness-raising group. When she heard Germaine Greer, the feminist author of “The Female Eunuch,” interviewed on the countercultural radio station WBAI, it was a revelation. She wrote to Ms. Cowan, a producer at the station who had conducted the interview. Ms. Cowan invited her on the program to perform, and the two women fell in love.After they got together, Ms. Dobkin decided she wanted to make music for and by women only. Ms. Cowan would go on to found lesbian magazines like Dyke, A Quarterly. In the mid-’70s, the couple bought a 70-acre farm in rural Schoharie County, in central New York State — not an easy locale to plunk down a gay family.“I remember being called a ‘hobo’ by the kids in school,” Adrian Hood said, “though they were trying to say ‘homo’. I craved a normal mom with long hair.”Ms. Dobkin in performance in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2017. “She made an impact,” her fellow singer Melissa Etheridge said, “and she did it with humor.”Retts ScauzilloMs. Dobkin’s tour schedule slowed down a bit in the late ’90s, and when Ms. Hood had her own children, Ms. Dobkin took on a new role.“She was a stay-at-home grandma by choice, which allowed me to work full time,” said Ms. Hood, who is dean of students and director of admissions at a day school in Woodstock. “That was a huge gift. She was able to express that everyday maternal attention that she missed with me.”In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dobkin is survived by her brother, Carl; her sister, Julie Dobkin; and three grandchildren. In 2015, a photograph of Ms. Dobkin taken by Ms. Cowan wearing a T-shirt that read “The Future Is Female” exploded on social media, thanks to an Instagram post by @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, an account that documents lesbian imagery. It brought the T-shirt, originally made in the 1970s by Labyris Books, the first feminist bookstore in New York City, back into production — and introduced Ms. Dobkin to a new generation of young women.“I’ve prepared all my life for this job,” Ms. Dobkin told the crowd at a women’s music festival in 1997. “Because being a Jew and being a lesbian are very similar. That’s why I look so much alike. I have so much in common. It’s OK to be a Jew, it’s OK to be a lesbian — as long as you don’t mention it. And what we also have in common is that we were never supposed to survive.” More

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    Was 1971 the Year ‘Music Changed Everything’?

    How would 1974 feel about that? Or 1965? A new eight-part documentary on Apple TV+ is the latest salvo in the record geek’s eternal debate.Everything changed with the music of 1971. No, wait. It was 1973. Check that — 1974 was the year, except it was music, film and television, but only in Los Angeles. More

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    DMX’s Posthumous All-Star Track, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Griff, Kidd G, Masayoshi Fujita and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.DMX featuring Jay-Z and Nas, ‘Bath Salts’This song from “Exodus,” the first posthumous DMX album, features a 1990s rap supergroup that could have been. DMX sounds limber and loose, and Jay-Z and Nas are having far more fun here than they did on the grown-and-grumpy “Sorry Not Sorry,” from the latest DJ Khaled album. The union of the three titans is consequential, but they treat it like a friendly cipher, the mark of stars confident in their legacy. JON CARAMANICASofi Tukker and Amadou & Mariam, ‘Mon Cheri’The nonprofit Red Hot Organization supports its efforts to fight AIDS with albums full of unexpected collaborators. The preview of its dance-oriented “Red Hot + Free” collection, due July 2, is “Mon Cheri,” which brings together the Florida dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker with the Malian singers Amadou & Mariam. Sophie Hawley-Weld of Sofi Tukker coos the verses in Portuguese, philosophizing about time and rhythm over a twangy guitar line that hints at Malian modes; when Amadou & Mariam arrive for the choruses, calling for togetherness in love, a 4/4 thump kicks in, steering the song directly to the dance floor. Before it’s over, a synthesizer starts cheerfully sputtering like a high-tech kazoo. JON PARELESMelvin Gibbs featuring Kokayi, ‘Message From the Streets’Tuesday marked the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, and the culmination of a heady year of Black Lives Matter organizing. It was also the bassist Melvin Gibbs’s birthday. Over the past 12 months, Gibbs paid a number of visits to the site of Floyd’s death, and he was moved by the complicated but nearly serene energy about the place, which has become a kind of pilgrimage site and memorial. On Tuesday, Gibbs released an EP, “4 + 1 Equals 5 for May 25,” that balances coiled frustration with catalytic release. The idea, he wrote in the notes accompanying the EP, was “to manifest peace while facing up to cataclysm.” Working with the Washington, D.C.-based rapper Kokayi, Gibbs assembled a collection of pieces (condensed here into a final composite track, “Message From the Streets”) that writhe and heave but fix a steady gaze on the world. The act of bearing witness becomes a means of unmaking, and maybe building anew. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOUpper Wilds, ‘Love Song #5’Dan Friel has been making noisy rock — frenetic guitar abetted by over-the-top electronics — since he founded the band Parts & Labor in the early 2000s. He’s still at it in his current band, Upper Wilds, and “Love Song #5,” from an album due in July titled “Venus,” comes on as a whirlwind. As he sings about how love changes nothing and everything at once, a stereo blitz of distorted strumming, whizzing arpeggios and screaming sustained tones insists how much it matters. PARELESGriff, ‘One Foot in Front of the Other’Griff, an English pop singer, songwriter and producer who won this year’s Brit award as rising new star, sounds optimistic despite herself with “One Foot in Front of the Other,” which will be the title song of her mixtape due June 18. Sure, her first steps are tentative as she recovers from a breakup — “Things just take longer to heal these days” — but her perky keyboard tones and a chord progression that descends but soon bounces back all insist that she’ll thrive, and soon. PARELESKidd G, ‘Break Up Song’Recently, the emo-rap-influenced country singer Kidd G announced a partnership with the Valory Music Co., a division of the country powerhouse Big Machine Label Group. It was a seeming acknowledgment that his most viable path forward would run through Nashville — or at least near it. And indeed, he is slowly homing in on a version of his hip-hop that’s structured more like contemporary country music. On “Break Up Song,” the guitars are fuller, and his rapping has less residue of Juice WRLD than his earlier songs. The laments are pure country, too: “I wiped your footprints off the window of my truck.” CARAMANICAFoy Vance, ‘Sapling’A songwriter from Northern Ireland who’s fond of vintage American soul music, Foy Vance has collaborated with Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys and Kacey Musgraves. On his own, he harks back to Van Morrison’s better days, grainy and impassioned. Many of his previous songs have been folky and rootsy, but “Sapling” deploys electronic illusions as well. He strives to draw benevolence out of his own imperfections and regrets — “Am I strong enough?” he wonders — as patient piano chords open into vast reverberations. PARELESOhGeesy featuring DaBaby, ‘Get Fly’A union of one of hip-hop’s most stoic rappers and one of its most excitable. In this partnership, OhGeesy (formerly of Shoreline Mafia) pulls DaBaby into his patient tempo, a surprise victory. CARAMANICAMasayoshi Fujita, ‘Morocco’“Morocco” is from the new album, “Bird Ambience,” by Masayoshi Fujita, a Japanese vibraphonist and composer who constructs meditative pieces with a Minimalistic pulse — layers of vibraphone lines with fleeting apparitions of percussion and sustained brass tones. Every layer is melodic; follow any one closely, and it turns out to be far less repetitive than it seems at first. PARELESDave Holland, ‘Gentle Warrior’On his new album, “Another Land,” the eminent bassist Dave Holland teams up with the guitarist (and former “Tonight Show” musical director) Kevin Eubanks, a longtime Holland confidante, and the drummer Obed Calvaire, a newer collaborator. Holland is a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and former Miles Davis accompanist whose career has skipped around from jazz-rock fusion to the avant-garde, often lingering in the spaces in between. On “Gentle Warrior,” the one track on “Another Land” penned by Calvaire, the drummer works across the full range of his kit, getting his cymbals to speak to one another; Holland takes a bass solo that’s endowed with lyrical flair, and pries at the piece’s complex five-beat rhythm. RUSSONELLO More