B. J. Thomas – Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head

The raindrops you hear aren’t strings or synths — they’re thumbtacks hammered into a piano, played under a song about a sunny day.

The sound that gives “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” its patter isn’t rain at all. It’s a tack piano — an ordinary piano with thumbtacks pushed into the felt hammers so each note lands with a bright, percussive tap. Burt Bacharach used it to suggest raindrops, and the joke buried in the arrangement is that the scene it accompanies, Paul Newman clowning on a bicycle in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, unfolds under a bright, cloudless sky. The lyric is about rain; the picture is pure sunshine. Somehow it works perfectly.

Keep watching: B.J. Thomas – Hooked on a Feeling · explore more 60s →

Bacharach and Hal David wrote the song on commission for the 1969 film, and getting the right voice took some doing. Ray Stevens was offered it first and turned it down — he wanted to change the lyrics and had his own single waiting in the wings. The job came to B.J. Thomas, a Texan singer already known for “Hooked on a Feeling,” and the recording that ended up in the film happened almost by accident of timing. Thomas was fighting laryngitis, which roughened his voice into a husky rasp, and Bacharach, a notorious perfectionist, made him sing it seven times before he was satisfied. That hoarse, lived-in vocal is the one heard in the movie. Once his throat healed, Thomas re-recorded a smoother version at A&R Studios in New York for the single, with Carol Kaye on bass and Bacharach adding a jaunty thirty-second instrumental outro to make it fit Top 40 radio.

Almost nobody involved expected a hit. The film’s star didn’t care for the song, the first singer had passed on it, and radio programmers balked at its cheerful, old-timey bounce just as the flower-power 1960s were curdling into a harder decade. One Scepter executive later admitted it felt out of step with everything around it — while the rest of pop was protest songs and psychedelia, here was a man singing about not letting the rain get him down.

The first No. 1 of a new decade

The doubt didn’t last. After Butch Cassidy arrived as a Christmas release and radio finally embraced the record, “Raindrops” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the issue dated January 3, 1970 — the very first chart-topper of the 1970s. It held the top for four weeks, spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and logged thirteen weeks in the top 10, the longest such run between the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” At the 1970 Academy Awards it won Best Original Song, with Thomas performing it on the broadcast, and Bacharach took Best Original Score for the film. It has kept turning up ever since, from Forrest Gump to Spider-Man 2, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.

Remembering B.J. Thomas

Billy Joe Thomas was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on August 7, 1942, and raised around Houston, and across a long career he refused to stay in any single lane, topping the pop, country, adult contemporary, and gospel charts at different points and selling more than seventy million records. He won five Grammys and reached No. 1 again in 1975 with “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” He died on May 29, 2021, at his home in Arlington, Texas, of complications from lung cancer, at 78. The performance below, from The Ed Sullivan Show on January 25, 1970, catches him at the exact moment “Raindrops” sat atop the charts — young, warm, and entirely at ease with the song that would follow him for the next half century. He once said he hoped audiences left his shows with their heads lifted. This is a good place to see why they did.

Here he is on The Ed Sullivan Show, January 25, 1970.