Recent recordings included “Living Room Music,” featuring cameos from Lyle Lovett, Vince Gill and Richard Marx. He also acted in a handful of movies, including “Jory” and “Jake’s Corner” and toured often. 1 songs as “Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love” and “New Looks from an Old Lover.” In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he was also a top gospel and inspirational singer, winning two Dove awards and five Grammys, including a Grammy in 1979 for best gospel performance for “The Lord’s Prayer.”įans of the 1980s sitcom “Growing Pains” heard him as the singer of the show’s theme song. Thomas had few pop hits after the mid-1970s, but he continued to score on the country charts with such No. “I was at the bottom with my addictions and my problems,” he said in 2020 on “The Debby Campbell Goodtime Show.” He cited a “spiritual awakening,” shared with his wife, Gloria Richardson, with helping him to get clean. By 1976, while ″(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” was hitting No. He was touring and recording constantly and taking dozens of pills a day. Thomas would later say the phenomenon of “Raindrops” exacerbated an addiction to pills and alcohol which dated back to his teens, when a record producer in Houston suggested he take amphetamines to keep his energy up. “At the time, it seemed like a dumb idea. “When the film was released, I was highly critical - how did the song fit with the film? There was no rain,” Redford told USA Today in 2019. Redford, meanwhile, doubted the song even belonged in “Butch Cassidy.” Thomas was recovering from laryngitis while recording the soundtrack version and his vocals are raspier than for the track released on its own. But, at first, not everyone was satisfied. “Raindrops” has since been heard everywhere from “The Simpsons” to “Forrest Gump” and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013.

But his warm, soulful tenor fit the song’s easygoing mood, immortalized on film during the scene when Butch (Paul Newman) shows off his new bicycle to Etta Place (Katharine Ross), the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford). 1 pop hit and an Oscar winner for best original song as part of the soundtrack to one of the biggest movies of 1969, the irreverent Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Thomas wasn’t the first choice to perform the whimsical ballad composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David Ray Stevens turned the songwriters down. With most sprayers in use today, all it takes is a slight breeze for half of the pesticide to end up in the neighbouring field,' he said.His signature recording was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” a No. 'Understanding how droplets will be distributed can be very important. The findings could have practical applications in understanding rainfall patterns and in crop spraying, said Villermaux. The hypothesis was that droplets which bump into other droplets coalesce and become bigger, while smaller droplets are those that did not bump into as many other droplets.īut the new paper, published online in the journal Nature Physics, says the process is in fact much simpler than thought. Way back in 1904, scientists noted that raindrops came in different sizes. 'Each drop breaks up individually, independently of its neighbours, on its way to earth.'

'Rainfall does indeed start through coalescence in the clouds but something quite different happens on the way down, and this explains the diversity of raindrop sizes,' said Emmanuel Villermaux, who co-wrote the study with Benjamin Bossa of the Aix-Marseille University in southern France. The whole process takes only several thousands of a second.īut when the droplets hit the ground, the most numerous by far are very small, while large drops are comparatively few. The bag then inflates beyond the ability of the water's tension to hold things together and bursts into lots of smaller droplets. Initially, a raindrop starts to fall as a sphere, but then flattens out into a pancake shape.Įventually, as the pancake widens and thins, the onrush of air causes it to hollow out, like an upturned bag. Complex interaction between these droplets as they fall explains why raindrops come in such a remarkable range of sizes, goes this idea.īut French scientists armed with ultra-fast video footage say something else happens on the way down - and this is why rainfall can range from fine droplets to chubby plops.

Raindrops keep faling