Miami musician Timmy Thomas, known for anti-war anthem ‘Why Can’t We Live Together,’ dies at 77
One of contemporary music’s most potent social commentary songs was written as the Vietnam War raged and a Miami musician sat transfixed by a TV news broadcast enumerating the mounting dead. The multifaceted composition came just a few years after the slaying of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
That Timmy Thomas tune, “Why Can’t We Live Together,” which burns ever more timely by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February and the global reckoning over racism after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, was born in a Miami music studio nearly 50 years ago.
Thomas, the Miami singer-songwriter and keyboardist who composed the landmark “Why Can’t We Live Together?” and released it on a Miami-based TK Records subsidiary label in 1972, died in Miami on March 11.
Thomas was 77 and the cause was cancer, according to his wife Lillie Brown Thomas, The New York Times reported.
Sam Moore reflects
Thomas’ anti-war and brotherhood anthem, with its stabbing pulse and insinuating hook framed by Thomas’ organ and an early drum machine and its plaintive lyrics, was inspired by a summer 1972 Walter Cronkite telecast on “CBS Evening News.” Thomas watched as Cronkite listed that day’s death count of American and Vietcong soldiers killed during the Vietnam War. He could have written the probing “Why Can’t We Live Together” in 2022.
“Timmy asked the question of questions. It’s unfortunate to realize that Timmy passed and still to this day, all these decades later, no one can answer that question,” Sam Moore, a Class of 1953 Booker T. Washington grad and one half of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame duo Sam and Dave, pondered from the Coral Gables home he shares with his wife, Joyce Moore.
Thomas’ lyrics:
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?/
No matter, no matter what color/Umm, you are still my brother/
I said, “No matter, no matter what color/Umm, you are still my brother”/
Why can’t we live together?
“We talked about this in the context of the song and Timmy’s passing, last night, and the Godawful, awful horror we’re watching unfolding in front of all of our eyes that we wish we could do something more to stop. No more Ukrainian men, women and especially the children [should] die,” Joyce Moore told the Miami Herald.
“We were saddened by another loss to our music family — and especially our Miami music family,” she added.
Anti-war anthem
Thomas was born Timothy Earle Thomas in Evansville, Indiana, to a minister dad and homemaker mom on Nov. 13, 1944. But after learning and then playing the organ at age 10 at his father’s church, he would eventually make his career as a musician in Miami. Thomas told interviewers that the song and its title came to him during the Cronkite telecast.
“I said, ‘What?!’ You mean that many mothers’ children died today 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?’” Thomas told Spin magazine in 2015. “I said, ‘Why can’t we live together?’”
In addition to fans at the time who responded nearly a million sales strong to send the song to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1973, the song inspired another seismic shift in the sound of Miami made music.
KC and the Miami sound
Harry Wayne Casey, the songwriting half of KC & the Sunshine Band (with former writing partner Rick Finch), was working with Thomas at the time of “Why Can’t We Live Together” taking care of his bookings and travel.
Casey, a Hialeah kid and fledgling songwriter at TK Records’ studio, told the Herald that Thomas gave him the opportunity to co-write a song together. They came up with “Let Me Be Your Eyes.”
“He was a kind and caring man. Always smiling. We shared many laughs together. Many times he lent his talent to my productions as a keyboardist. It was his Lowrey organ that he used on ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’ that I used to write ‘Rock Your Baby,’” Casey said.
“Rock Your Baby,” recorded by Miami singer George McRae, became the first of Casey and Finch’s compositions to hit No. 1 on the pop charts in 1974 and is considered one of the breakthrough early disco hits.
“Also, for historical reasons, it was a show that I booked him on with Rare Earth in Washington, D.C., [in 1973] that became the first song I wrote for KC & The Sunshine band called ‘Blow Your Whistle’ — which, next year will be my 50th year,” Casey said. “At the show everyone in the audience was blowing whistles. On the plane ride home I wrote the song and that was the beginning. You never know how one thing may inspire another. And then it just happens.”
Legacy of ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’
Thomas never had another hit as wide-reaching as “Why Can’t We Live Together” but the song paid dividends. Canadian rapper Drake sampled it on “Hotline Bling” in 2015 and MC Hammer did so on his “Too Legit to Quit” album in 1991. “Why Can’t We Live Together” was also covered by Steve Winwood, Sade, Maria Muldaur, Joan Osborne, Santana and Lucky Peterson.
Twenty years after “Why Can’t We Live Together” reached its No. 3 peak on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart for Feb. 10, 1973, behind pop culture staples by Carly Simon (“You’re So Vain”) and Elton John (“Crocodile Rock”), Thomas turned his talents to teaching, though he would take the occasional gig.
In 1993, he became the choir master at Miami Norland High School, Thomas posted on his LinkedIn page.
Two years later, Thomas, who earned his master’s in mental health counseling from Nova Southeastern University in 1997, was the school music director at Shadowlawn Elementary School in Miami.
“I’m not teaching, I’m pulling out what’s already there,” Thomas said of his Shadowlawn students in a 2006 Miami Herald article.
Survivors, services
Thomas’ survivors include his wife Lillie Brown Thomas; his children Tamara Wagner-Marion, Li’Tina Thomas, Tremayne and Travis Thomas; 12 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and his siblings Diane Winton, Mary Davis, the Rev. Velma Thomas, Ray, Kenneth, Roland, Jerome and the Rev. Jeffery Thomas.
Services will include a viewing from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday at New Way Fellowship Praise and Worship Church, 16800 NW 22nd Ave., Miami and a funeral at 1 p.m. Saturday at the same church.
This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 8:23 PM.
