Ray Thomas

Raymond Thomas (29 December 1941 – 4 January 2018) was an English musician, singer and songwriter. He was best known as a founding member of the English progressive rock band the Moody Blues. His flute solo on the band's 1967 hit single "Nights in White Satin" is regarded as one of progressive rock's defining moments. In 2018, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues.

Thomas was born at an emergency maternity unit set up during the Second World War in Lickhill Manor, Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, England. His father's family was from the southwest corner of Wales. His grandfather was a Welsh miner and went on to become a carpenter and a wood-carver, at one stage working on the church where Thomas later got married. His father taught him at the age of nine to play harmonica, and this sparked his interest in music. He joined the school choir a year later. He quit schooling at the age of 14, and briefly left music to work as a toolmaking trainee at Lemarks. By the age of 16 he had embarked on a search for a music band, and within two years had left his trade to pursue a career in music.

In the 1960s, Thomas joined the Birmingham Youth Choir then began singing with various Birmingham blues and soul groups including The Saints and Sinners and The Ramblers. He was inspired to learn the flute from a grandfather who played the instrument. Again taking up the harmonica, he started a band, El Riot and the Rebels, with bassist John Lodge. After a couple of years their friend Mike Pinder joined as keyboardist. On Easter Monday 1963 the band opened for the Beatles at the Bridge Hotel, Tenbury Wells. Thomas and Pinder were later in a band called Krew Cats, formed in 1963, who played in Hamburg and other places in northern Germany.

Thomas and Pinder then recruited guitarist Denny Laine, drummer Graeme Edge, and bassist Clint Warwick to form a new, blues-based band, The Moody Blues. Signed to Decca Records, their first album, The Magnificent Moodies, yielded a No. 1 UK hit (No. 10 in the US) with "Go Now". Thomas sang lead vocals on George and Ira Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So" from the musical Porgy and Bess. He shared lead vocals with Laine on "23rd Psalm" which was recorded in 1964 but remained unreleased until 2014.

His flute featured on three songs on the album—"Something You Got", "I've Got a Dream", and "Let Me Go"—as well as the single "From the Bottom of My Heart", after he had more or less pushed himself to learn playing. Thomas said in a 1986 interview that

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.