Thomas has been a music teacher in Miami for decades. Why can't we live together? No matter what color, you're still my brother, or no matter what color, you're still my sister." "I want to meet him one day and just give him a big hug and just say, 'Man, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to try to get my foot back in the door to try to teach these kids to be an asset instead of a liability," Thomas says. But no one took it global quite like Drake. Over the past 45 years, "Why Can't We Live Together" has been covered by the likes of Santana and Sade, and it was even sampled by MC Hammer. Now that his song has received significant attention for the second time, Thomas plans to re-record it with an orchestra and background singers. He wasn't even born when my record came out the first time." He had an opportunity to use Snoop Dogg beats, Dre beats, all these new beats. "And he sounds so good on it! It didn't have the message that I had about the world, about 'Why Can't We Live Together?' But I was so deeply honored in my heart that he used my original music. "I knew right away it was my record," Thomas says. He's so thrilled, in fact, he's on a mission to meet the Canadian rapper to thank him. But that's not the case with Thomas, who was thrilled to hear the distinctive beat of "Why Can't We Live Together" on Drake's song.
Typically, stories that begin like this one continue with lawsuit proceedings. charts, had become the backbeat on Drake's confessional about a girl who replaced late-night phone calls with late-night outings. That's when he searched online and heard that the recording he had made more than four decades earlier as a one-man band, one that wound up topping the Billboard R&B charts and making the Top 20 on the U.K. First, Thomas' nephew called to tell him to listen to the song. Forty-three years later came "Hotline Bling" by Drake. "I stopped on the side of the street just to listen to it," he recalls. Miami soul singer Timmy Thomas remembers the first time he heard his Vietnam-era peace plea "Why Can't We Live Together" on the radio.