Latimore

Benjamin William Lattimore was born on September 7, 1939, in Charleston, Tennessee. He grew up with country radio, Baptist church singing, and the blues. In interviews he recalled a country childhood without electricity at first, then a battery radio tuned to Nashville's WLAC, where he heard Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, gospel, and country story-songs. His mother sang and played guitar; his father played banjo. He joined the junior choir as a boy and sang his first church solo in his early teens. A family piano and ear training, not formal conservatory schooling, shaped the keyboard style that later carried his records.

He left home for Nashville, briefly attended college, then dropped out to sing with saxophonist Louis Brooks and his band. Brooks taught him stage discipline and pushed him onto piano when the band needed a keyboardist. Latimore later toured as accompanist and opener for Nashville hitmaker Joe Henderson after Snap Your Fingers. A talent-show night in Miami led club owner Clyde Killens to fly him back to work the Knight Beat. Latimore planned a short Florida stay and never really left.

In Miami he entered the orbit of entrepreneur Henry Stone. Around 1965 he began recording for Stone's Dade and related labels, initially billed as Benny Latimore. He became a house pianist for the wider TK / Miami soul scene, later credited on sessions that included Betty Wright's Clean Up Woman and Gwen McCrae's Rockin' Chair in period accounts. In the early 1970s he moved to Stone's Glades imprint, dropped his first name, and broke nationally with a jazzy remake of T-Bone Walker's Stormy Monday (No. 27 R&B, 1973), helped by Chicago radio play. A gender-flipped cover, If You Were My Woman, reached No. 70 R&B.

Then came the record that defined him. Self-written Let's Straighten It Out, built on electric piano, bass, and drums with a nearly spoken baritone plea to sit down and talk, topped the R&B chart for two weeks in November 1974 and reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. Follow-ups included Keep the Home Fire Burnin' (No. 5 R&B, 1975) and Somethin' 'Bout 'Cha (No. 7 R&B; also a Hot 100 hit). He remained a Glades / TK-era star through the late 1970s even as disco dominated Miami, later lampooning the craze on Discoed to Death.

When the Miami empire cooled, he signed with Jackson, Mississippi's Malaco Records in 1982 and cut a long run of Southern soul and modern blues albums for adult audiences who had not abandoned the style. Fans nicknamed him the Silver Fox for his gray hair. He briefly recorded away from Malaco in the mid-1990s (including J-Town's Turning Up The Mood), returned for You're Welcome To Ride (2000), cut Latt Is Back for Mel Waiters's Brittney Records, then reunited creatively with Henry Stone on the LatStone imprint for Back 'Atcha (2007). He kept releasing into the 2010s, including Live in Vienna (2010) and the Ray Charles tribute Latimore Remembers Ray Charles (2013).

Session work tied him to a new generation: he played piano on Joss Stone's The Soul Sessions (2003) and Mind Body & Soul (2004) with Miami peers Betty Wright, Timmy Thomas, and Willie Hale. In May 2014 he sat in with The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon while promoting a Henry Stone compilation. In 2017 the Blues Foundation inducted him into the Blues Hall of Fame. Streaming and TikTok later rediscovered the deep cut Let Me Go from his 1970s catalog, pushing tens of millions of plays to listeners born after the Glades years.

Latimore died on August 22, 2026, in Tampa, Florida, at age 86. Malaco and multiple outlets confirmed the news; a cause of death was not made public. He was still booked to perform at the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival in September. Survivors named in the Miami Herald include his wife, Yvonne Lattimore. Funeral details were not announced in the early obituaries. What remains is the catalog: a conversational baritone, a piano that carried whole songs almost alone, and a hit about fixing what is broken by talking it through.