Benjamin “Benny” Latimore, the Southern soul-blues singer, pianist and songwriter whose voice carried one of the genre’s best-known records, has died at 86. His death closes the career of a man who spent more than fifty years building songs that linked Delta roots, R&B polish and the hard-earned snap of Southern club music.
Latimore was born in Charleston, Tennessee, in 1939, and he came up through the music business as a backing pianist for Florida bands, including Steve Alaimo’s. By around 1965, he was cutting studio sides with Henry Stone’s Miami-based Dade label, the start of a run that would eventually make his name familiar far beyond the Gulf Coast.
His defining record was 1974’s “Let’s Straighten It Out,” which topped the R&B chart and crossed into the Billboard Hot 100. Before that breakthrough, he had already shown his range with a 1973 reworking of “Stormy Monday,” and after it he kept the momentum with a gender-flipped version of Gladys Knight’s “If You Were My Woman.”
The climb was not smooth. Latimore’s biggest hit came in 1974, but the streak cooled toward the end of the decade, forcing him to rebuild rather than coast on one smash. He did that by staying useful, moving between styles and labels, and proving he could still sell a song even when the radio pulse shifted.
That rebuild mattered. “Keep the Home Fire Burnin’” reached the Top 10 on the R&B chart in 1975, and “Somethin’ ‘Bout ‘Cha” did the same in 1976. In 1982, he signed with Malaco Records and released seven albums of modern blues material there, later stepping away briefly in the mid-1990s for a stint with J-Town before returning to Malaco in 2000.
Latimore kept working late into life. He later recorded for Mel Waiters’ Brittney Records, launched LatStone with Henry Stone in 2007, played on Joss Stone’s The Soul Sessions and Mind Body & Soul as a session pianist, and turned up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2014. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2017, a formal nod to a career that never really stopped moving.
What is not in question is his place in the music. For fans of Southern soul-blues and R&B, Latimore was not just a hitmaker from the 1970s. He was a working musician who kept finding a way back, and that is why the news of Benjamin “Benny” Latimore age 86 lands as more than the loss of one singer: it marks the end of a long, stubborn thread in American blues history.
