Soul Hitmaker Behind One of the ‘Greatest’ 1974 R&B Chart-Toppers “Let’s Straighten It Out,” Dies at 86

Benjamin “Benny” Latimore, the Southern soul-blues singer, pianist, and songwriter who spent more than fifty years shaping the genre, has died at 86.

Latimore was born in Charleston, Tennessee, in 1939, and grew up steeped in country radio, Baptist church hymns, and Delta blues. He broke into the music business as a backing pianist for Florida bands, including Steve Alaimo’s, before landing his first studio sessions around 1965 with Henry Stone’s Miami-based Dade label. A move to Glades Records in the early ’70s paid off fast: his 1973 reworking of T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” cracked the R&B Top 30, and a gender-flipped cover of Gladys Knight’s “If You Were My Woman” followed soon after.

Then came the song that defined him. “Let’s Straighten It Out” topped the R&B chart in 1974 and crossed into the Billboard Hot 100, a career peak he followed with two more Top 10 R&B hits, “Keep the Home Fire Burnin'” (1975) and “Somethin’ ‘Bout ‘Cha” (1976), before the hit streak cooled toward the decade’s end.

Rather than fade, Latimore rebuilt. He signed with Malaco Records in 1982 and released seven albums of modern blues material over the following years, stepping away briefly in the mid-’90s for a stint with J-Town before returning to Malaco in 2000. He later recorded for Mel Waiters’ Brittney Records and, in 2007, launched his own label, LatStone, with longtime collaborator Henry Stone, the same producer who’d given him his first break decades earlier.

Even outside his own catalog, Latimore stayed busy in Miami’s soul scene as a session pianist, playing on Joss Stone’s The Soul Sessions and Mind Body & Soul alongside fellow Florida veterans Betty Wright, Timmy Thomas, and Willie Hale. He made a late-career television appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2014, and in 2017 was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.