Thursday, December 9, 2021

Ralph Tavares, R.I.P.

Ralph Tavares, the eldest brother of the 1970's R&B and disco group Tavares, passed away yesterday two days shy of his 80th birthday. No cause of death was released.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Tavares had a string of hits during the mid to late 1970's. The one with which I am most familiar is "It Only Takes a Minute" which was part of a compilation album my Uncle Andy and Aunt Diane sent us when they owned TeeVee Records. Other hits which followed included "Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel", "Whodunit" and their version of The Bee Gees' "More Than a Woman" which appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

I had the opportunity to see Tavares perform on a couple of occasions in and around Boston during the mid-2000's, but Ralph Tavares left the group in 1984 to lead, for lack of a better term, a regular life. Not everyone that can walk away from that kind of life. But Ralph Tavares did spending more than 30 years working in the Massachusetts court system in both New Bedford and nearby Fall River before retiring in 2015. He would reunite with his brothers onstage in 2014 for a concert at Bristol Community College before resuming his regular life. R.I.P.

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