Learning to sing well is not always the most comfortable experience in the world. If you’ve spent most of your life sitting in the back of the classroom or silently mouthed along in choir practice, having a bunch of eyes suddenly on you will not be easy to take in the first time you open your mouth. When Tom Jones sang to the heavens for the first time, he knew he had something when he tried his hand at ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’.
Granted, it’s not like the legendary cowboy song has a lot of range to it. If anything, there are a lot of guttural lows that you have to hit in the track to pull it off effectively, and the fact that Jones could get down that low when singing feels impossible.
Because when looking at how he sings, Jones practically feels like a human tuba most of the time. He’s not exactly one for subtlety, and while that’s normally a good thing when delivering a showstopping number, hearing him sing this kind of brooding song in his trademark style could have easily come off as semi-hilarious.
When he was still in primary school, Jones knew he had a gift when he started singing this tune, telling The Guardian, “I must have been eight or nine when I climbed on top of my school desk and sang this because I had heard it on the radio the night before… It was the first time I really got attention for singing because, at home, I was singing so much that everyone took it for granted. A few years later, I discovered rock’n’roll and all the boys looked to me for what was going on.”
Though Jones got a standing ovation from his classmates at the time, he knew that he had the right technique… just the wrong genre. ‘Ghost Riders in e Sky’ may have been something that a kid in the 1950s could appreciate, but it wasn’t until Jerry Lee Lewis came along that Jones found out what he really wanted to do.
The western style was fun, but rock and roll was where the real action was. Compared to the other proper crooners of the day, Lewis didn’t hold anything back on ‘Whole Lotta Shakin Goin’ On’, following the lead of other amazing vocalists like Little Richard by leaning into the gruffness of his voice.
While many found that gruffness unpleasant, it’s Jones’s greatest strength whenever he sings. He can still sing perfectly in tune whenever he steps up to the microphone, but the real appeal of his voice is how he can really go beyond the measures of what “proper” singing is supposed to be, usually reaching up in his range and making sounds that would have left his parents’ generation running scared.
Hell, you could even trace a common line between Jones’s delivery and the gruffness you would hear in other rock singers of the next generations. He may not have been the coolest person to reference, but if people hadn’t gotten used to his voice first, they wouldn’t have been ready for what artists like AC/DC were doing years later. Whether you see it as a blessing or a curse, Jones finding out he could sing from just one obscure country record may have had a greater impact on rock and roll than most people realise.
