Jack Jones

Jack Jones ranked among the leading vocalists to rise after Elvis Presley’s dominant era and before the Beatles took hold. Within two years he captured Grammys for Pop Male Performance with “Lollipops and Roses” in 1962 and “Wives and Lovers” in 1964, securing a platform that sustained live work and recordings well into the twenty-first century. Although his pop singles stopped charting in the early 1970s, he had earlier dominated Billboard’s Adult Contemporary listings with number-one entries “The Race Is On,” “The Impossible Dream (The Quest),” and “Lady” from 1965 to 1967. He maintained a steady presence in Las Vegas and on tour, surfacing in popular culture by performing “The Love Boat Theme” in 1980. Later he turned toward blues and jazz, issuing the 2023 collaboration ArtWork with Joey DeFrancesco.

Born in Los Angeles, California, to performing parents, he entered the world on the same evening his father Allan Jones cut the hit “The Donkey Serenade.” Jones launched his professional career in his father’s stage revue at the Thunderbird Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Demo sessions for Don Raye led to a Capitol contract in 1959. His debut album for the label, This Love of Mine, failed to register and Capitol let him go. Relocating to San Francisco, he attracted the attention of Pete King at Kapp Records, who signed him immediately. King released “Lollipops and Roses” in 1962; the single became a substantial success and earned Jones the Grammy for Pop Male Performance. Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Wives and Lovers” proved still more successful in 1964, climbing to number fourteen on Billboard’s Top 40 and securing another Grammy.

Although Jones’s pop-chart run proved brief—“Dear Heart” reached number thirty in 1964 and his version of George Jones’s country hit “The Race Is On” peaked at number fifteen in 1965—he continued to register on the Adult Contemporary chart through the decade, attaining the top spot with “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” in 1966 and “Lady” in 1967. He switched from Kapp to RCA in 1967. His initial RCA release, Without Her, took its title from a Harry Nilsson cover and signaled the direction of his subsequent work, which moved between supper-club standards and soft-rock material, reaching a culmination in the 1972 Bread tribute Bread Winners. Throughout the 1970s he experimented with prevailing styles, including disco, and recorded a version of Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” in 1977 before departing for MGM. His 1979 MGM debut, Nobody Does It Better, extended the disco explorations and featured “The Love Boat Theme,” the knowingly theatrical signature song for the television series.

After MGM closed following the 1980 release of Don’t Stop Now, Jones issued recordings only occasionally, producing just two albums during the 1980s—Jack Jones in 1982 and I Am a Singer in 1987—while focusing on worldwide club performances. A 1992 major-label return with The Gershwin Album proved short-lived; by 1997 he had moved to Honest and released New Jack Swing along with Paints a Tribute to Tony Bennett. Over the following twenty years he sustained a schedule of concerts and selective recordings, supplemented by stage appearances and occasional television spots. The mid-2010s brought heightened visibility: he appeared briefly in David O. Russell’s 2013 film American Hustle, supplied a voice for the Cartoon Network series Over the Garden Wall, and recorded the 2015 album Seriously Frank (Celebrating the 100th Birthday of Frank Sinatra). That project marked his deeper immersion in jazz and blues. Every Other Day I Have the Blues, featuring covers of Eddie Harris & Les McCann and Robert Cray material, arrived in 2021. ArtWork, the Joey DeFrancesco collaboration cut shortly before the organist’s death in 2022, followed in 2023. Jack Jones died of leukemia on October 23, 2024, at the age of eighty-six.