In a six-decade career, Jack Jones, who has died of leukaemia aged 86, became one of the most popular and admired singers of mainstream easy-listening music. His supple, expressive voice enabled him to wring the maximum expression from a lyric, and Frank Sinatra once tipped him as “the best singer in the business. He has a distinction, an all-round quality that puts him potentially about three lengths in front of the other guys.”
Jones was firmly in the tradition of performers such as Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Andy Williams and Mel Tormé. Like his contemporaries, he found his big-band sound (featuring arrangements by such leading names as Nelson Riddle and Billy May) overshadowed by the boom in rock and pop music in the 1960s and 70s.
As the 70s dawned, when signed to RCA Victor, Jones made efforts to adopt a more contemporary sound, recording songs by Randy Newman, Carole King, Gordon Lightfoot and Little Feat’s Lowell George. In 1972 he recorded the album Bread Winners, comprising songs by Bread’s David Gates, and also made albums of songs by Michel Legrand and Charles Aznavour.
He released 60 albums, among them the Top 20 hits Wives and Lovers (1963), Dear Heart (1965) and The Impossible Dream (1966). He also scored three No 1 hit singles on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart (now renamed Adult Contemporary) – The Race Is On (1965), The Impossible Dream (The Quest) (1966) and Lady (1967). He was still recording as recently as last year, when he released the album ArtWork, a collaboration with the trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco.
In 1962 he scored his first hit with Lollipops and Roses, which brought him a Grammy award for best solo male vocal performance. Wives and Lovers, a Burt Bacharach / Hal David composition which reached 14 on the US chart in 1963, earned him another Grammy, despite now being seen as egregiously sexist (the lyrics urged women to always make themselves attractive if they did not want their husbands to be lured away by “girls at the office”).
Decades later, Jones commented: “Since it’s a politically incorrect song, I start it out with a disclaimer … I meant no harm when I did it. It made my career, and I’m grateful for that.”
He was also able to branch out successfully into television and film work. In 1959 he starred in the musical comedy Juke Box Rhythm, and in 1978 he had a leading role in the blood-spattered supernatural thriller The Comeback. He also had a self-mocking cameo in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). Between 1974 and 1977, he hosted The Jack Jones Show on BBC2, and he made countless TV guest appearances, and appeared in the drama series The Rat Patrol and the Rock Hudson vehicle McMillan & Wife.
One of his most widely known accomplishments was his performance of the title song from the TV series The Love Boat, which ran from 1977 until the mid-80s. “Any singer loves to have a theme song that goes on and on,” said Jones. “I said ‘I don’t know who’s gonna watch a show about a cruise ship’, but they did and here we are. I had no idea.”
Jones was born in Los Angeles, to show business parents. His father, Allan, was a singer and actor who starred in the 1936 film musical Show Boat and appeared in the Marx Brothers films A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, while his mother Irene (nee Hervey) enjoyed a long and successful acting career in film, TV and the theatre. On the day Jack was born, Allan recorded The Donkey Serenade for the film The Firefly, which would become his trademark song.
Jack attended University high school in West Los Angeles, and also took private classes in singing and drama. He showed some ability in athletics and football, but music was always his main objective. He vividly remembered the day his schoolmate Nancy Sinatra invited her father, Frank, to sing in the school auditorium: “That was the day I decided I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”
After graduating from high school in 1957, Jack made his performing debut, aged 19, as part of his father’s act in Elko, Nevada, then in Las Vegas. However, this was not successful (“my voice was less mature than his,” Jones noted). His parents divorced in the same year, “and that knocked the wind out of the whole thing. I went out on my own, and my salary dropped, but I felt better.”
In 1959 he was signed by Capitol Records after they heard a demo recording Jones had made for the songwriter Don Raye, and he recorded his debut album, This Love of Mine. This was not successful, but a track from it, This Could Be the Start of Something Big, was heard by the owner of the San Francisco club Facks, who hired Jones for a three-week season. Pete King, a producer for Kapp Records, heard him sing and signed him to the label. He recorded Lollipops and Roses in 1961, and the following year it hit the charts and ignited Jones’s career.
In the 21st century, Jones added yet another string to his bow by appearing in stage musicals including Guys and Dolls, South Pacific and Man of La Mancha. In 2013 he played himself as a nightclub singer in David O Russell’s comic caper movie American Hustle. He made his last concert tour of Britain in 2018.
Five marriages ended in divorce; Jones is survived by his sixth wife, Eleanora Peters, whom he married in 2009; and by two daughters, Crystal, from his first marriage, to Katie Lee Nuckols, and Nicole, from his fifth, to Kim Ely, and three grandchildren.
• John Allan Jones, singer and actor, born 14 January 1938; died 23 October 2024
