Tom Jones
Beacon Theater
September 18

There’s a brief video of Tom Jones from 1990 that rather brilliantly serves as a microcosm for his entire remarkable career. It’s an excerpt from a long-running Australian variety program, “Hey Hey It’s Saturday,” in which Mr. Jones appears side by side with an Australian pop star, John Farnham.  

Mr. Farnham makes no secret of how Mr. Jones was his original inspiration and role model, and, for the benefit of the audience, he makes a point of asking Mr. Jones to give a demonstration of how he does what he does.  

Mr. Jones obliges, but when it comes time for Mr. Farnham to join him in song, the younger man is so intimidated by the presence of his idol that a falsetto squeak is all that comes out of his mouth. Soon enough, though, he finds his footing, and the two finish the song together. 

The performance is wonderful, not only because it brilliantly illuminates the influence of Tom Jones on multiple generations of singers, but for the song they’ve selected for this meet-up: “My Yiddishe Momme.”

Mr. Jones  — who on Wednesday is making a rare New York appearance at the Beacon Theater — first began performing “Yiddishe Momme” in 1967, and it’s been in his repertory ever since. That a singer from Wales and another who grew up in Melbourne could find common ground in a 1925 Yiddish song from Tin Pan Alley provides a vivid illustration of the universality of Mr. Jones’s appeal, that he can take a song written at a very specific time for a very specific audience and show that it has something to say to everybody for all time.   

I first saw Tom Jones live about 25 years ago as part of a special benefit for Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Apollo Theater; he was one of a truly stellar line-up of superstars that included Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, and Joe Cocker. Given the level of the talent involved, I didn’t expect to be as impressed as I was. Yet of all the legendary names, the one who made the greatest impression on both myself and the crowd was Tom Jones.

Mr. Jones has always seemed one of the major successors to the larger legacy of Elvis Presley, even if, by historical and geographical circumstance, he’s generally considered one of the more durable survivors of the so-called British Invasion. Still, his true counterparts aren’t necessarily the Moody Blues or the Who, though both of those bands appeared with Mr. Jones on his 1969 TV series: Those are the major American troubadours of the 1960s, such as Sam Cooke, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Bobby Darin, and Marvin Gaye, as well as Presley, whose appeal crossed racial, genre, and national boundaries.  

In fact, it’s always seemed that Mr. Jones has directly built on Elvis’s unique vision: Where Presley combined R&B, blues, gospel, and country music, Mr. Jones used that combination as his starting point, and expanded upon that purview to include a considerable amount of International music. Mr. Jones’s songs come from every country and every time period, and, in fact, the new and improved Elvis of the 1970s — my own favorite chapter of Presley’s career — was apparently informed, in his own way, by Tom Jones. The international Elvis of the “concert years,” who sang Italian songs like “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” and the works of Burt Bacharach, was partially a response to what Tom Jones was already doing.  

There’s a story about the first time Presley heard Curly Putman Jr.’s “Green, Green Grass of Home”; supposedly, he liked the song, but dismissed it as “too country.” Presley passed on “Green, Green Grass,” but after Mr. Jones turned it into a worldwide hit in 1966, he changed Presley’s mind, and Elvis recorded it in 1975.  It took a Welshman to prove to Elvis the value of a song by a writer from Alabama.

Mr. Jones has been a music biz phenom for 60 years; it’s hard to think of anyone else who released their first single as early as 1964 and is still not only going strong but sounds better than ever. For all of that time, he’s also served as a literal symbol of male attractiveness and sexuality. When, in 1970, a 73-year-old comedian, “Moms” Mabley, wanted to get an instant laugh, she achieved it by telling the world that she was dating Tom Jones.

At 84, Mr. Jones ranks alongside Marilyn Maye and the late Tony Bennett as an entertainer who’s kept a major portion of his chops and style even going into his ninth decade. Tom Jones still has the power, the energy, the voice, and the moves — the commanding baritone and the compelling body English — of 50 to 60 years ago. 

In fact, I’m reluctant to describe any period as his prime years, since he’s never been other than at the top of his game. He continues to sing with such authority that you can’t help but wonder if, in fact, his mama might have been Yiddish after all.