Caption:  A sold-out crowd at Ravinia in Highland Park greeted legendary Tom Jones with boisterous cheers. (Photo by Jim Summaria) 

The legendary Tom Jones performed on a cool Saturday night, Sept. 7, at Ravinia in Highland Park, but the place heated up quickly when Jones came on stage.  

The sold-out crowd greeted him with boisterous cheers, and he seemed deeply humbled. The man is 84 years old, looks 20 years younger, and sings like he did 60 years ago.  

Jones sang the early hits, “It’s Not Unusual,” “What’s New Pussycat” and he and the audience had a great time doing a sing-along with “Delilah.”  

However, Jones added so many other genres of music that included the rhythm and blues “Strange Things Happening Every Day” first recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a bluesy Doors-like version of “Lazarus Man”, Prince’s funky “Kiss,” and a couple of Bob Dylan songs, “Not Dark Yet” plus “One More Cup of Coffee.”  

The song “If I Only Knew” combined Motown with rap. He got the crowd up and dancing to his 1999 song “Sex Bomb.”

Jones added his own bluesy styling to Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat” that had some of the crowd cheering each time he sang the song’s title.  

In 2021, he released the album “Surrounded by Time,” which reached No. 1 on the United Kingdom charts and contains many of the songs from his Ravinia show.  

Coming back to the stage after a 90-minute show, his first encore song was “One Hell of a Life,” which he sang heartfelt as if it was his biography.  

Jones definitely feels blessed to have had the life he has lived.  

He closed first with a raucous version of “Johnny B. Goode” and told of the story of when he went with Elvis Presley to see Chuck Berry perform in Las Vegas. Presley proclaimed to Jones that Berry was the real king of rock ’n’ roll. With the crowd still in a rock ’n’ roll frenzy Jones said that he grew up listening to the rock ’n’ roll music of the 1950s and that his favorite song was Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.”  

With the mention of the song Jones and his stellar band kicked it into high gear and rocked the roof off the pavilion. Tom Jones has one of the best voices in the history of rock ’n’ roll music. He certainly is in the team picture and probably should be one of the team captains. There is a line in Leonard Cohen’s song “Tower of Song” that when Jones sang it everybody in the crowd loudly cheered their agreement, “I was born like this, I had no choice. I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”  

Yes, you were Tom, yes you were.