The old hometown looks the same as I step down from the train
Continuing my trip back through the 1968 album charts.
28/01/68 : Green, Green Grass Of Home - Tom Jones
Our third visit with Tom this year - it's hard to imagine it's going to be massively different from either of the others.
Nope - it's pretty much the same. I suspect it's all covers, but it's a combination of known covers, unknown covers and the title track, which he's best known for. I'd say "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and "Ring Of Fire" are unnecessarily cheesy for me, but at least he doesn't go down the Engelbert cheese route. It's a historical curiosity, but no more than that for me
We're at #27 in the charts this week on his 44th week of a 49 week run, having peaked at #3 for four weeks from his sixth week - he was unlucky to be caught behind More Of The Monkees and TSOM. The top five this week were Sgt Pepper, TSOM, Val Doonican, The Four Tops best-of and British Motown Chartbusters, the highest new entry was Herb Alpert all the way down at #40 and there were no new women in the charts.
Wikipedia has very little on the album - the only thing of note is one of the critics saying that "with this album Jones began to abandon his teenage pop audience" which suggests we've got some interesting Tom albums to meet in '66 or '67 (I can assure you that's not going to be happening any time soon though). As a diversion, I went to the entry for the title track - it was first recorded in '65 by Johnny Darrel and was made popular by Porter Wagoner's version from the same year (fantastically country!) but Tom learned about it from Jerry Lee Lewis's version.
"Customers also listened to" John Barry (Tom recorded the theme tune to Thunderball), Burt Bacharach, Engelbert Humperdinck and Patrizio Buanne (never heard of 'im!). I didn't mind this, but there's nothing here to make you stray from a Tom Jones best-of.
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