In the spring of 2016, Tom Jones was on tour in the Philippines when the phone call came from Los Angeles. A doctor had first said Linda’s lung cancer was treatable. Then the doctor called back. The cancer was so aggressive, Tom later told AARP, that it was terminal.
He canceled the rest of his Asian dates. The only public explanation was a “serious illness in his immediate family.” At the time, there was no public word that Linda was sick. He flew straight to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, where she had about a week left.
The Conversation in the Hospital Room
Melinda Rose Woodward, known to everyone as Linda, had been Tom’s sweetheart since they were kids in South Wales. They married in 1957, when they were both 16. Through all the years of fame, he called her the most important thing in his life.
When Tom walked into her room, Linda was sitting up in bed with a big smile. Tom later said he and Mark were “like basket cases.” In a 2015 autobiography, written before she got sick, he had already suggested he wouldn’t be able to keep singing if something happened to her. Now it was happening.
He told her the truth: he didn’t think he could sing again. The songs, he said, would stick in his throat. He asked her if she understood the cancer was incurable. She said she did. Tom later described her as the calmest person in the room.
“Of course you will,” she told him. “I’ve got to leave. I know I don’t have long now.”
Then Linda laid out what came next. She told Tom and their son, Mark, that they had to “mentor one another now and carry on.” She told Tom to move back to London, where the family was, something the two of them had planned to do together. And she told him to keep singing.
“Don’t fall with me,” she said. “Don’t come down with me.”
Tom stayed by her side for her last days. Linda died on Sunday, April 10, 2016, at 75, with her husband and loved ones around her. They had been married 59 years.
Keeping the Promise Was Harder Than Making It
Tom Jones has never pretended the next part was easy. He has said he could barely get out of bed. It was Mark who pushed him to see a grief therapist in Los Angeles.
The therapist told him not to make any drastic moves. Then she asked which song would be the hardest for him to sing. Tom knew right away: Bob Dylan’s “What Good Am I?” He had recorded it on his 2010 album Praise & Blame, and he has said it was one of Linda’s favorites. After she died, the song left him asking whether he had done enough for her.
The therapist’s advice was simple. Sing that one first. If you can get through it, you’ll know you can do the rest. Tom gathered a rhythm section in a hotel and did exactly that.
That June, about two months after Linda’s death, he walked back onto a stage at Hampton Court Palace. He also did what she asked about home. He sold the Los Angeles house where they had lived for decades and moved back to London.
The Song He Didn’t Write
Five years later, Tom Jones released Surrounded by Time. The first song on it was “I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall.”
Tom did not write it, and it was not written for Linda. It came from Bernice Johnson Reagon, the civil rights singer who founded the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. The song is about loving someone enough to help them for as long as you can, while refusing to be pulled down when they go.
When Tom heard it, he heard that hospital room. He told interviewers the song was there because of what Linda said to him, and that he sang it for her. He was also honest about one detail.
“Linda didn’t actually use the word ‘crumble,’ but she may as well have.”
Surrounded by Time came out on April 23, 2021, and went straight to No. 1 on the UK albums chart. At 80, Tom Jones became the oldest man ever to top that chart, the man who once said he couldn’t get the words out.
One More Thing She Asked
When Tom told the story on BBC’s The One Show in April 2021, he shared one last piece of that conversation. Linda didn’t want him carrying the hospital room onto the stage with him.
“When you get on the stage, think of me laughing.”
That is how he remembers her now, Tom said. And it does lift him up.