Tom Jones Reveals the Elvis Song That “Made Him Cry” 

Somewhere on a highway between Los Angeles and Memphis in the middle of the 1960s, the biggest star in the world is doing the driving himself. He has a bus.  He has a long road ahead of him. And on the radio, a song comes on that stops him cold. He doesn’t  just turn it up. He reaches for the phone, calls a friend at a Memphis radio station, and makes a request that no ordinary listener would ever  dream of making.

Here is Tom Jones telling the story decades later.  So, he called this DJ, a friend of his in Memphis, and he once he got within uh earshot of uh of this radio station, he said, “I want you to play the  Play it continuously    until I get there. Not once, not twice, over and over  for as long as it takes a man to drive across half a country.

Now, one quick note  before we go any further. This video is commentary based on publicly available interviews,  memoirs, and reports. Where accounts differ, or something is one person’s version, I’ll say so. So, who is telling us  this? Tom Jones. The Welsh singer who met Elvis Presley  in 1965 in Hollywood right at the start of his own career.

The two of them became real friends, the kind who overlapped in Las Vegas and  sang together late into the night. We’ve told the story of that first meeting before. This is a different story. This one is about a single song, a single radio station, and the strange, moving thing a song can do. Even to the king of rock and roll.

But to understand why Elvis reacted the way he did, you first have to understand  the song itself. And the song has a secret. The song is  called The Green, Green Grass of Home. And most people who hum it have no idea what it’s actually  about. It was written by a country songwriter named Curly Putman, Claude Putman Jr.

, and  first recorded by a singer called Johnny Darrell in 1965. That same year, the country star  Porter Wagoner carried it onto the American country chart, where it climbed to number  four. On the surface, it sounds like the gentlest thing in the world. A man steps off a train in his old hometown.

His mother and father are there to meet him. His sweetheart is running down the road, and the grass is green under his feet. It’s warm.  It’s tender. It sounds exactly like coming home. And then the final verse turns the whole thing over. Because the man isn’t home at all. He wakes up, and there are cold, gray walls around him.

   He’s a prisoner, a condemned man, dreaming of a homecoming he will never really have. The only way he’ll ever come home is to be laid to rest beneath that same  green grass. That’s the twist Putman built into it. A song  that feels like an embrace, right up until you realize it’s a goodbye.

Hold onto that. Because it’s going to matter for what Elvis did next. And here’s how deep this song runs. It didn’t stay a small country record. Over the years, it was recorded by what feels like half the history of American music. Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Joan Baez, Kenny Rogers, Roger Miller, George Jones,    even the Grateful Dead.

There’s a strange footnote, too. The man who wrote it, Curly Putman, owned a farm in Tennessee.  And that farm is the one Paul McCartney was singing about years later in the Wings song Junior’s Farm. One quiet songwriter sitting at the center of an astonishing web. But of all the people who would eventually be pulled into this song’s orbit, one Welshman was about to change its  life completely.

So, how does a young singer from Wales end up with an American country song? In 1965,  Tom Jones was in New York appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. And while he was  there, he went digging through a record shop the way music obsessed people do, and came across a version of the song recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis.

   He couldn’t shake it. He took it home, made it his own, and released his version in Britain in 1966.  And it was enormous. It went to number one in the United Kingdom on the 1st of December  that year. And it did not move. Seven straight weeks at number one. Through Christmas into the new year.

Seven more weeks at the top in Ireland as well. It became one of the defining records of Tom Jones’s early career. A song people would ask him to sing for the next 60  years. And crucially, it crossed the ocean. Which means that somewhere back in America, on a car radio, on a bus radio, that big Welsh voice was now traveling the very same highways as everyone else’s, including one very particular listener behind the wheel of his own bus heading home to Memphis.

Here’s something people  forget about Elvis Presley. For all the private jets that came later, there was a long stretch of his life where the thing he loved most was simply to drive. In the early 60s, he bought himself a full-size  touring coach and had it customized into what one description called a small apartment on wheels.

 Room enough for him and all his friends to travel between Hollywood,  where he was making movie after movie, and Memphis, where his heart always was. He was careful about it. He deliberately left his name off the outside of the bus so nobody would look twice as it rolled through town. His friends would pass  the miles playing cards and Yahtzee.

And right through the middle of the decade, all the way to 1967,  Elvis did the driving himself. The others relaxed. He kept his hands on the wheel. Tom Jones saw exactly this side of him and described that  habit plainly.  And they would get in this in this touring bus and he would drive.

 He loved to drive.  He loved to drive. And that’s  the picture you need to hold. Not Elvis the icon frozen under stage lights, Elvis the man off the clock, a movie finished, gathering his friends,    pointing a bus east and pulling out onto the open road toward home. And this, Tom tells us, is when it happened.

Somewhere on that long drive back to Memphis, the green green grass of home came on the radio. And it reached him. So, he did the thing we heard at the very start of this  video. He called a friend at a Memphis radio station. Now, Tom doesn’t name that friend. But Elvis had one famous DJ friend in Memphis, a man named George Klein, someone he’d known since their school days at Humes High back in 1948 and who spun records on Memphis radio for decades.

 Elvis even had a nickname for him, GK. That friendship lasted right to the end of Elvis’s life. And once Elvis got close enough to pick up that Memphis station signal, he asked for the song to be played on a loop, continuously, until he arrived. Picture what that actually means. The king of rock and roll turning an entire city’s radio station into the personal soundtrack of his own homecoming.

All for a record made by a friend from Wales. Stop and sit with that because it’s easy to rush straight  past it. Elvis Presley did not need to promote anyone. He was the promotion. Everything he touched turned  into attention. And here he is, using that enormous gravity  not for himself, but to push a friend’s record out over the airwaves of his own hometown.

Tom understood exactly how rare that was. To have the most  famous singer alive become your personal promoter for free, out of nothing but love for a song. Listen to how he says it.  So it was great. So it was, you know, to to have Elvis Presley promoting you, you know, as your promotion man, you know, it was unbelievable.

 Unbelievable. That’s the word he  keeps reaching for. And it fits. If the human side of these legends is what keeps you watching, subscribe to Retro Secrets. This whole series is built out of small moments exactly like this one. Now, here’s the part that catches people off guard. Elvis didn’t only fall for Tom’s records from a distance.

 He also went hunting for songs to hand him. Songs he thought Tom could  sing better than he could. Tom told this next part on American television, on Conan. Elvis, he said, had been approached with a song.    Somebody had tried to pitch it to him, and Elvis listened to it and came to a conclusion that almost no star on Earth would ever come to.

He decided the song wasn’t right for himself, but that it was perfect for his friend. So he brought it to Tom personally and kept after him to record it. Think about that for a moment. A songwriter’s whole dream is to get a song into the hands of Elvis Presley,  and Elvis, holding one, looks at it and thinks of somebody else.

Here’s how Tom put it.  Yeah, someone had approached him with a song and he said, I think it’s not right for me, but it’d be great for Tom.” And then he kept bugging you, “You got to record this song.” Is that right?  Uh yes.  “Not right for me, but it’d be great for Tom.” That is not the sentence of a rival.

That’s the sentence of a fan, a real one, who happened to also be the most famous entertainer on the planet,  the king of rock and roll, quietly playing talent scout for a friend from Wales. So, let me ask you right here. When was the last time someone with nothing to gain went out of their way to lift you up the way Elvis did for Tom? Tell me in the comments.

And now we circle back to the question we opened with, the radio station, the song on a loop. Why that  song? Of all the records in the world, why did the green, green grass of home reach into Elvis  Presley and hold on? Remember the secret buried inside it. It isn’t really a happy song about coming home.

It’s a song about a man who can only come home in his dreams, and who knows, somewhere deep down, that his real homecoming is the very last one. It’s a song about distance, about missing a place you’re no longer sure you can fully return to. And now think about who is hearing it. A man from Memphis, hundreds of miles away, driving through the dark to get back to the one place that ever truly grounded him.

A man who had already lost his  mother, the person that home had been built around. A man for whom the word home  was never a simple word again. Is it any wonder a song  like that found him on that road? Tom saw the effect it had, and he described it about as plainly as a thing like that can be described.

 And he said it made him cry, you know, it  it it got to him. And then he recorded it himself afterwards.  It made him cry. And then, and this is the part that turns a lovely story into something more. He recorded  it himself. Not right away. It took years. It wasn’t until 1975, nearly a decade after Tom’s version had topped the charts, that Elvis walked into a Hollywood studio and cut his own version of The Green, Green Grass of Home.

It appeared on his album simply called Today, released in May of that year. And there’s a quiet detail in the timing. Those sessions came just weeks after his own father had been taken to hospital with a heart attack. A song about home and family recorded by a son in a hard, uncertain stretch of his life. And here’s the detail that closes the whole loop.

Historians of Elvis’s recordings note  the exact same habit Tom described from the other side. That Elvis loved Tom Jones’s version so much that, while traveling, he would have his friends call up local radio stations and ask them to play it. Two separate sources.    One from Tom’s memory, one from the documented record of Elvis’s own life.

And they line  up. So, what do we actually know? And what remains Tom’s telling? We know Elvis recorded the song in 1975. That’s documented. We know he was a devoted fan of Tom’s  version. That’s documented, too. The image of the bus, the phone call,  the exact words to that DJ, that reaches us through Tom Jones, his  account, told his way.

But it fits everything else we know about the man. And sometimes that’s as close to the truth as history will let us stand. So, here’s where it leaves us. A song written by a country songwriter in Tennessee about a man who can never really go home made into a worldwide hit by a Welshman who found it in a New York record shop heard on a car radio by an American king driving his own bus through the dark toward  Memphis.

And it moved him so much that he took over a radio station for it, and years later sang it himself.    Music does that. It reaches across every border we think matters, and finds the one thing all of us share. So, I’ll leave the real question with you. What’s the song that does that to you? The one  that, no matter where you are in the world, pulls you straight back home.

Tell me in the comments. I read them, and I’d love to know. And if you’d like more of these, Elvis seen through the people who actually knew him,    like this video and subscribe to Retro Secrets. I’ll see you in the  next one.