Jack Jones, who sang “The Love Boat” theme song, has died. He was 86.
“Jack Jones passed away last night at 9:17 p.m. at Eisenhower Hospital after battling leukemia for well over two years,” Jones’ rep, Milt Suchin, said in a statement shared with Fox News Digital Thursday. “He passed peacefully holding hands with his wife Eleonora and his beloved toy poodle, Ivy.”
Born in 1938 to movie stars Allan Jones and Irene Hervey, Jones was destined for greatness at a young age.
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After years of performing with his father, Jones signed with Capitol Records in 1959 and, later, with Kapp Records, where he recorded his infamous ballad, “Lollipops and Roses.”
Some of his other memorable songs include “Wives and Lovers,” “The Race Is On” and “Lady.”
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In the mid-1960s, Frank Sinatra declared him the “next major star of show business,” according to The Washington Post.
“I was thrilled,” Jones told The London Observer in 2002, according to the Post. “There was only one problem: He never retired. When a guy reaches that level of fame, there’s no elbowing him out. A lot of us weren’t willing to give up what Frank did to achieve his mystique. I wasn’t worried about having some great babe on my arm, but that’s important if you want to be a star.”
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The “Love Boat” theme song was recorded by Jones and released as a hit single in 1979. It was replaced for the ninth and tenth seasons by a cover version sung by Dionne Warwick.
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“His weathered voice is filled with seams and crevices,” Stephen Holden, a New York Times music critic, wrote in 2008. “His world-weary cragginess coincides with an impulse to take ballads at extremely slow tempos. … Because the lower end of Mr. Jones’s voice has deepened, his sudden flights into a quasi-falsetto are more dramatic than ever.”
Jones is survived by his wife of 15 years, Eleonara, and three daughters.
