Born Thomas John Woodward in Treforest, Wales on 7 June 1940, Jones was already an international star when he was handed Jerry Lee Lewis’s country album at Colony Records in New York and took the song to his recording manager Peter Sullivan. Les Reed’s arrangement pulled it out of Nashville and into pop, and the Decca single (F 22511), released on 28 October 1966, reached No. 1 in the UK on 1 December and stayed seven weeks; it also topped the Irish chart and reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. It is a superb piece of record-making — the restraint Jones holds until the final verse is the whole reason the song works on a mass audience. The only thing wrong with how it is remembered is the chronology. In September 2006 he sang it as a duet with Lewis and publicly credited him as the source.