AT 86, TOM JONES REVEALS WHY HE NEVER REMARRIED AFTER LOSING LINDA — “THERE WAS ONE LOVE OF MY LIFE”
For more than sixty years, the world has known him as Tom Jones — the unmistakable Welsh voice, the commanding performer, the man who could walk onto a stage and make thousands of people rise to their feet before he had sung a single note. But before the fame, before the screaming audiences, before the records and television appearances, he was simply Tommy Woodward, a boy from Pontypridd who fell in love with a girl named Melinda “Linda” Trenchard. And after everything that followed, Jones has made one thing unmistakably clear: there was never going to be another Linda.
Their story began long before either of them could have imagined the life waiting ahead. They knew each other as children in Wales, and Jones has spoken over the years about loving Linda from an extraordinarily young age. They married in 1957, when both were 16, and their son Mark was born that same year. At the time there was no international superstar named Tom Jones. There was only a young working-class couple beginning a marriage with little idea that within a few years, Tommy Woodward’s voice would carry him far beyond Pontypridd.
Then came 1965, and everything changed. “It’s Not Unusual” became a breakthrough hit, and Tommy Woodward became Tom Jones in the eyes of the world. Suddenly there were television cameras, international tours, Las Vegas, enormous crowds, and the kind of attention that can transform an ordinary marriage into something almost impossible to protect. Linda, however, never seemed interested in becoming part of the spectacle. While her husband became one of the most recognizable entertainers of his generation, she increasingly chose a private life away from the cameras.
Their marriage was far from conventional, and Jones has never pretended otherwise. Over the years, he spoke openly about his relationships with other women during the height of his fame. Those chapters complicated the story of Tom and Linda, and reducing their marriage to a perfect romance would erase realities that both had to confront. Yet the marriage endured for 59 years, through fame, separation caused by touring, mistakes, arguments, changing fortunes, and the enormous pressures that accompanied Jones’s career.
That endurance is part of what makes Linda’s death in 2016 so central to understanding the man Jones became afterward. Linda had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and her condition deteriorated rapidly. Jones later described the shock of how quickly events moved. After nearly six decades together, the person who had existed beside him since before the world knew his stage name was suddenly slipping away.
In those final days, something happened that Jones would continue talking about for years afterward. He was devastated by the thought of life without Linda, and music itself suddenly seemed impossible. He has recalled telling her that he did not know what he was going to do because he did not think he would be able to sing after she was gone.
Linda’s response became a kind of instruction for the rest of his life.
She told him that he had to continue.
She urged him not to fall with her, but to keep doing what they had planned. Most poignantly, she told him that when he returned to the stage, he should not remember her as she looked during those painful final days. Instead, he should think about their years together and remember her laughing.
It is difficult to imagine a more powerful instruction for a performer whose entire adult life had been shared, in one form or another, with the same woman. Linda was not asking him to forget her. She was asking him to remember her differently. She wanted the memory of their life together to become something that lifted him rather than something that destroyed him.
And Jones listened.
Returning to music did not mean the grief disappeared. In many ways, his later work became deeper because the grief remained. His voice, already weathered by age, carried a different emotional weight. Songs about time, mortality, regret, memory, and love suddenly belonged to a man who had experienced a loss that no amount of fame could soften. The stage became not an escape from Linda, but one of the places where he could continue carrying her with him.
After her death, Jones also made significant changes to his life. He sold the Los Angeles home where they had lived and returned to Britain, something he said reflected plans Linda had wanted them to pursue. The move carried enormous symbolic weight. The Los Angeles years had represented a major chapter of his international success, but without Linda, the house no longer represented the same future.
Then came another remarkable chapter.
In 2021, when Jones was 80, he released Surrounded by Time, an album filled with reflections on aging, memory and mortality. It reached No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart, making him, at the time, the oldest man to top that chart with an album of new material. More than half a century after “It’s Not Unusual” had transformed his life, Jones was still standing behind a microphone — but the man singing was carrying experiences that the young Welsh performer of 1965 could never have imagined.
And inevitably, people asked about love.
Would he ever marry again?
Could someone else eventually enter his life?
Jones’s answer has remained strikingly simple. Linda was the love of his life. He has spoken about wishing she were still beside him so that they could have grown old together. Whatever complications existed within their marriage — and Jones has never hidden that there were many — his description of Linda after her death has consistently returned to the same idea: she occupied a place in his life that he did not believe another person could replace.
There is something particularly moving about that when one remembers that Linda knew him before “Tom Jones” existed.
She knew Tommy Woodward.
She knew the boy from Wales before the tailored suits, before Las Vegas, before the television specials, before the records sold around the world. She had seen the entire transformation from the beginning. Fame introduced millions of people to Tom Jones, but Linda had known the person underneath the name.
Perhaps that helps explain why losing her affected him so profoundly.
When someone has shared almost your entire life, their absence is not confined to an empty chair or a quiet room. They exist inside your memories of who you used to be. They remember versions of you that nobody else ever met. They knew you before the victories, before the disappointments, before age changed your face and time changed your priorities.
Linda represented all of that for Jones.
She was connected to the boy he had been, the young husband and father he became, the singer struggling to make something of his voice, the international star navigating fame, and finally the older man forced to imagine life without the person who had been present at the beginning.
That is why her final encouragement mattered so much. “Keep singing” was more than advice about a career. It was permission to continue living. Returning to the stage did not betray their history. It honored the future they had discussed together.
And so Jones kept walking beneath the lights.
Night after night, year after year, he continued singing. The voice changed, naturally. Age added shadows and textures that youth could never manufacture. But perhaps that is precisely why his later performances have carried such emotional force. Behind the familiar songs stands a man who understands that time eventually takes nearly everything a person assumes will always be there.
What it cannot necessarily take is memory.
When Jones remembers Linda laughing instead of remembering her hospital bed, he is doing exactly what she asked him to do. He is choosing nearly six decades of shared life over the final days of illness. He remembers the girl from Pontypridd rather than allowing cancer to have the final word.
That may also explain why the question of remarriage has always seemed different for him. His answer is not a declaration that nobody else could ever be worthy. It is a statement about the particular history he and Linda shared. There can only be one person who knew him before everything happened. There can only be one person who walked beside him from adolescence into old age. There can only be one woman who married Tommy Woodward before the rest of the world fell in love with Tom Jones.
Nearly seventy years after those two Welsh teenagers began their life together, that distinction still matters.
The crowds know the legend.
The record books know the achievements.
Music history knows Tom Jones.
But Linda knew Tommy.
And whenever the older man walks onto a stage, hears the first applause, and begins another song, there is something quietly beautiful in remembering the promise behind it all.
He kept singing.
Not because grief disappeared.
Not because Linda could ever be replaced.
But because, when he believed he might never sing again, the woman who had known him almost his entire life told him to keep going — and to remember her laughing.
At 86, after all the stages, all the applause, all the mistakes and all the years, perhaps that is the simplest explanation for why there was never another marriage.
Tom Jones had millions of admirers. But Tommy Woodward had one Linda.