The song was “Near You.” In early 1977, George Jones and Tammy Wynette took it to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart. Their daughter, Georgette Jones, was six years old at the time. In 2014, she recorded it herself, singing Tammy’s part, and the voice singing George’s part belonged to Sammy Kershaw, a man who had loved George Jones’s singing since he was four or five years old.
The new version closed a circle that started in a Louisiana honky-tonk more than forty years earlier.
The boy who cried at George Jones records
Sammy Kershaw grew up in Kaplan, Louisiana. He has said he was only four or five when he first remembers hearing George Jones sing, and that he could hear a tear in George’s voice that made him cry. He got his first guitar at 11, and by 12 he was already playing clubs, honky-tonks and barrooms in south Louisiana.
He was 14 when his hero walked into one of those clubs. Sammy was on the bill that night, singing a couple of songs with the band before George came on. Years later, in a 1994 interview, he still remembered what George had on his feet.
“He had these western boots on, they were bright blue.” (Sammy Kershaw, 1994)
To a teenager playing bars at night, those boots meant fame and fortune. The two of them sat and talked for a while that evening. After that first meeting, Sammy opened several more shows for George Jones when he came through the region.
Forty-two years of friendship
When Sammy Kershaw finally landed a record deal and broke through in the early 1990s, critics compared his voice to George Jones’s almost from the first single. Sammy never minded. He later said that being compared to George was like a ballplayer being compared to Mickey Mantle. In 1993, the two even recorded a duet together, “Never Bit a Bullet Like This,” for George’s album High-Tech Redneck.
George Jones died on April 26, 2013, at 81. Speaking to The Boot the following year, Sammy described their bond simply: friends for 42 years, a man he loved and still missed every day.
He answered the loss the way a singer does. He produced a full tribute album, Do You Know Me? A Tribute to George Jones, and released it on his own label, Big Hit Records, on July 22, 2014. Most of the 14 tracks were George’s own classics, from “The Grand Tour” and “White Lightning” to “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Two were new songs inspired by George’s life. One was a duet.
The song with two lives
“Near You” did not start as a country song. Nashville bandleader Francis Craig wrote the melody, with lyrics by Kermit Goell, and his 1947 recording became the biggest record in America that year. It ran 17 straight weeks at No. 1 on one of Billboard’s lists at the time, while the magazine’s best-seller chart counts its run at 12 weeks.
George Jones and Tammy Wynette recorded their version in late 1974, while they were still married. They divorced in 1975. Their label released the song in late 1976, and by early 1977, a love song about wanting nothing more than to be near someone was sitting at No. 1, sung by a couple who no longer shared a home. It turned out to be the last No. 1 single of Tammy Wynette’s career.
So when Sammy Kershaw planned his tribute, this was not just another George Jones hit. It belonged to two people, and one of them was no longer there to sing it either. Tammy Wynette had died in 1998.
“Her mother’s part”
Sammy knew from the start who should sing Tammy’s lines.
“There was no way that I couldn’t ask Georgette Jones to do her mother’s part.” (Sammy Kershaw)
He said Georgette agreed right away. She had grown up on her parents’ stages and had been building her own career as a country singer, and she had her own reason for saying yes. She called it a huge honor to record the duet with him, and said Sammy had a special bond with her father and that George would be proud of what he had done.
In the album’s liner notes, she put it in one line that the Washington Times later quoted in its review: Sammy Kershaw, she wrote, has “the closest voice I know to my Dad’s.”
What listeners heard
The album debuted at No. 37 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, Sammy Kershaw’s first Top 40 album there in more than a decade. Reviewers singled out the duet. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described Georgette taking on her mother’s role as part of a warm and tender tribute. No Depression was more measured, noting that it was not George and Tammy, but calling it a good pairing and a fine tribute to her parents.
That is probably the fairest way to hear it. On that track, the daughter of country music’s most famous duet partners sang her mother’s lines to the man her father had known since he was a 14-year-old opening act, on a song her parents took to No. 1 when she was six.
A few tracks later comes the album’s title song, “Do You Know Me,” a new ballad that tells George Jones’s life story for listeners who never got the chance to know him.