The duet LeAnn Rimes had wanted for years did not happen on a concert stage. It happened in the quiet stretch between two blind auditions in September 2024, when she and Sir Tom Jones, then 84, sang “Let It Be Me” together with no band, no rehearsal and no plan, while the rest of the coaching panel looked on.
A Meeting at Top of the Pops
The Voice UK had brought in three new coaches that year: LeAnn Rimes and McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones. They joined the two coaches who had been there since the show began in 2012, will.i.am and Tom Jones.
LeAnn already had history with one of them. Asked in ITV’s press interviews before the series whether she had met any of her fellow coaches, she answered:
“I met Sir Tom when I was 15 years old at Top of the Pops.”
She had met will.i.am only in passing, she added, and had never met the two McFly men before filming. With Tom Jones, the connection went back to the late 1990s, when a teenage LeAnn was riding hits like “How Do I Live” and he was already more than three decades into his career.
The Conversation Between Auditions
The duet started as small talk. While the coaches waited for the next singer, LeAnn Rimes asked Tom Jones what he likes to sing at his concerts. He told her he likes a mixture of songs, and then explained why he still sings the old hits:
“I think once a hit, always a hit, you know, there is something in a hit song that remains that way.”
That was when LeAnn confessed she had always wanted to sing with him. Tom asked whether she liked the Everly Brothers. “I love The Everly Brothers,” she told him. (Some reports give his question as whether she knew the Everly Brothers; either way, her answer was the same.)
Tom Jones suggested “Let It Be Me” and started singing, unaccompanied. LeAnn came in with him, and for the length of the song the two of them held a harmony that will.i.am, Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones simply sat and watched.
A Song With a Long Road
The song Tom Jones picked was older than his own career. “Let It Be Me” began in France as “Je t’appartiens,” written by Gilbert Bécaud with lyricist Pierre Delanoë and released by Bécaud in 1955. Manny Curtis wrote the English words.
The Everly Brothers recorded it in December 1959, at the suggestion of their producer Archie Bleyer, and the Cadence Records single entered the charts in January 1960. It climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. Tom Jones was 19 years old that winter, still years away from “It’s Not Unusual.”
Country fans know the song another way, too. In 1969, Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry took their duet version to No. 14 on Billboard’s country chart. So when Tom Jones and LeAnn Rimes sang it as a duet, they were stepping into a song that had already been passed between voices for nearly 70 years, exactly the kind of hit he had just told her never stops being one.
“My Dream Duet”
LeAnn Rimes posted the clip on her official YouTube channel with a caption that said it plainly: “Well, it looks like I got my dream duet… your voice is like no other.”
Viewers at home heard it the same way, and many could not believe the man singing was 84. “To sing like that at 84. Absolute legend,” one fan wrote after the episode aired.
Neither of Them Sits There Now
That duet can no longer happen on that panel. LeAnn Rimes coached The Voice UK for that single 2024 series before reportedly stepping away to focus on work in the United States, and by the next series Kelly Rowland had joined the panel.
Then, in September 2026, Tom Jones announced that he would not be back for the 2027 series. He said ITV had offered him only a much-reduced role, and he made it clear the decision was not his:
“To be clear, I did not want to leave The Voice as I love the show and really appreciate the audience.”
He had coached 13 of the show’s 14 series and won three of them. At 86, he was back onstage in Los Angeles this November with his Come Gather Round tour. The chairs where he and LeAnn Rimes once traded harmonies on a 1960 love song now belong to other people, but the clip she shared still carries the words she chose for it: her dream duet.
Where did you first hear “Let It Be Me” — the Everly Brothers on the radio, or Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry years later?