Singer Wynonna Judd paid tribute to her mother, Naomi Judd, at the 2023 CMT Music Awards nearly one year after her death.
On Sunday, Wynonna Judd gave a touching performance of “I Want To Know What Love Is” with singer Ashley McBryde.
As she sang the song, she proceeded to point to the sky and said, “Mama, you need to be here.”
During the 2022 CMT Music Awards, Wynonna Judd and Naomi Judd performed together for the last time. It was their first time performing together again after two decades, according to Entertainment Tonight (ET).
Wynonna Judd spoke with Entertainment Tonight (ET) after the performance about the anniversary of her mother’s death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=034-BTvvHSQ
“It’s an anniversary and we all have anniversaries. I’m not terminally unique,” she shared.
She added, “We all have something that we look at and go ‘what the hell?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I don’t understand’ and that was my ‘I don’t understand.'”
She also shared how this tragedy has motivated her to “help people.”
“It’s like, look at my face. Look at this face. If you’re having a crappy day, and just think, ‘If I can do it so can you,’ because it’s not easy,” she stated.
In April 2022, Naomi Judd died by suicide after a long battle with depression. She was 76 years old.
A month later, Wynonna Judd spoke openly about her grief in an Instagram post.
“Before I sat down to write this, I thought, ‘No…I just don’t know what to say.’ Then, I heard the words from my life coach asking me, ‘What do you know?’ And I began to cry.” “WHAT DO I KNOW??” she wrote.
Continuing, she wrote, “I DO know, that the pain of losing Mom on 4/30 to suicide is so great that I often feel like I’m not ever going to be able to fully accept and surrender to the truth that she left the way she did. This cannot be how The Judds story ends.”