Songfacts®:

• They say time heals all wounds, but Charley Pride ain't buying it. On his first hit single, the country singer holds out hope that the old adage is true, but insists his former love is "too much to forget." Pride's first two singles, "The Snakes Crawl at Night" and "Before I Met You" failed to make the country chart, but "Just Between You and Me" soared to #9 and earned Pride a Grammy nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.
• Pride recognized the song's potential immediately and wanted it for his debut single, but producer Jack Clement, who also wrote it, nixed the idea. Pride told Songfacts: "He said he didn't want me singing any gospel song, any love song, and 'I don't want you singing my song because I don't want people thinking I got you here and I'm going to push all of my songs on you.' But when it was my third single and went to #9 and was nominated for a Grammy, that tells me something."
• Clement was also concerned about an African American singer performing a love song for the mostly white country crowd in the midst of the Civil Rights Era. "They didn't want me singing love songs at that point because [racists might wonder] who I was singing those love songs to and what color were they?" Pride told Michael Streissguth, author of Voices Of Country: Interviews with Classic Country Performers. "So all of that would dial into the equation, which I didn't kick then and I'm not kicking now because I think they had a point. We weren't even off the ground, but it ended up that all my fans want to hear me sing is love songs."
• The single's success also gave Pride the confidence to trust his gut when selecting songs. He explained in the same 2004 interview: "I said, 'So now what I'm going to try to do is if I hear a song make sure Charley, level with yourself do you like that song?' That's what I've tried to do and still do all these years. The songs that I like the lyric content of, my fans will like it."
• Pride got the race issue out of the way early on and, when pressed in interviews, prefers to focus on his music rather than the color of this skin. In 1967, the same year "Just Between You and Me" became a hit, Pride became one of the few African American artists to grace the legendary Grand Ole Opry stage. The crowd was slightly taken aback when they realized the man they heard on the radio was black. Pride told us, "I said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I realize it's very unique, me coming out here on a country music show having this permanent tan. I ain't got time to talk about our pigments. I got only 10 minutes. I'm going to do my three songs. And if I have time, I'll do maybe a Hank Williams song.'"
  
  The audience ended up loving him and, says Pride, never stopped: "Once I come out and start singing, it didn't make any difference whether I was pink. They wanted to hear me sing again. So that's the way my career has been all these years."
• This features Lloyd Green on pedal steel guitar. The prolific session musician also contributed to recordings by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, The Byrds, and many others.
• Pride, accompanied by Green, made his television debut singing this on The Lawrence Welk Show on April 29, 1967.
• Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner covered this for their first collaborative album, also titled Just Between You And Me, in 1968, but didn't release it as a single. It's also been recorded by Johnny Paycheck, Bobby Helms, Wanda Jackson, Marty Stuart, and Neal McCoy (who covered it for the 2013 tribute album Pride).