Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig james-smith.org. NS
Answer
james-smith.org. 5 NS ns-568.awsdns-07.net.
james-smith.org. 5 NS ns-743.awsdns-28.net.
james-smith.org. 5 NS ns-90.awsdns-11.com.
james-smith.org. 5 NS ns-481.awsdns-60.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0