It is a sad irony that Sheri laFontaine’s love letter to the Glass City —“Toledo, My Hometown” —appears on “Holiday Wishes 2” just as she is making a new city her home. Although laFontaine recently moved to Nashville in further pursuit of her music career, she speaks of Toledo, and the song it inspired, with great warmth.
“It really is a special thing to think back to the time when I first wrote that song,” laFontaine said. “I lived in Toledo for eight years, and I fell in love with this city that I had heard was —all the songs that I had heard about it, John Denver’s song (“Saturday Night In Toledo, Ohio”) and different things, had been, you know, picturing Toledo in a negative light. And I just felt it was high time somebody said something positive about it.”
Her desire to take a musical stand for Toledoans came to a head in the most obvious of places — at a baseball game.
“I was at the Mud Hens game, I think, three years ago, when I started writing the first verse to the song, and then it turned into a Christmas song and [101.5] The River picked it up,” laFontaine said. “When I recorded it, we sent it to [101.5] at, like, 3 in the morning when we were done taping. And by 6 a.m., it was on ‘Mary Beth and Rick.’ It was just amazing,” she said.
Over the past few years, laFontaine’s self-published track has become a holiday staple on The River. She produced copies herself that “sold as fast as we could print them.”
She said there’s something about the track that speaks to a love of tradition — especially local traditions.
“I love the fact that we can go to the Lights Before Christmas. I love the fact that we’re gonna go and see either ‘Scrooge’ or ‘The Nutcracker’ at the Stranahan. It’s all part of the holiday theater. And I think that’s what makes that song so special to people, is that people from all over the Toledo area can connect, because we all do the same things every holiday season.”
Even now, as she works for a company called Vertical Sky in Nashville, laFontaine isn’t giving up on those local traditions. During the course of this interview, she was on her way back to Toledo to visit for Thanksgiving, and plans on returning again for Christmas. And she spoke with great pride about how “Toledo My Hometown” has now found a new home on “Holiday Wishes 2.”
“This is what the holidays are about,” she said. “Helping others. And I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nurse, I’m nothing like that. All I know to help with is my gift, and that’s music.”
