Burleson Star (Burleson, Tex.), Vol. 26, No. 5, Ed. 1 Friday, October 19, 1990 Page: 4 of 20
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4—Burleson Star, Friday, October 19, 1990
It's often rocky, bumpy, and
full of detours, but Sherry
Fontaine's
hoping her
music leads
her on the
By JAMES MOODY
m J uick, name a half dozen of the top female country singers.
VjV No problem; there's an an array of talented country gals in the music
spotlight. For starters, there's Barbara Mandrell, Crystal Gayle,
Emmy Lou Harris, Reba McEntire, Janie Fricke, Sherry Fontaine.
Sherry Fontaine?
OK, maybe you haven't heard of her now, but that doesn't mean you won't.
Nobody ever heard of Tanya Tucker either before "Delta Dawn," but that West
Texas girl has managed to do all right for herself in the country music field.
It just takes a little bit of the right song, a dash of good timing, a tad of stage
presence, and a sprinkling of talent.
Blend it all together with an incredible amount of good luck and you've got
an overnight success story, Nashville-style.
While success itself may seem to come overnight to one not personally in-
volved, it's a night that may require years of hard work and perscrverance and
disappointment to the person who's spending all that time "paying his dues.”
Or her dues.
Sherry Fontaine's been paying her dues for some time now and the’Burleson
woman is about ready to experience firsthand one of those "overnight suc-
cesses."
And all she needs is the incredible amount of good luck because she has the
voice and the material. One of her songs wouldn't have jumped into the top 20 of
all songs recorded on independent labels otherwise. To prove that's no fluke, an-
other's not too many notches below in the Top 40. That's from no less an author-
ity than Cashbox, a top magazine of the recording industry.
Being on an independent label—in this case Pleasure Records—doesn't put
her in the same category as the McEntires and Frickies and Gayles and Man-
drells of the world maybe, but the singer of the song immediately above her, in
the number 14 position, answers to the name of Mel Tillis. He’s not exactly an
unknown among country music fans. Nor is Roy Gark, who holds down the
number five position.
And neither one of those country music giants outranks Sherry in the New
York market, where her song "That's the Way My Mama Was Raised" is ranked
number three among all records recorded on country independent labels. ,
That song, like the other three on her "record"—it's actually a cassette tape
instead of a disk—was written by her. It and "The Wall" are the ones currently
being promoted and the ones you might hear on a country radio station.
But don't listen for her songs on any of the country giants like KPLX, KSCS,
or WBAP. "Those stations generally play preprogrammed material and rarely
give air play to independent labels," she said. But KCLE in Gebume plays her
song, as does KDNT in Denton, and numerous other small-to-medium sized
country music stations in the north Texas area.
The song she'll be pushing next was a homecoming event of sorts to Sherry.
A former member of the Texas Girls Choir, she recorded "Soldier Boy/Soldier
Girl" with a dozen members of the girls choir.
On Saturday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m. at the choir's Concert Hall, 4449 Camp
Bowie, Sherry will be premiering the song—but this time shell have the voices
of 236 little girls backing her up.
"I wrote the song after watching a CNN newscast about the situation in the
Middle East," Sherry said. "1 must have cried five times while I was writing it."
After writing the song, she called the director of the girls choir, Shirley Car-
ter, and asked that the girls be allowed to record a humanitarian song about the
200,000 men and women who have left their homes for the desert sand of Saudi
Arabia in order to ddfend world peace.
"I knew Shirley from my own choir days," Sherry said, "and knew her for a
hard-working and super-dedicated person. She’s also quite a humanitarian herself
and I felt she’d go along with it."
Shirley did (permit the recording) and Sherry and the choir did (record it)
and they all hope the rest is history in the making.
The chorus of the song contains the lines:
Angels march every step of the way; hold your head up, oh don't be afraid;
you've come from peace makers humble and meek; no matter where your home
is, you long to be free; pray for peace in our world for our soldier boys and our
soldier girls.
"Music is fascinating to me," she said. ”1 like to see and hear it come to-
gether in the studio. It’s like something magic to hear your own songs come to
life."
It’s like different sides to the same coin, this creating original music out of
your own head and then performing it. And she loves both sides.
She gets so involved in the creative part of it that she said she feels "like I go
into some kind of trance-like state and the words just come to me." She espe-
cially felt that way about "Soldier Boy/Soldier Girl" because she felt she was
making a broader statement with her music than songwriters generally make
with their work.
"I like to do things on a humanitarian level,” she said. "The song is special
to me. I feel like it was God sent."
She'd like to do a video of the song and has some ideas to incorporate into it
if she should get the opportunity. She made a video of "That's the Way My
Mama Was Raised" and another song on the tape, "Too Much Time," and it's
currently being reviewed by the producers of a new television series. Star '91,
which will be a replacement for American Magazine.
Allan Newton, a former Burleson resident, is her manager and he is currently
working with Six Flags about doing a video of "Soldier Boy/Soldier Girl" there
with members of the Texas Girls Choir.
She likes the performing side of music, too, although she hasn't hadfier own
band or played at clubs in several years. When she did, she played atuie White
Elephant Saloon in North Fort Worth and other name clubs in the Metroplex
area. She's sung at Johnny High's Country Music Revue numerous times, includ-
ing once this past summer, and will be singing at a benefit in Hillsboro soon.
Although she loves the glitter and excitement of performing, she's convinced
that playing at clubs doesn't do much for most musical careers if the performer is
serious about music. "It's hard to do that and create your own music," she said,
noting that most of a person's time woiild be spent learning other singer’s
songs—time that's even more limited if the singer has to have a fulltime job in
another field to support his singing habit
But it was at a club that she got her first big break in the music business and
it was at a club that she met her husband, Troy Callahan—a stage name like hers
("half the people I know call me by my name and the other half by my stage
name,” Sherry—the Sherry part of her name is real—said).
Her husband is also a singer, but it was Sherry who was singing at the club
when the two met. "He came up to me and said he didn’t usually go up and talk
to girls at clubs," she said. He could have fooled her, though, because he talked
dto
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Moody, James. Burleson Star (Burleson, Tex.), Vol. 26, No. 5, Ed. 1 Friday, October 19, 1990, newspaper, October 19, 1990; Burleson, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth763211/m1/4/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Burleson Public Library.