During a staff seminar at the beginning of the 2023/2024 school year, Lacey Schaffer-Thomas sang “Superstition” with the band High Reliability, made up of employees in the Fort Smith School System. The keynote speaker was bestselling author Jon Gordon. When he heard Lacey sing, he blasted a video clip of her performance across social media, which got the attention of the Kelly Clarkson Show. Kelly asked Lacey to perform with her, bringing worldwide attention to Lacey and Fort Smith. The show aired on November 13, 2023.
Singer/songwriter Lacey Schaffer-Thomas, just weeks after performing on the Kelly Clarkson Show, sits in an empty classroom at Euper Lane Elementary in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It’s shortly after the final bell at three o’clock in the afternoon, and Lacey, a paraprofessional who works with special education students, has had a good day. It started with her drive to work, listening to KISR-93 radio. She caught Jelly Roll’s “Need a Favor,” her new favorite song.
The sixty-year-old has loved singing since childhood. “One of my friends told me she can still see me, sitting at my kitchen table, a hairbrush for a microphone, singing to my mama,” Lacey says. “Mama would be standing at the stove, and she’d say, ‘Sing me a song, Lace.’ Her favorite was ‘One Day at a Time.’ Dad’s was ‘Amazing Grace.’”
It also took a bit of grace to raise Lacey. “I was fifteen and in the tenth grade at Northside High School, and The Gong Show was coming to the Civic Center in Fort Smith, and I wanted to be in it.” [The Gong Show was a nationally televised talent show in the 1970s. If your act was deemed subpar, you’d know it by the sound of a mallet hitting a metal cymbal.]
Lacey’s family of eight attended Fort Smith’s First Freewill Baptist Church. So did a couple who had a son in the local band, Jasper. Lacey, never one to shy away from an opportunity, asked them to get a message to their son, hoping the band would back her up if she got on The Gong Show. To Lacey’s delight, they said yes.
“My very first live performance, other than church, was with Jasper, and I sang ‘Tumbling Dice.’” The 1972 Rolling Stones song wasn’t enough to get her to Hollywood, but it did open a door. “After that, Jasper invited me to join the band.
“I went home and asked my dad, and he said not no, but Hell no!” Which sent the teenage Lacey to her room, crying crocodile tears. That could have been the end, but while she stormed to her bedroom, her dad stomped out of the house to get a haircut. The barber just happened to be a lifelong musician and the sound engineer for Jasper.
He told Lacey’s dad that he’d had the same problem with his musical son, and his advice was this: Don’t knock her down. Not when she has the love and passion for music.
So, Lacey began singing with Jasper. On weeknights, she had to be home by half past ten. On weekends, twelve-thirty. That meant she missed part of the sets, but she didn’t mind.
“I just wanted to sing. It was the only time I felt special,” Lacey says. “The first person to notice my voice, besides people in church, was Bill Cromer, the choir director at Kimmons Junior High. Years later, Bill told Tom Ware [Lacey’s longtime friend, musical and songwriting partner] that students like Lacey come along in a choir director’s dreams. And sometimes never.”
By the mid-1980s, Lacey was finding wide success with the local band Gray Ghost. The group signed with Mercury/Polygram Records and had songs in the Top 100. They opened for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Photos from that time show Lacey, thin as any runway model, her big eighties hair a bridal veil of curls, her mouth lined with maroon lip pencil, her blue eyes shining. If she worried about expenses, it was likely because she was buying the biggest cans of Aqua Net hairspray she could find.
It could have been a trying time, with six people in the band and Lacey the only woman. But the guys, which included Tom Ware, treated her like a little sister. “Nobody messed with Lacey,” she says and laughs.
Gray Ghost toured Canada, Bahrain, Japan, Spain, Korea, Iceland. They played a lot of military bases. “We had to learn Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA.’ We got asked to play that all the time, and at first, we were like, ‘We’re too cool for that!’ But then we played it in Spain, and I looked out, and all the service people were singing along, holding up their lighters, and I got it. I stood on the stage and bawled.”
She did miss a trip to China with Grayghost. “I was seven months pregnant with my daughter Phoebe, and I said, ‘Guys, I don’t want to have this baby in China.’” She stayed with the band a bit longer but finally moved on to a more traditional life.
Eventually, she found her footing as a paraprofessional at Euper Lane Elementary School, with students who fill her heart. When she sang Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” accompanied by the High Reliability Band, made up of employees for the school district, the earth shook, and the world took notice. And it was all because the keynote speaker at the back-to-school seminar, author Jon Gordon, shared her video on social media. Soon, the Kelly Clarkson Show came calling. Lacey and her husband Derek flew to New York City for the taping in front of 200 people. After producers whisked her away to hair and makeup, Lacey practiced with the band. The plan was to have her sing into a commercial break. She would not meet Kelly.
“I was rehearsing ‘Superstition,’ and everybody just stopped. I looked, and there was Kelly Clarkson. She said, ‘Girl, I was sitting there about to get my makeup on, and I’m thinking maybe we need to start this show together.’
“I didn’t have time to get too nervous. I was waiting on her, across from where she’ll come out, and I’m staring at the audience. She walks through the door, and the producer kind of pushes me out there, and the next thing I know, the music starts. It was so fun!
“I wasn’t scared. I’ve performed most of my life. I’m sixty years old.” Lacey shrugs. “It is what it is. And, oh my lord, I can’t say enough about Kelly. She’s so kind. She’s exactly what you see on TV. She’s genuine. She put me at ease. We only had to do one take, and we were ready.”
Lacey left with the clothes she was given to wear on the show, and a trip to hear Kelly sing in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve. “Kelly just came up to us and offered.”
Since being on the show that aired on November 13, 2023, Lacey’s heard from fans as far away as New Zealand and South Africa. Her grandkids, Oscar and Opal, think she’s pretty cool. As much as she loves what’s happened (another opportunity may be in the works), the Kelly Clarkson Show isn’t the pinnacle of her singing career, and neither is Gray Ghost.
Instead, her favorite performance happened at Euper Lane. “I was singing the national anthem about five years ago, and it was close to Veterans Day. The entire school was here; the kids are behind me on the stage, and I start singing, and the entire school starts singing with me. It was incredible,” Lacy says, and tears gather. “It was this perfect moment.”
The lights in the classroom are motion-activated, and we’ve been mostly still, so it goes dark. Lacey waves her arms to make the classroom bright again. But for a moment, in the middling light, it’s as if the only thing shining is Lacey. Silver bracelets sound as they mesh on her thin wrist. Her silver hair falls in waves around her face.
Lacey mentions the goodness of Kelly Clarkson again and the generosity of Jon Gordon. “He didn’t have to call me out, but he did,” she says, talking about the viral social media post that set everything in motion.
“I used to tell my children that the only time you should look down on someone is when you’re giving them a hand to help them up.” It looks as if the universe took notice and lifted her up instead. “I thought I had everything I ever wanted, but I think I needed this to happen.” Lacey folds her hands in her lap. Her fingernails are painted blue. The light catches her smile, and for a moment she’s that super-cool girl from Gray Ghost, the world at her feet. The overhead light flickers, and she transforms to the present day, just as beautiful, but with a much richer story to tell.
