Eight years ago, the most famous voice in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade belonged to a kid from Springfield. John Legend — born John Roger Stephens in Springfield on December 28, 1978 — rode the Build-A-Bear float through Herald Square in the 2018 parade, singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for a national television audience, and then, almost by accident, became the author of that year’s defining parade story. This is part of “Ohio at the Macy’s Parade,” NewsForce247’s series telling the parade’s first century through the Ohioans woven into it, counting down to the 100th parade on Thanksgiving morning.
Legend’s Ohio roots run deep. He grew up in Springfield and graduated from the city’s North High School as salutatorian before heading east for college and, eventually, a music career that made him one of the most decorated performers of his generation. But on Thanksgiving morning 2018 — the 92nd parade — the hometown on the introduction was Springfield, Ohio, and Macy’s own performer announcement for the 2018 parade listed him among the day’s headliners.
His Herald Square moment came aboard the Build-A-Bear float, where he performed “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” drawn from his holiday album A Legendary Christmas. It was a fitting booking: a singer whose voice has become as much a part of the modern Christmas season as any crooner’s, delivering the season’s most wistful standard at the parade that officially opens the holidays.
What happened next is what parade fans still talk about. Viewers took to social media to note that Legend’s performance, like every musical performance in the parade, was delivered to a pre-recorded track. Legend explained afterward that all parade singers perform that way because a moving float cannot support a fully live musical performance — an explanation that the Associated Press and other outlets reported, and that turned into the most discussed story of the 2018 parade. Rather than a scandal, it became a piece of parade education: the cold, the distance and the logistics of a two-and-a-half-mile route make the pre-recorded performance a practical necessity, and it has been standard practice for years.
The 2018 parade was a quietly enormous Ohio day in New York. The same morning Legend sang at Herald Square, the Ohio State University Marching Band made its first — and still its only — appearance in the parade, a story this series told on its opening day. Two Ohio acts, one from Springfield and one from Columbus, shared a route that Ohio performers reach only rarely: in a century of parades, the list of Ohio singers, bands and performers who have made the trip fits into a single short series like this one.
Legend’s booking also fit the parade’s modern shape. Macy’s builds its performer lineup around the holiday season it is launching, and in 2018 that meant an artist with a new Christmas album riding a float built around one of the season’s most familiar toy brands. For Springfield, it meant something simpler: the city’s most famous son, on the country’s biggest Thanksgiving stage, singing the song that tells everybody to have themselves a merry little Christmas.
Ohio will not put a band in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving — the announced 2026 band list contains no Ohio school — which makes the Ohio chapters of parades past the heart of this series. Legend’s 2018 morning remains the most prominent solo performance an Ohioan has given in the parade’s modern era, and it started, like so many Ohio parade stories, in a hometown that raised him: Springfield, where the name on the birth certificate was John Roger Stephens and the school was North High.
Ohio’s parade performers have usually arrived in groups — 98 Degrees, the Canton-and-Cincinnati vocal group profiled later in this series, sang in 2017 — which makes Legend’s solo headline turn rarer still. Macy’s releases bill its biggest gets at the top of the lineup, and in 2018 a Springfield native stood there alone: not as part of an ensemble or a Broadway cast, but as himself, a headliner whose name sold the morning. For a state whose parade story is mostly told through bands and balloons, Legend’s 2018 float ride remains Ohio’s most prominent single performance in the modern parade.
“Ohio at the Macy’s Parade” continues through Thanksgiving Eve, when it concludes with “Akron Built the Balloons” — the Nov. 25 finale telling how Akron’s Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. designed and built the parade’s giant balloons from 1927 into the early 1980s, including every Superman balloon the parade ever flew. The 100th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade steps off Thursday, November 26, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on NBC and Peacock.