Wintley Phipps, who performed for President Barack Obama’s inaugural prayer breakfast, will be the featured artist Sunday evening when the Chattanooga Choral Society for the Preservation of African American Song presents its annual Lee Mackey Memorial Concert. The performance will be held in First Baptist Church in the Golden Gateway.
“Wintley Phipps is an internationally acclaimed soloist,” said Roland Carter, who will direct the singers in concert.
“He has a very popular video that circulated on the Internet on the story of ‘Amazing Grace’ and how it was created by a slave trader and how the melody of spirituals uses the pentatonic scale.”
This concert honors the late Dr. Lee Mackey, a longtime public school educator. Mackey was choir director at Brainerd High and the former Chattanooga High School, now known as Center for Creative Arts. A founding member of the choral society, he was a protege of the late Edmonia Simmons, the choral society’s director for many years.
Phipps is founder, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Dream Academy Inc., a national after-school program whose mission is to break the cycle of incarceration by giving children skills to lead productive lives, according to a news release.