Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker on Tuesday welcomed a performance by the Voices of Lee, the travelling choir of Lee University in Cleveland, during Tennessee Tuesday, the weekly breakfast the senators hold for Tennesseans visiting the Capitol.
The choir performing at Tuesday’s event is part of the Lee University Festival Choir that Senator Alexander, as a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, personally recommended to perform at the presidential inauguration this past January.
Recalling that announcement as he introduced the choir this morning, Senator Alexander said, “One of my prerogatives as a committee member was to identify one group to perform at the presidential inauguration. So, I drove down to Lee University in Cleveland, and they assembled the student body there, and I said, ‘We don’t know who the president is going to be, but we do know one thing: that the Lee University singers will be singing at the inauguration of the President of the United States’…They are terrific musicians and they represent our country and our state and their community in a beautiful way.”
Senator Corker said, “As mayor of Chattanooga, I had the opportunity to hear talented young people from Lee University perform many times, and I was delighted to welcome the ‘Voices of Lee’ to Washington this morning. The recognition they received from Lamar Alexander, the Senate’s resident musician, is high praise indeed.”
Beginning a long history with Lee, Senator Alexander invited Lynn Golden of Lee College, as the university was called at the time, to sing the national anthem when he was sworn-in as governor of Tennessee on January 20, 1979. The new governor had met and heard Lynn sing during his 1,000-mile campaign walk across Tennessee.
At the breakfast today, the choir performed “Silver Bells” and a rendition of The Preamble to the United States Constitution, transitioning into “America the Beautiful.”