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On Sunday evening, the Southern Gospel quartet Ernie Haase & Signature Sound performed a live concert in the Troup High School Fine Arts Building.

The event was hosted by the Troup High Alumni Association as a fundraiser. The money raised will be used for scholarships, assisting teachers, and anything the school needs “that’s beyond their budget,” according to the association founder and past president Ellis Cadenhead.

“Before we begin tonight, I’d like to take a moment to thank publicly the Troup High Alumni Association,” Troup High Principal Niki Watts said before the show. “The members of this group are a support to me and to the students and the staff of Troup County High School beyond any level that I could actually ever verbalize. They are willing to give of their time, their energy, their efforts, their money, to do things to give back to the place that they came from, the place that they graduated from.”

Alumni Association President Shane Frailey said as he was greeting people and asking them where they were from, he discovered people from 27 different cities.

“We have people from Pell City Alabama, we have a couple from Tallahassee, Florida. So, we’re really blessed in LaGrange, and thank you all for coming,” he said.

Sponsors for the concert were RE/MAX, Colony Bank, ACE Air, Kimble’s Food by Design, LaGrange Toyota, LJL Ranch, KIA of LaGrange, RCS Industrial & Environmental, Higgins Funeral Home, ETI, Landscape Supply of LaGrange, Forbus Gutter Service, Jindal Films, and Mud Creek Graphics.

As examples of how the alumni association has used funds in the past, Frailey said during a previous interview that it had used fundraised money to send students to parades, to feed the school band, and to feed the school football team.

“What we do is we get with principal Niki Watts, and she will talk with the teachers and the students,” Frailey said. “And they come before the alumni association and make a request for funds. And as a group, we vote on those.”

Frailey said the alumni association has raised over $100,000 in the last seven years.

Formed in 2003 by tenor Ernie Haase, Ernie Haase & Signature Sound has performed concerts in Latvia, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and various places in North America, according to their website. They’ve also made TV appearances on ESPN with NASCAR, sung the national anthem multiple times for the NBA, and completed a tour of historic American theaters in support of their Broadway project.

The group has been nominated for a Grammy award and has won a GMA Dove award.