4 SC singers to appear on ‘American Idol.’ See who earned a golden ticket to Hollywood
The next two weeks of American Idol will feature four singers from South Carolina.
Tripp Taylor of Florence will appear on Sunday and Warren Peay of Bamberg, Ophrah Kablan of Laurens and Mariah Faith of Conway will be on the March 19 show.
Taylor graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville last year and is a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, majoring in musical theater.
He grew up singing in church and taking piano and tenor saxophone lessons, but has said he does not favor one musical genre over another. He’s become a TikTok star with more than 300,000 followers and 6.4 million views.
He sings songs across all genres on TikTok, from Christmas to Stevie Wonder to Michael Buble.
Peay describes himself as an avid duck hunter, whose original song “Duck Blind” is on his YouTube channel. He was a member of a Christian band for several years based at Colston Branch Baptist Church outside Bamburg.
Kablan has been getting accolades for her singing for years, including winning the Upstate Black Expo’s Gospel Best as a 10-year-old in 2013. During that contest, her mother said she prayed for a baby after being told she could not conceive and when her daughter was born she knew she was blessed with the gift of singing.
She is a 2020 graduate of Laurens District 55 High School and appeared in an ad during the Grammy’s that year for the NAACP’s Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympic to celebrate the next generation of the organization’s leaders.
Faith is originally from Baltimore but now lives in Conway, where she performed in “Bringing Down the House” variety show at the Main Street Theatre in 2018.
After her father died in 2019, she struggled with alcohol abuse and wrote about it on social media, the website Idol Chatter reported.
“Almost 3 years of using alcohol to self medicate, trying to heal that broken, hurting, girl missing her daddy with a lack of ability to see the sunshine in all the dark,” she wrote, announcing she was now sober.
One South Carolina singer has won American Idol, Candice Glover of St. Helena in 2013, the 12th season.
American Idol appears on ABC at 8 p.m. on Sundays.
