Grammy-winning a cappella group Pentatonix, which includes Owensboro native Kevin Olusola, will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next week.
The Pentatonix star ceremony will take place at 11:30 a.m. PT (1:30 p.m. CT) and will be streamed live exclusively at walkoffame.com. Theirs is the 2,748th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but they are the first a cappella group to be honored.
Their star will be placed between Walk of Famers Etta James and Cole Porter.
Olusola, 34, was born and raised in Owensboro. He attended Owensboro High School for two years before enrolling at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts his junior year. After graduating from Andover, Olusola attended Yale University, where he graduated in 2011 with a degree in East Asian Studies. Olusola also has a star on the Owensboro Walk of Fame. That was unveiled in June 2017 at ROMP Fest.
Pentatonix was founded in 2011 when the auditioned for and won the third season of NBC’s The Sing-Off. The original members included Olusola, Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kirstin Maldonado, and Avi Kaplan. In 2017, Kaplan left the group and was replaced by Matt Sallee.
Pentatonix has sold 10 million albums worldwide with billions of streams. The group’s catalog boasts back-to-back No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, namely the gold-certified Pentatonix and platinum-certified A Pentatonix Christmas.
They notably made history as the first a cappella act to win “Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella” at the Grammys in 2015 and 2016. A year later, they earned another Grammy in the category “Best Country Duo/Group Performance” for their duet with Dolly Parton on her song Jolene.
Following 2021’s Evergreen, which tallied over 100 million streams and earned the group a Grammy nomination for “Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album,” Pentatonix launched one of their biggest tours to date, “Pentatonix: The Evergreen Christmas Tour.” Their most recent album, Holidays Around the World, was released on October 28, 2022, and marked the group’s ninth Top 10 entry on Billboard’s Top Holiday Albums Chart.
