Trip Lee’s Story

Atlanta-based Christian rapper, author, and pastor William Lee Barefield III is best known to music fans as Trip Lee, modernizing messages of faith with sleekly produced commercial rap tracks. Lee‘s energetic and spiritually driven albums have regularly found their way onto various Billboard charts, with 2012’s The Good Life cross-pollinating gospel and rap charts, and the subsequent 2014 effort Rise even breaking into the top 20 of the Billboard 200. In 2022, Lee released his sixth studio album, The End, and followed the next year with the mixtape The Epilogue.

Lee was born in Dallas, Texas, where in his teenage years he was a founding member of the Southern Christian rap collective 116 Clique. Lee moved from Dallas to attend various Christian universities, first in Philadelphia, then in Louisville, Kentucky. He made his full-length album debut in 2006 with If They Only Knew. His second album, 2008’s 20/20, featured guests and Reach Records labelmates Lecrae, Tedashii, and Sho Baraka. Not only did it break into the Billboard Top 200, but it also broke into the Top Ten of the Christian albums chart.

His success continued with Between Two Worlds in 2010, his first to top the Billboard Christian charts. His second chart-topper, The Good Life, arrived two years later and also broke onto the rap charts. Lee published a book of the same name months later before announcing his intention to focus his message on ministry. He continued writing and became a pastor. In 2014, he released his fifth album, Rise, his highest-charting Billboard 200 entry (number 16) and his third Top Three Christian chart entry. A second book, Rise: Get Up and Live in God’s Great Story, was released in 2015. Lee‘s mixtape, The Waiting Room, appeared near the end of 2016. In 2022, the sixth album, The End, was released, featuring guest appearances from Taylor Hill, KB, Wande, and others. The next year, a companion mixtape entitled The Epilogue came out, this time with contributions from Madison Ryann Ward and Kirk Franklin.