First Baptist Church will celebrate Independence Day early with a free patriotic concert presented by the Vicksburg Orchestral Society at 4 p.m. Sunday at the church, 1607 Cherry St.

Sponsored by the Four Seasons of the Arts, society member Elias Arredondo said the orchestra has performed the patriotic concert at First Baptist for the past 5 years on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July.

“We play mostly marches, things that people will recognize; tunes you’ve heard before,” he said. “Things like Sousa marches. We always do an armed forces salute where we play the songs for the different armed forces. We get pretty good crowds.”

According to the concert program, selections will include the “Star Spangled Banner,” Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma,” John Williams’ “Imperial March” from the movie “Star Wars,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America” and John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Arredondo said the orchestral society began 2010.

“We started with the idea there were enough people in the community who played different musical instruments who needed a local group to play symphonic music together,” he said. “A group of us got together and we put together a list of all the people we were aware of who played instruments and contacted people and said, ‘let’s get together and start a group.’”

The organization’s first concert was May 2010 at Church of the Holy Trinity.

“We barely had enough people to cover all the parts, but we did it any way,” Arredondo said. “After we did the first concert at Holy Trinity, people came and saw it, and said, ‘How do we participate?’

“We’ve been steadily growing a dozen people or so. Currently, we have over 40 people. We’ve done three concerts each year since 2010 so this is our ninth season.”

Beside First Baptist the orchestral society has performed at Church of the Holy Trinity and the Vicksburg Theatre Guild’s Parkside Playhouse.