Peter Anthony Morgan, the lead singer of the reggae band Morgan Heritage, a Grammy Award-winning group that was shaped by youngsters of the singer Denroy Morgan and got here to be recognized for its diverse influences and tight vocal harmonies, died on Sunday.
He was 46, The Related Press reported. Mr. Morgan’s household confirmed his loss of life in a assertion on the band’s social media platforms. The assertion didn’t point out his age or present a reason behind loss of life.
Mr. Morgan, referred to as “Peetah,” began Morgan Heritage with seven of his siblings within the 1994. The band later turned a quintet.
For some early albums, together with “Defend Us Jah” (1997) and “Don’t Haffi Dread” (1999), Morgan Heritage labored with Bobby Digital, certainly one of Jamaica’s most influential producers. Earlier than a present at New York Metropolis’s Irving Plaza in 1999, a New York Occasions music critic wrote that the band “holds on to the Nineteen Seventies reggae traditions of concord singing and considerate messages.”
However Morgan Heritage was greater than a throwback to an older period of reggae. AllMusic.com described its sound as a mix of “parts of roots reggae, lovers rock, soul, R&B, calypso, gospel, dub, and every now and then, funk and dancehall.”
A number of Morgan Heritage albums had deep runs on the Billboard reggae charts. One in every of them, “Strictly Roots” received for greatest reggae album of the 12 months on the 2015 Grammy Awards. The band’s album “Avrakedabra” was up for a similar award two years later, however misplaced out to “Stony Hill” by Damian Marley, a son of Bob Marley.
Details about Mr. Morgan’s survivors was not instantly out there. His household’s assertion described him as a husband, father, son and brother.
Peter Anthony Morgan was certainly one of greater than two dozen youngsters of Denroy Morgan, a reggae star who was born in Jamaica and died in 2022. Peter Morgan and a few of his siblings had been educated in Springfield, Mass., the place their grandmother lived, the Hartford Courant newspaper reported in 1999. Their father was residing in New York on the time.
“We’d go to highschool in the course of the week, then on Friday evening come to New York and rehearse with my father all weekend, come again up on Monday in time for college,” Peter Morgan’s brother Mojo advised the Courant.
Morgan Heritage started touring within the early Nineties and launched its first album, “Miracle,” on MCA Data in 1994, in line with VP Data, a reggae label that launched a number of of the band’s different albums.
Their newest album, “The Homeland,” launched in 2023, highlighted reggae’s African roots and featured collaborations with musicians from Jamaica and Africa. The undertaking occurred after the band did a present in Kenya in 2015 and commenced spending time there and in Ghana, and realized how linked Jamaica remained to Africa, Peter Morgan advised Kaboom Journal. He stated he hoped the album, delayed by the pandemic, would burnish the band’s legacy.
“The physique of labor, the catalog — you need to be remembered as a number of the greatest music that ever was created all through the years,” he stated, including he hoped the music would “encourage generations to come back.”
