EGN NEWS DESK
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 diversified influences and tight vocal harmonies, died on Sunday.
He was 46, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Morgan’s household confirmed his loss of life in an announcement 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, generally known 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 “Protect Us Jah” (1997) and “Don’t Haffi Dread” (1999), Morgan Heritage labored with Bobby Digital, one in every of Jamaica’s most influential producers. Before a present at New York City’s Irving Plaza in 1999, a New York Times music critic wrote that the band “holds on to the Seventies reggae traditions of concord singing and considerate messages.”
But Morgan Heritage was greater than a throwback to an older period of reggae. AllMusic.com described its sound as a mix of “components of roots reggae, lovers rock, soul, R&B, calypso, gospel, dub, and from time to time, funk and dancehall.”
Several Morgan Heritage albums had deep runs on the Billboard reggae charts. One of them, “Strictly Roots” gained 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.
Information 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 one in every 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 have been educated in Springfield, Mass., the place their grandmother lived, the Hartford Courant newspaper reported in 1999. Their father was dwelling in New York on the time.
“We’d go to highschool through 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 varsity,” Peter Morgan’s brother Mojo advised the Courant.
Morgan Heritage started touring within the early Nineteen Nineties and launched its first album, “Miracle,” on MCA Records in 1994, based on VP Records, 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 started spending time there and in Ghana, and realized how related Jamaica remained to Africa, Peter Morgan advised Kaboom Magazine. 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 among the greatest music that ever was created all through the years,” he stated, including he hoped the music would “encourage generations to return.”
