Peter Anthony Morgan, the lead singer of the reggae band Morgan Heritage, a Grammy Award-winning group that was fashioned by kids of the singer Denroy Morgan and got here to be identified for its different influences and tight vocal harmonies, died on Sunday.
He was 46, The Related Press reported. Mr. Morgan’s household confirmed his demise in a statement on the band’s social media platforms. The assertion didn’t point out his age or present a explanation for demise.
Mr. Morgan, often known as “Peetah,” began Morgan Heritage with seven of his siblings within the 1994. The band later grew to become a quintet.
For some early albums, together with “Defend Us Jah” (1997) and “Don’t Haffi Dread” (1999), Morgan Heritage labored with Bobby Digital, considered one of Jamaica’s most influential producers. Earlier than a present at New York Metropolis’s Irving Plaza in 1999, a New York Instances music critic wrote that the band “holds on to the 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 “components of roots reggae, lovers rock, soul, R&B, calypso, gospel, dub, and once in a while, funk and dancehall.”
A number of Morgan Heritage albums had deep runs on the Billboard reggae charts. Considered one of them, “Strictly Roots” won for best reggae album of the year 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 obtainable. His household’s assertion described him as a husband, father, son and brother.
Peter Anthony Morgan was considered one of greater than two dozen kids 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 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 informed the Courant.
Morgan Heritage started touring within the early Nineties and launched its first album, “Miracle,” on MCA Data in 1994, according to VP Records, a reggae label that released 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 informed Kaboom Magazine. He mentioned he hoped the album, delayed by the pandemic, would burnish the band’s legacy.
“The physique of labor, the catalog — you wish to be remembered as a number of the finest music that ever was created all through the years,” he mentioned, including he hoped the music would “encourage generations to come back.”
