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 diversified influences and tight vocal harmonies, died on Sunday.
He was 46, The Related Press reported. Mr. Morgan’s household confirmed his demise in a assertion on the band’s social media platforms. The assertion didn’t point out his age or present a reason for demise.
Mr. Morgan, often 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 “Defend Us Jah” (1997) and “Don’t Haffi Dread” (1999), Morgan Heritage labored with Bobby Digital, one in all 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 “parts of roots reggae, lovers rock, soul, R&B, calypso, gospel, dub, and every so often, funk and dancehall.”
A number of Morgan Heritage albums had deep runs on the Billboard reggae charts. One in all them, “Strictly Roots” gained for finest reggae album of the yr 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 one in all 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 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 Nineties and launched its first album, “Miracle,” on MCA Data in 1994, in response to 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 venture 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 Journal. He stated 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 among the finest music that ever was created all through the years,” he stated, including he hoped the music would “encourage generations to come back.”
