Richard Auguste Morse

Richard Auguste Morse (born 1957) is a Puerto-Rican-born Haitian-American musician and owner of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, which burned down in 2025. Morse is the founder of a mizik rasin band, RAM, named after his initials. Morse is married to the band's lead female vocalist, Lunise Morse, and has two children. Morse and his band are famous in Haiti for their political songs and performances critical of the Raoul Cédras military junta from 1991 to 1994. In the early 2000s, Morse has also criticized Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas through his music. Morse is a United States citizen. His cousin Michel Martelly is a musician, right-wing Haitian politician and former President of Haiti. Richard Morse repeatedly expressed support for Martelly in the 2010 presidential elections in Haiti. By the end of 2012, he had distanced himself from the Martelly government.

Early life Richard Auguste Morse was born in Puerto Rico in 1957. His father, Richard M. Morse, was an American academic sociologist and writer, and his mother, Emerante de Pradines (1918-2018), was a famous Haitian singer, as was his maternal grandfather, Auguste de Pradines. The family did not stay in Puerto Rico for long, and Richard grew up in the town of Woodbridge, Connecticut in the United States. Morse graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a degree in anthropology. While at Princeton Morse sang with a band, "The Groceries," which became sufficiently successful to play-off-campus. They played new wave and punk rock music with certain Caribbean musical style elements.

Move to Haiti In 1985, Morse was dating a woman whose father strongly disapproved of his daughter dating a musician. Morse also had a falling out with his fellow band members in The Groceries over musical differences, and was struggling with the direction his life should take. A conversation with a French record producer persuaded Morse to start over and move to Port-au-Prince to better explore Haitian and Caribbean music. In 1987, he signed a 15-year lease to manage the Hotel Oloffson, then dilapidated and the inspiration for the fictional Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's famous 1966 novel The Comedians.

In September 1994, U.S. military troops arrived to oust the Cédras regime, and Morse and his band were finally able to release some of their music in their own albums. Over time, Morse, like many other Haitians, had become disillusioned with Aristide and his new political party, Fanmi Lavalas. In 1998, Manno Charlemagne, the newly elected Fanmi Lavalas mayor of Port-au-Prince, sent armed men to the Oloffson to dismantle the float on which RAM was scheduled to perform in the upcoming annual Carnival. The mayor had taken offense to the lyrics of one of the band's songs, which he interpreted as an accusation of corruption. In a compromise, the band was allowed to perform on a flatbed truck. However, the brakes on the truck were sabotaged [evidence?] and during the procession, the truck swerved into the crowd, killing eight and forcing the members of the band to flee for their lives.

Vodou Since moving to Haiti in 1985, Morse has been involved in the vodou community. The music he writes and performs is inspired by traditional vodou folk music, and incorporates the petwo drums and rara horns used in vodou ceremonies. Eventually, Richard Morse became so involved in the vodou religion through his music that he was initiated as a houngan, or vodou priest, in 2002. Describing a RAM concert, Morse explains, "Yes, you might see our dancers go into a trance. Some get possessed by the loas, to the rhythm of the drums, but it's a natural state when it happens. You can't fake it."