Pamela Morgan

Pamela Morgan spent nineteen years as the voice of Figgy Duff and has spent the decades since keeping Newfoundland and Labrador's old songs in circulation, as a singer, arranger, producer, label owner and composer for the stage. She was born in Grand Falls on November 25, 1957.

Noel Dinn heard her sing at a drama festival and asked her to join the band he was forming in St. John's. She said no, then said yes when he asked again about a year later, and from then until his death in 1993 the two of them were the core of Figgy Duff. She sang lead, played guitar, whistle and piano and arranged much of the band's material, from the ballads and dance tunes it learned from singers and fiddlers around the island to the originals she and Dinn wrote for Weather Out The Storm and Downstream. The band toured Canada, the United States and Europe, played Cambridge and Glastonbury, and wrote a score for a 1982 St. John's production of The Tempest. In the early 1980s she also began work on a folk opera of her own, The Nobleman's Wedding, built from the melodies and stories of the province's ballads.

The preservation work ran alongside the band. For Come and I Will Sing You, the collection of Newfoundland folk songs edited by Genevieve Lehr with an introduction by Anita Best and published in 1985, Morgan transcribed more than a hundred melodies and wrote the transcriber's note.

In his last years Dinn produced The Colour of Amber, her album of traditional songs with Anita Best. At the 1993 East Coast Music Awards it won Roots/Traditional Recording of the Year, with further nominations for FACTOR Recording of the Year and for the video of 'Súil a Grá'. Amber Christmas, also with Best, followed in 1997.

In the early 1990s Morgan brought her recordings under her own control. She gathered the complete Figgy Duff catalogue, along with her own work, under her label, Amber Music, which went on to release records by Anita Best and the late fiddler Emile Benoit. In 1995 she put together Retrospective 1974-1993, and she produced the 1999 silver anniversary tour and the live recording that came out of it, Figgy Duff Live: Silver Reunion.

Her first solo album, On A Wing And A Prayer, came out in 1996 on Sleeping Giant Music through A&M. She produced it herself at the Red Lion Lodge in Portugal Cove with her brother George Morgan, violinist Serguei Tchepournov and a circle of Figgy Duff players and friends, among them Dave Panting, Kelly Russell, Frank Maher, Philip Dinn and Anita Best. It mixed her own songs with two by Noel Dinn, two they wrote together and the traditional 'Blackwater Side'.

Seven Years, which she produced in Toronto and St. John's over 2001 and 2002, came out on Amber Music in Newfoundland on July 29, 2002, and across Canada that September through Outside Music. Built more on her songwriting and piano, its songs took on Alzheimer's disease, middle-aged men facing upheaval and the steady departure of Newfoundlanders for work elsewhere. The title came from the seven-year turns she saw in her life and music, and Billboard covered the record that October.

Ancestral Songs (2005) went back to the source: ten songs from the oral tradition, recorded acoustically at Blue Moon Studio in Oxfordshire with Fairport Convention's Chris Leslie on violin and viola. The booklet names the people she learned them from, including Mose Harris of Lethbridge in Bonavista Bay, Philip Foley of Tilting on Fogo Island and his brother Bill, and Gerald Campbell of Branch, and dedicates the record to the spirits of Emile Benoit, Neil Murray and Noel Dinn. That year she also arranged and sang 'Sal Stopped Up to Iron Some Clothes' for It's Time for Another One, Memorial University's record pairing historic field recordings from Ramea and Grole with new performances, and she was part of Canada's cultural program at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan.

Memorial University gave her an honorary doctor of letters at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook in October 2007, for her contribution to the development of traditional music in the province. The next year she started a two-year graphic design course at the College of the North Atlantic, finishing with honours in 2010, and used it to design and notate her own book, Newfoundland Ballads for Piano and Voice (2011). She has also produced records for other artists, including the Conne River Mi'kmaq, singer Vicky Hynes and songwriter Mark Bragg.

Play On, begun in Oxfordshire in the summer of 2011 and released digitally on December 2, 2012, was recorded mostly in England with English session players and old friends from home. It mixed traditional ballads with her own songs and, for the first time on one of her records, a cover: Tom Jans's 'Loving Arms'. In 2013 she finished Sounds and Sweet Airs, her recording of the Figgy Duff score for The Tempest, rebuilt from four audience cassettes of the 1982 production that director Stephen Bush had kept. The Nobleman's Wedding reached the stage through Rising Tide Theatre and the Stephenville Theatre Festival, which made it a headline production in 2014, the season she served as the festival's musical director.

After a stretch of health problems and then the pandemic, she returned with two of her most ambitious works. Wetland, written with George Morgan, is a rock opera for all ages that grew out of Tom Dawe's poem retelling the Frog Prince, the same poem behind 'The Frog Prince' on Play On. Its nineteen-track recording, with Anita Best as narrator and the singers from its original demos as its characters, was released by Amber Music on September 23, 2025. The White Fleet Suite honours the Portuguese cod fleet that sheltered in St. John's harbour for generations. The idea took hold after she heard The Brendan Voyage in Dublin, and it drew on the Portuguese tunes Figgy Duff's first accordion player, Art Stoyles, had taught her years before. With poems by Agnes Walsh and orchestration by Duane Andrews, the suite premiered in St. John's on November 3, 2023, and toured Portugal in May 2024 with nine Portuguese musicians alongside Morgan, Andrews and Kyle Gryphon.

In 2016 she accepted the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society's Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of Figgy Duff, and in 2024 the East Coast Music Association gave her its Stompin' Tom Award. On November 8, 2024, The White Fleet Suite returned for a one-night remount at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's, filmed for a documentary about the fleet.

-Robert Williston