Nathan Morris, a proclaimed mortician musician, appears in a photo released on his website.
(PHOTO BY LAUREN ELIZABETH)
BY BRENNAN D. CRAIN, WCLU News
GLASGOW — Questions about the funeral business may seem intimidating to ask, but Nathan Morris has never been afraid to blur the boundaries between genre and discipline. He will be in concert this weekend with Anthem Lights at the Historic Plaza Theatre to showcase his debut performance of “When the Curtains Close.”
Morris is the owner and operator of Morris Family Services, an operation consisting of 10 funeral homes, a monument company, a vault company, and more. He recently took ownership of Glasgow’s A.F. Crow and Son Funeral Home.
While his discipline keeps him quite busy, he never lost sight of his original muse: music.
Morris has taken a unique career path that includes hit podcasts, acclaimed piano ballads, and even a thriving chain of funeral homes, all tied together by a lifelong creator who proudly embraces the unconventional. Morris began working at his first funeral home in 2010, the same year he won the Indie Charts Independent Artist of the Year Award.
At the time, he was riding a wave of critical acclaim and commercial accolades for “Closure,” the soulful single that launched his songwriting career several years earlier. A piano-driven song about painful endings and new beginnings, “Closure” appeared on his debut record, A Gentleman’s Closure, in 2007. The song didn’t just earn radio airplay from coast to coast; it went international, too, with Starbucks adding the track to its in-store playlists across America and Canada.
“Not long before that, I’d been living in the closet of a sound equipment warehouse in Thomasville, North Carolina,” remembers Morris, a Kentucky native who’d moved to North Carolina after graduation. “I had nothing, but I did have the vision of what I wanted to do. I’ve never lost sight of that. It’s my rags to riches story. You can lay down and accept your fate, or you can rewrite the script.”
He rewrote his own script in Kentucky, having been brought back home by the woman who would soon become his wife. Joining the staff of a funeral home owned by his future father-in-law, Morris saw a chance to celebrate life while administering the same level of exemplary care he’d previously given to his audience. He climbed the company ladder and became CEO.
He didn’t have to look far for inspiration. The Covid-19 pandemic brought sweeping change to the entire world, but it hit the funeral industry particularly hard.
“It was a time where everyone was experiencing some kind of loss — the loss of a job, the loss of inspiration, maybe even the loss of a loved one — and we were in the thick of that,” he remembers. “It was overwhelming to work at a funeral home, experiencing not only the sadness of the people we serve, but also the relentlessness of the people I served alongside. It inspired the whole record.”
He’s now a genuine TikTok star with more than 250,000 subscribers, as well as a successful podcast host whose weekly series, “You’ll Die Trying,” averages more than 10,000 downloads per episode. As the world changes, Nathan Morris continues to evolve alongside it, finding new ways to spread his music and message.
The concert planned this weekend is a debut presentation of his experiences as a mortician and songwriter. It is slated for Saturday, Aug. 6 at 7 p.m. General admission is $20. Buy tickets online at historicplaza.org.
