Richard Auguste Morse 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 2014, he had distanced himself from the Martelly government. 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
Michel Martelly called compas, the only music allowed under the Duvaliers." After the 1991 Haitian coup d'état saw the expulsion of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Martelly opened a Pétion-Ville club called the Garage, where he entertained many of the coup's main architects, including the much-feared chief of national police, Michel François, later convicted in absentia for massacring Aristide supporters." Martelly has been heralded as a pioneer of a unique genre of compas, a style of Haitian dance music sung predominantly in the Haitian Creole language. Originally, compas, was the creation of Nemours Jean-Baptiste. Martelly, a keyboardist and the self-proclaimed "President of Compas," popularized a