"Love feels so good I can't imagine why anyone chooses to hate," Edward Morris wrote in one of his last Facebook posts, on July 20, 2026. Two months later the Nashville journalist, author, poet and playwright, who spent 14 years steering Billboard's country music coverage and another 20 writing for CMT.com, died on September 17, 2026, at 90.

He was born Murrell Edward Morris on September 21, 1935, on a hillside farm on Aaron's Fork in Kanawha County, West Virginia, the second of four brothers born to Charles Sennett Morris and Mary Elizabeth Morris. At Elkview High School he edited the student newspaper and won the spelling bee championship for all of Kanawha County's schools. His family had no car, so he hitchhiked to Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, where he again ran the campus paper, The Comet, and earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1958, according to the University of Charleston. Graduate study in journalism at Ohio University led him to musical-theater performer Norma Chapman. They married in the Morris Harvey College chapel in February 1960 and stayed married for 61 years.

Writing came before Nashville by more than a decade. Morris taught English and journalism at four schools, Findlay College and Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky, and Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania, then worked as an assistant editor at the trade magazine Writer's Digest. He began freelancing for Billboard in 1972, moved to Nashville in 1980, and joined the magazine's Nashville staff the following year. By the time he left in 1995, he had spent 14 years there and risen to country music editor and chief Nashville columnist, a tenure that shaped how the trade press covered Music Row through the genre's growth in the 1980s and its 1990s boom, according to Billboard.

Billboard was never the whole of it. Morris's byline also ran in Advertising Age, TV Guide, McCall's, The Hollywood Reporter, BookPage, The Journal of Country Music, Mother Earth News, Bluegrass Unlimited and The Saturday Evening Post, and record labels hired him to write liner notes for box sets by the Judds, Keith Whitley, Eddy Arnold, Guy Clark, Hank Snow and Chet Atkins. He published eight books, among them Alabama in 1985, Garth Brooks: Platinum Cowboy in 1993, and Edward Morris' Complete Guide to Country Music Videos in 1997. The International Bluegrass Music Association named him its Print Journalist of the Year in 1993, and in 2002 Belmont University gave him its Charlie Lamb Journalist of the Year award at its International Country Music Conference; he went on to guest-lecture at Belmont, Vanderbilt University and Trevecca Nazarene University.

When Billboard's Nashville bureau shrank, Morris did not stop. He wrote for CMT.com for 20 years, from 1999 until the pandemic-era layoffs that ended the site's news operation in 2020, filing from home while still covering the industry's award shows and number-one parties. At 80 he wrote his first stage play, a one-woman drama called The Passion of Ethel Rosenberg that was staged in Nashville and Santa Fe and given a public reading at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage, according to MusicRow. Asked once what kept him at it, he said, "You hear musicians say that they would do it for free if they weren't paid for it. And I feel the same way about writing. I love to write with the anticipation of amusing people or getting arguments started or whatever ... Anything that happens, if you treat it right, can be turned into a piece of prose. And that's what I do."

Norma Morris built her own career in Nashville as a music publicist, representing artists including Ralph Stanley and Steve Wariner. After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease in 2015, Morris wrote about caring for her in a series of Facebook posts that he later gathered into the 2020 book Stardust: An Alzheimer's Love Story. Norma died in 2021. Morris kept posting to Facebook nearly every day afterward; his family said his dry humor and outspoken commentary on politics, philosophy and religion drew both devoted readers and critics, according to his family's obituary. Well into his 90th year, he also took on a column for his local paper, The Kingston Springs Gazette. "Ed was my inspiration to become a writer and to never take anything at face value," his brother Roger Morris, his only surviving sibling, said in the days after his death, in the same obituary.

Morris's reporting and reviews chronicled Nashville's country music business from the Urban Cowboy years through the genre's 1990s boom and its move online, work now preserved in Billboard's archive, in liner notes still packaged with reissued box sets, and in the eight books that carry his byline. He is survived by his daughters, Erin Morris Huttlinger and Rachel Serrato, his son, Jason Morris, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren; a fourth child, Christopher, died at age two. Those who followed his columns for five decades, from Billboard to CMT.com to the Kingston Springs Gazette, knew him first by his byline, a deadline he kept meeting into his 90th year. The family held a private service at Larkspur Conservation, a conservation burial ground in Taylor Hollow outside Nashville.