Country music songwriter and Tracy native Dennis Morgan returns to honor a late friend
By Per Peterson
Tracy’s favorite songwriter and former “Sensational Sleeper,” Dennis Morgan, was back in Tracy last week to say good-bye to a dear friend and reconnect with current ones.
Morgan, an award-winning country songwriter, attended the funeral of Terry Johnson last Tuesday, and a day later spent some time with Dru and Nicole Larson, including attending a Milroy Irish amateur baseball game Wednesday night and taking in Irish Yard, a “Field of Dreams” of sorts cut into the agricultural landscape northeast of Milroy on Dolan land.
“This is a highlight, this is unbelievable,” Morgan said of Irish Yard. “I wish we would’ve done this on our farm on Highway 14. That would’ve been cool.”
Morgan, who penned a song for Johnson after his cancer diagnosis, certainly would’ve rather come back to town for a visit under different circumstances, but he felt compelled to come back home to attend his friend’s funeral service at Lake Sarah Lutheran Church in Garvin.
“It was great to come back for him and (Johnson’s wife) Barb and the family,” said the Nashville resident whose return to Tracy was his first since a brief visit last August. “I really tried to escape COVID last year by driving north. Then when I get here, there’s 27 cases of COVID in Ghent. It was all over the place.”
While recognizing the pandemic affected others much more than him in 2020, he said COVID did have a big impact on himself and the entertainment industry. The pandemic, combined with tornadoes and sporadic riots, created what Morgan called a tremendous shutdown.
See this week’s Headlight Herald for more on this article.