Online Reporter
KINGSTON. – Jimmy Cliff, who died aged 81, was a singer, songwriter and actor whose work opened up the music and culture of Jamaica to an international audience.
Blazing a trail for Bob Marley, Cliff enjoyed a string of hits in the early 1970s that combined his unusually pure singing voice with a lilting reggae rhythm.
But his real breakthrough came when he starred as the gun-toting, drug-dealing rude boy in the low budget blockbuster The Harder They Come (1972).
A brutal depiction of life in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, the film followed the travails of an underdog musician adrift in a big city where corruption was endemic.
The accompanying score established reggae in America and became a bestselling soundtrack album.
Although it included songs by accomplished performers such as Toots and the Maytals and Desmond Dekker, it was Cliff’s compositions You Can Get it if You Really Want (which became the Conservative Party’s anthem at their annual conference in 2009), the hymn-like Many Rivers To Cross, as well as the title track, that particularly stood out.
But if these showcased the clarity of his voice and revealed him at his most soulful, Cliff refused to be pigeon-holed, experimenting with rock, soul and R&B to such an extent that he missed out on the commercialisation of reggae.
This allowed Bob Marley to steal his crown and caused some observers to consider that he had under-achieved.
Cliff, who had recorded more than 20 albums over a 40-year career, disagreed.
As he put it: “They say: ‘You’re a Jamaican, you’re known for reggae so you’re supposed to do that.’ But I won’t . . . I’m on another path . . . looking for the new. That’s fundamental to me.”
It was an attitude that proved as inspirational as his music, and his influence extended to Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer and beyond.
Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers during a hurricane on April 1 1944 in the Somerton district of St James, Jamaica, the eighth of nine children raised by his father in near-poverty.
A star singer in his local church, Jimmy left school in 1960 and moved to Kingston, where he strove to make a name for himself on the anarchic music scene later exposed by The Harder They Come.
One day he walked into Leslie Kong’s ice cream parlour-cum-recording studio and sang his own composition, Dearest Beverley.
Kong signed him and produced his first local hit, Hurricane Hattie, and, at 14, renamed Jimmy Cliff, he found himself at the forefront of the nascent ska movement with its uptempo jaunty rhythms, and helping a young Robert Marley record his first song, Judge Not.
The new Jamaican government wanted to popularise the local sound, and in 1965 Cliff joined Prince Buster and Byron Lee’s Dragonaires on a tour of the US, where he met Chris Blackwell, the British founder of Island Records.
Blackwell persuaded Cliff to move to England, where he worked as a backing singer for other Island artists. His debut solo album, Hard Road to Travel (1967), and a flotilla of singles, failed to chart.
In 1969 he left Island for Trojan Records, and Wonderful World, Beautiful People, taken from his album Jimmy Cliff (1970), became his first Top 10 hit, the first for reggae as a crossover genre.
Cliff’s radio-friendly work was light and poppy compared with the darker sounds of ska and rocksteady coming from Jamaica. His second single, the anti-war Vietnam, was described by Bob Dylan as the best protest song he had ever heard, and so impressed Paul Simon that he flew to Kingston to record his first, eponymous solo album in the same studio using Cliff’s rhythm section and engineer.
Having unsuccessfully recorded a reggae version of Procol Harum’s classic A Whiter Shade of Pale, Cliff fared better with his adaptation of Cat Stevens’s Wild World.
Meanwhile, Desmond Dekker’s cover of Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want and the Pioneers’ interpretation of his Let Your Yeah Be Yeah both reached the top five in the UK.
After re-signing to Island, he released Another Cycle (1971). Recorded at the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, it disappointed his fans with its enthusiasm for soul and R&B, and the singer returned to Kingston to compose songs for the soundtrack of Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come.
But when Henzell had asked Cliff if he thought he could write the music the singer had replied “Think? I can do anything.”
That mixture of arrogance, optimism and defiance entranced Henzell, who promptly offered him the starring role.
The film introduced Western audiences to the guns, drugs, violence and corruption that formed the socio-political backdrop to Jamaica’s increasingly popular reggae culture.
When Cliff left Island for a second time, he converted to Islam and moved to Africa.
But while his ancestral roots informed his songwriting, successive albums for EMI, while critically applauded, failed to hit the commercial jackpot.
But he recorded and toured constantly, particularly across Africa, and his refusal to bow to the dictates of the market inspired successive generations of musicians, from punks onwards.
His albums such as I Am The Living (1980), Special (1982) and The Power and the Glory (1984), pointed the way to rap and hip-hop.
Cliff resurfaced in the mid-1980s when UB40 successfully covered Many Rivers to Cross, Bruce Springsteen reinterpreted Trapped on the USA for Africa album We Are the World (1985), and Cliff himself appeared on the Artists Against Apartheid single Sun City.
He played opposite Peter O’Toole and Robin Williams in the film Club Paradise (1986), as well as writing seven songs – including a duet with Elvis Costello – for the soundtrack.
Cliff returned to the charts for the first time in more than 20 years with his cover of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, which featured on the soundtrack of John Candy’s Cool Runnings (1993), and in 1995 he sang the version of the song Hakuna Matata that appeared on the album Rhythm of the Pride Lands, a musical “sequel” to The Lion King.
Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium Cliff continued to record and release work across the genres.
The album Humanitarian (1999) was followed by a compilation, The Messenger (2000) and, in collaboration with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, Fantastic Plastic People (2003).
His 2012 album Rebirth won him a Grammy for best reggae album. His final single, C’Mon Get Happy, was released the following year. He was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 2003, and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Jimmy Cliff’s marriage produced a son and a daughter, and he was also the father of the singer and actress Nabiyah Be. – The Telegraph
