The singer and songwriter Jimmy Cliff, who has died aged 81, was one of Jamaica’s most celebrated performers. An itinerant ambassador who introduced the music and culture of his island to audiences across the world at a time when reggae was largely unknown, he was a pioneer with a distinctive high tenor voice whose themes of civil and human rights resonated with many.
The stirring optimism of his orchestrated Wonderful World, Beautiful People spent 13 weeks in the British singles charts in 1969, peaking at No 6, and his caustic Vietnam, in the same year, was a favourite of Bob Dylan’s that inspired Paul Simon to later record Mother and Child Reunion in Jamaica with the same backing band, after Dylan made him aware of it.
But perhaps his most famous song was Many Rivers to Cross, also from 1969, which he wrote about the frustrations of trying to make it in the music business. Although it never commanded a high chart position, the song became a well-recognised anthem, and was rerecorded by many artists, including John Lennon, Percy Sledge, Cher, Joe Cocker and UB40.
Cliff’s other great claim to fame was his portrayal of Ivan in Perry Henzell’s groundbreaking 1972 feature film, The Harder They Come, which brought aspects of his own story into cinematic focus through improvised dialogue based on his life experiences.
He contributed four songs to the soundtrack, including his enduringly popular composition You Can Get It If You Really Want, which reached No 2 in the UK singles chart; the title track, The Harder They Come; and the soulful Sitting in Limbo. The Harder They Come was the only song specifically written for the soundtrack; everything else had been recorded before the film was conceived.
He was born James Chambers in Adelphi, an impoverished hillside community in the district of Somerton, near Montego Bay in Jamaica, where his father, Lilbert, was a tailor, farmer and community leader and his mother, Christine – who was a Maroon descended from escaped slaves – was a domestic worker.
Following the failure of his parents’ marriage, he and his older brother, Victor, were raised by their father, a Pentecostal Christian, in a two-roomed shack that was destroyed by Hurricane Charlie in 1951, forcing young Jimmy to live for a time with his aunt and grandmother on a nearby farm.
At Somerton All Age school his intelligence was noted by his teacher Robertha White (mother of the future film director Lennie Little-White), who recommended that he enrol at Kingston Technical high school to study electronics. Jimmy moved to the capital in the late 1950s to begin the course, lodging with a cousin, and was soon participating in talent contests, using the stage name of Jimmy Cliff.
Moving to the home of a family friend who lived in a tenement in western Kingston, Cliff made his first recording, Daisy Got Me Crazy, for the local sound system proprietor Count Boysie, but the song was never released.
His debut single, I’m Sorry, was issued by another sound system owner, Sir Cavalier, on his Hi Tone label in Jamaica and Blue Beat in the UK to little effect, but Cliff nonetheless abandoned his studies to concentrate on music, and he convinced the entrepreneur Leslie Kong to begin producing some of his records in 1961. The following year he scored his first hit for Kong with a ska love song called Hurricane Hattie, which made him a household name in Jamaica.
Cliff’s appearance at the World’s Fair in New York in 1963 brought him to the attention of the Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who took him to London two years later to market him as a soul singer, backed by future members of Mott the Hoople. His debut album, Hard Road to Travel (1967), made little impact, but Cliff’s cover of the pop song Waterfall, by the British rock band Nirvana, made him a well-known figure in Brazil after he entered a song competition in Rio, and he stayed on in the country.
Revitalised, he returned to Jamaica in 1969 to cut Wonderful World, Beautiful People, Vietnam, and a cover of Cat Stevens’ Wild World that also reached the British Top 10. With his career on the rise, Cliff then became the star of The Harder They Come, playing an impoverished country boy trying to make it as a singer in Kingston.
But although the film broke box office records in Jamaica in 1972 and would become a cult classic, it took its time to earn a profit, and feeling that his career was stagnating, Cliff left Island for EMI.
The fresh start proved to be difficult, not just because his membership of the Nation of Islam had begun to alienate some fans, but also because Blackwell had signed the Wailers to market Bob Marley as a rebel outlaw modelled on Cliff’s film character. As a result, Cliff found himself in Marley’s shadow, despite the strength of his EMI albums such as Unlimited (1973), House of Exile (1974) and Follow My Mind (1975).
However, Cliff’s reggae slant, incorporating non-Jamaican musical elements, found an audience in Africa, leading to performances in Nigeria in 1974 and a tour of west Africa three years later, where his meeting with Sheik Mourtada Mbaké, spiritual leader of the Baye Fall Mourides order of Sufism in Senegal, inspired Cliff to embrace a more traditional form of Islam.
The self-produced album Give Thankx (1978) was a strong roots reggae recording, and the more commercial I Am the Living (1980) arrived just before his controversial performance in Soweto, to a multiracial audience of 55,000, despite an anti-apartheid ban.
He then returned to Brazil, collaborating with the singer Gilberto Gil. Once back in Jamaica he staged a free concert for 20,000 people in his home patch of Somerton, which became the platform for the documentary film Bongo Man (1982), which revealed (notwithstanding his commitment to Islam) the enduring impact of Rastafari consciousness on his worldview.
Cliff signed to Columbia in 1982 for the album Special, featuring the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, and then a working partnership with Kool and the Gang’s Ronald Bell (Khalis Bayyan) yielded some of his most commercially successful material, including the album The Power and the Glory (1983), with its hit single Reggae Night, co-written with La Toya Jackson, and Cliff Hanger, which won a Grammy in 1985. Cliff appeared in the comedy film Club Paradise (1986) with Robin Williams and Peter O’Toole the following year, and composed most of its soundtrack, which included a duet with Elvis Costello.
With the album Hanging Fire (1987) he moved into commercial dance music, including some soukous-oriented songs recorded in Brazzaville. During the 90s he divided his time between Jamaica, the US, Senegal, Nigeria and Brazil, scoring a hit with a remake of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now for the soundtrack of the film Cool Runnings in 1993, and another with a version of Hakuna Matata, the Elton John/Tim Rice song composed for The Lion King in 1995.
In 2002 Cliff’s album Fantastic Plastic People, released by Dave Stewart’s Artists Network, featured Sting, Joe Strummer, Stewart, Annie Lennox, the Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and Gary Mudbone Cooper of P-Funk; the following year Cliff was awarded Jamaica’s Order of Merit.
The album Rebirth (2012) was a welcome return to form, produced by the former Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, and Cliff continued to deliver dynamic performances on festival stages into his 70s. In 2022 he released the album Refugees, featuring Wyclef Jean guesting on the title track and his daughter Lilty Cliff on a song called Racism.
He is survived by his wife, Latifa Belaydi, their daughter Lilty and son Aken, and other children from previous relationships, including the Brazilian actor and singer Nabiyah Be.
