Jimmy Cliff, original rude boy and soulful reggae legend who helped spread the genre’s reach from Jamaica to the world with The Harder They Come, has died at the age of 81.
The singer’s family announced his death on Instagram, writing that he “crossed over due to a seizure followed by pneumonia.” “To all his fans around the world, please know that your support was his strength throughout his whole career. He really appreciated each and every fan for their love,” his wife, Latifa, and children Lilty and Aken wrote. “Jimmy, my darling, may you rest in peace. I will follow your wishes. I hope you all can respect our privacy during these hard times. Further information will be provided at a later date. See you and we see you Legend.”
Along with Toots and the Maytals — credited with coining the term “reggae” with their 1968 single “Do the Reggay” — Cliff was among the first Jamaican artists whose music was released through a partnership with Kingston label Beverley’s and Island Records, a joint British Jamaican label co-founded by Chris Blackwell with the aim of bringing the music of Jamaica across the Atlantic.
Through this deal, Cliff released a half dozen singles in the first half of the Sixties, beginning with his debut 1962 single “Hurricane Hattie,” along with ska classics like “Miss Jamaica” and “Gold Digger.” By the mid-Sixties, Cliff had moved to the U.K., befriending future rock legends like Pete Townshend and Robert Plant.
In 1967, Cliff’s debut Island LP, Hard Road to Travel, arrived. It was followed two years later by his self-titled 1969 LP (later renamed Wonderful World, Beautiful People), which boasted two songs that ultimately led to Cliff’s breakout and made him reggae’s first global superstar: The anti-war anthem “Vietnam,” and one of Cliff’s most enduring and oft-covered works, “Many Rivers to Cross.”
The following year, 1970, brought two more hits: Cliff’s rendition of Cat Stevens’ then-just-released “Wild World,” as well as “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” The success overseas put Cliff back in the spotlight in his native Jamaica, where filmmaker Perry Henzell was working on a crime film about the rude boys of Kingston.
“The way Perry [Henzell] got me to do the movie was — because I was doing so well in Europe at the time that I didn’t really want to come back [to Jamaica], I could make a lot of money in Europe, I had hits with ‘Wild World’ and ‘Vietnam’ and those songs — he said, ‘You know, I think you’re a better actor than singer.’ And I went wow to myself, because I thought the same thing to myself,” Cliff told Rolling Stone in 2019, adding that before he became a singer, he trained as an actor.
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The film, as well as its legendary soundtrack — featuring Cliff’s biggest singles to that point alongside the soon-to-be-hit title track he composed for the film, and classics by the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, and more — became a smash, and is credited with bringing both reggae music and Jamaican cinema to mainstream audiences. The Harder They Come was later included among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.
With Cliff on the precipice of stardom with The Harder They Come, the singer — frustrated by a contractual stalemate with Island — signed with rival EMI, leaving Island after a decade. Although Blackwell and Island lost their superstar, the pain was short-lived: Soon after Cliff departed, the label signed another emerging artist from Jamaica, a friend of Cliff’s from his teenage years, Bob Marley.
“[Marley] was an artist that I took into the business and became maybe the most phenomenal figure [in reggae],” he said. Cliff is often credited with giving Marley his first break, auditioning the young singer in 1962 for producer Leslie Kong’s Beverley’s label.
“Even though we had similar revolutionary aspirations, spirits and thoughts, I’m a bit of a loner, and he loved all the people,” Cliff told Rolling Stone of Marley. “And so he attracted the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Born James Chambers on July 30, 1944, in the St. James parish near Montego Bay, Cliff was attracted to music at an early age; the son of a devoutly religious father, he was inspired both by the gospel services he performed in at the church as well as the American music and pioneering Jamaican acts — from Little Richard to Derrick Morgan, Sam Cooke to Ray Charles — that was being played on a.m. radio, legendary singers who informed Cliff’s soulful vocals.
Cliff — who adopted his stage name as a preteen, an allusion to the heights he hoped he’d climb — began writing music while still at St. James, with his early songs showing enough promise that they culminated in a scholarship to a technical high school in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. Cliff and his family soon relocated to the West Kingston neighborhood of Denham Town — near Trench Town, where the teenaged Marley resided — and an area known for its criminal activity among its disaffected, poverty-stricken youths, which played a role in spawning the the rude-boy subculture.
“Kingston was shocking,” Cliff said of his teen years. “I grew up in a village where we didn’t have running water or anything, shops weren’t there. So if you’re ready to cook and have no salt, you just go to a neighbor. ‘Give me some salt,’ you know? I wasn’t accustomed to people cheating each other and that kind of thing.”
As Cliff told it, what followed in Kingston was not only the birth of his career, but also one of the most important record labels in Jamaica: While walking home from school one day, Cliff walked into a record shop called Beverley’s, run by three Chinese Jamaican brothers, the Kongs. Cliff offered to play them some songs he’d been working on — including one called “Dearest Beverley” — but was told they were a record store, not a record label.
“But you sell records. You might want to get in the business,” the teenaged Cliff told them. Oldest brother Leslie Kong told Cliff to sing for them. “Two of the brothers laughed,” Cliff said. “But this other brother told me, ‘You have the best voice I’ve ever heard in Jamaica.’ And I was like, yes! Because when you get somebody who sees in you what you see in yourself, it was a great encouragement.”
The Kongs launched their Beverley’s label soon after, with Cliff’s “Hurricane Hattie” (and “Dearest Beverley” as the B side) as their first single. The label would soon become home for reggae greats like Dekker, the Maytals, and the Wailers, including Peter Tosh and Marley’s first two singles.
While he never attained the sustained global stardom and cultural legacy as his compatriot Marley, Cliff remained a prolific and revered reggae artist in the years following The Harder They Come. He released albums at an almost annual pace throughout the Seventies and Eighties; a seven-time Grammy nominee, Cliff earned his first award when his 1985 LP Cliff Hanger won Best Reggae Recording.
Cliff’s seldom-heard 1972 single “Trapped,” produced by Cat Stevens, would resurface a decade later when it became a staple of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s concerts in the early Eighties; Springsteen had purchased a cassette compilation of Cliff’s music while on a European tour and integrated “Trapped” into the band’s set list (where it still remains). Springsteen’s live rendition was also included on the 1985 benefit album We Are the World, while Cliff himself revisited the track on his own 1989 album, Images. (Springsteen and Cliff would later join forces onstage at the 2012 SXSW. “He’s still terrific,” Steven Van Zandt said of Cliff at the time.)
Cliff would score one more surprise worldwide hit in the Nineties, updating fellow reggae icon Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” for the soundtrack to the 1993 Jamaican bobsled comedy Cool Runnings, with the cover reaching the Top 20 of the Hot 100, his highest charting single in the United States. The following year, Cliff contributed a rendition of The Lion King classic “Hakuna Matata” to a companion album for that 1994 animated film.
Despite his love of acting and his well-received Harder They Come performance, Cliff had sporadic appearances on the big screen in the decades that followed, making cameos in the Robin Williams comedy Club Paradise and the Steven Seagal action film Marked for Death. “There were some other roles that came up but I didn’t really see myself playing them, so I said no to them,” Cliff says of his movie career.
In 2012, two years after Cliff was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he released what became his swan song: Rebirth, an LP that recaptured the sound of his Seventies glory days thanks in part to production and songwriting by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong. The album earned Cliff his second Grammy Award, for Best Reggae Album. Cliff would release one final album, 2022’s Refugees.
“When we saw Jimmy Cliff, we saw ourselves,” Wyclef Jean said of the singer’s legacy in his speech inducting Cliff into the Rock Hall. “As I looked at Jimmy Cliff, I saw my face, and this is what Jimmy Cliff represents, not just to me from the ghetto, but I think all of the kids that come from rural areas, so thank you, Jimmy Cliff, for being an inspiration to all our lives.”
In September 2020, Cliff eulogized his late friend “Toots” Hibbert for Rolling Stone in a way that echoed his own legacy. “From our religious background, our concept of when someone cross over — we don’t say they ‘pass away,’ we say ‘cross over,’ they just go to the other side of existence, there’s no such thing as death — and then they go out there and they vibrate for however many days before they go to a higher height,” Cliff said. “But Toots, the way Toots lived his life, I’m sure his soul got to move on. The soul can reincarnate from 24 to 24,000 times, it depends how you lived your life. But with Toots, I can’t see Toots coming back to this planet. He’s evolved. He’s completed his task that he has to do on this planet.”
“His spirit will always be resonating with us,” Cliff added. “His soul will always be resonating with us and the people who loved his music.”
From Rolling Stone US
