Jimmy Cliff, reggae giant and star of landmark film The Harder They Come, dies aged 81

New York: Jimmy Cliff, the charismatic reggae pioneer and actor who preached joy, defiance and resilience in such classics as Many Rivers to Cross, You Can Get It If You Really Want and Vietnam and starred in the landmark movie The Harder They Come, has died at 81.

His family posted a message on Monday (overnight AEDT) on his social media sites that he died from a “seizure followed by pneumonia”. Additional information was not immediately available.

Jamaican musician, singer and actor Jimmy Cliff, pictured here performing in Singapore in 2013, has died.Credit: AP

“To all his fans around the world, please know that your support was his strength throughout his whole career,” the announcement reads in part. “He really appreciated each and every fan for their love.”

Cliff was a native Jamaican with a spirited tenor and a gift for catchphrases and topical lyrics who joined Kingston’s emerging music scene in his teens and helped lead a movement in the 1960s that included such future stars as Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert and Peter Tosh. By the early 1970s, he had accepted director Perry Henzell’s offer to star in a film about an aspiring reggae musician, Ivanhoe ‘Ivan’ Martin, who turns to crime when his career stalls. Henzell named the movie The Harder They Come after suggesting the title as a possible song for Cliff.

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“Ivanhoe was a real-life character for Jamaicans,” Cliff told Variety in 2022, upon the film’s 50th anniversary. “When I was a little boy, I used to hear about him as being a bad man. A real bad man. No one in Jamaica, at that time, had guns. But he had guns and shot a policeman, so he was someone to be feared. However, being a hero was the manner in which Perry wanted to make his name — an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes.”

The Harder They Come, delayed for some two years because of sporadic funding, was the first major commercial release to come out of Jamaica. It sold few tickets in its initial run, despite praise from Roger Ebert and other critics. But it now stands as a cultural touchstone, with a soundtrack widely cited as among the greatest ever and as a turning point in reggae’s worldwide rise.

For a brief time, Cliff rivalled Marley as the genre’s most prominent artist. On an album that included Toots and the Maytals, the Slickers and Desmond Dekker, Cliff was the featured artist on four out of 10 songs, all well-placed in the reggae canon.

Sitting in Limbo was a moody but hopeful take on a life in restless motion. You Can Get It If You Really Want and the title song were calls for action and vows of final payments: “The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all.” His fourth contribution was the weary cry of Many Rivers to Cross, a gospel-style testament he wrote after confronting racism in England in the 1960s.

“It was a very frustrating time. I came to England with very big hopes, and I saw my hopes fading,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012.

The music lives on

Cliff’s career peaked with The Harder They Come but, after a break in the late 1970s, he worked steadily for decades, taking on session work with the Rolling Stones and collaborations with Wyclef Jean, Sting and Annie Lennox among others. His early music lived on. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua used You Can Get It If You Really Want as a campaign theme and Bruce Springsteen helped expand Cliff’s US audience with his live cover of the reggae star’s Trapped, featured on the million-selling 1985 charity album We Are the World. Others who performed his songs included John Lennon, Cher and UB40.

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“So very sad to hear that the music icon and original reggae superstar, Jimmy Cliff, has died aged 81,” a message shared to UB40’s official Instagram page read. “He finally crossed over the last river. RIP Jimmy, your music will live forever.”

Cliff was nominated for seven Grammys and won twice for best reggae album: in 1986 for Cliff Hanger and in 2012 for the well-named Rebirth, widely regarded as his best work in years. His other albums included the Grammy-nominated The Power and the Glory, Humanitarian and the 2022 release Refugees. He also performed on Steve Van Zandt’s anti-apartheid protest anthem Sun City and acted in the Robin Williams comedy Club Paradise, for which he contributed a handful of songs to the soundtrack and sang with Elvis Costello on the rocker Seven Day Weekend.

In 2010, Cliff was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He was born James Chambers in suburban St James and, like Ivan Martin in The Harder They Come, moved to Kingston in his youth to become a musician. In the early 1960s, Jamaica was gaining its independence from Britain and the sounds that would lead to reggae – precursors called ska and rocksteady – were catching on. Calling himself Jimmy Cliff, he had a handful of local hits, including King of Kings and Miss Jamaica, and, after overcoming the kinds of barriers that upended Martin, was called on to help represent his country at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

“[Reggae] is a pure music. It was born of the poorer class of people,” he told Spin in 2022. “It came from the need for recognition, identity and respect.”

Approaching stardom

His popularity grew over the second half of the 1960s, and he signed with Island Records, the world’s leading reggae label. Island founder Chris Blackwell tried in vain to market him to rock audiences, but Cliff still managed to reach new listeners. He had a hit with a cover of Cat Stevens’ Wild World, and reached the top 10 in Britain with the uplifting Wonderful World, Beautiful People. Cliff’s widely heard protest chant, Vietnam, was inspired in part by a friend who had served in the war and returned damaged beyond recognition.

Cliff’s rise and the worldwide rise of reggae go hand in hand.Credit: AP

His success as a recording artist and concert performer led Henzell to seek a meeting with him and flatter him into accepting the part: “You know, I think you’re a better actor than singer,” Cliff remembered him saying. Aware that The Harder They Come could be a breakthrough for Jamaican cinema, he openly wished for stardom, although Cliff remained surprised by how well known he became.

“Back in those days there were few of us African descendants who came through the cracks to get any kind of recognition,” he told The Guardian in 2021. “It was easier in music than movies. But when you start to see your face and name on the side of the buses in London, that was like: ‘Wow, what’s going on?’”

Six songs that defined Cliff’s musical career – and reggae’s rise

Miss Jamaica (1962)

Singing along to an easy, bluesy groove, Cliff had a way of sounding both relaxed and fully committed, and could make a nursery rhyme sound like an anthem: “Roses are red / violets are blue / Believe me / I love you.”

He also joined a long popular tradition of offering praise to a very personal kind of beauty: “Although you may not have such a fabulous shape / To suit the rest of the world / But you do suit me and that’s all I want to know.”

Vietnam (1968)

Like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and other anti-war songs, Cliff’s Vietnam was drawn from the horrors of those who had served overseas. Vietnam was a seething, mid-tempo chant – “Vi-et-nam, Vi-et-nam”, the very name an indictment, in this song for the death of a soldier who had written home to say he would soon be returning, only for his mother to receive a telegram the next day announcing his death.

Wonderful World, Beautiful People (1969)

One of Cliff’s many talents was looking clear-eyed at life as it is, and imagining so well what it could be – a paradise made real by the melody, the feel and lyrics of Wonderful World, Beautiful People, a vision so inevitable even the likes of US president Richard Nixon and British prime minister Harold Wilson can’t get in the way. “This is our world, can’t you see? / Everybody wants to live and be free.”

Many Rivers to Cross (1969)

Onstage, he sometimes literally jumped for joy, but Cliff could also call out the deepest notes of despair. The sombre, gospel-style Many Rivers to Cross was inspired by the racism he encountered in England in the 1960s and tells a story of displacement, longing, fatigue and gathering rage – but never defeat.

“I merely survive because of my pride,” he tells us, a variation of the old saying that hopes dies last.

You Can Get It If You Really Want (1970)

Cliff’s political songs were so enduring in part because they were so catchy, and because they offered hope without the promise of easy success. Kicked off by a spare horn riff, You Can Get It If You Really Want has a lighter mood than Vietnam, but just as determined a spirit. “You must try, try and try, try and try,” Cliff warns. “Persecution you must bear / Win or lose you got to get your share.”

The Harder They Come (1972)

The title track to the movie which would mark the high point of his success, The Harder They Come has a spiky, muscular rhythm, the kind you could set to the forward march of a mass protest.

It’s a sermon of retribution for oppressors – “the harder they fall, one and all” – and of earthly rewards for those who have been robbed: “So as sure as the sun will shine / I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine.”

AP

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