Song 182: “Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff

Song 182: “Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff
On
December 18, 2025
By
Andrew Hickey
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Song 182: "Many Rivers to Cross" by Jimmy Cliff
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Duration: 1:50:15
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Recorded on December 18, 2025
This episode, we look at the song “Many Rivers to Cross”, the birth of reggae, and the career of the late Jimmy Cliff. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a sixty-seven-minute bonus episode available,
on “Return of Django” by the Upsetters
.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at
http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust
and
http://sitcomclub.com/
.
Resources
Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones.
This Tunemymusic link
will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Pride and Passion”, “Whiter Shade of Pale”, “Hey Mr. Yesterday”, “Dear Mother”, “One More” and the Annie Lennox and George Melly tracks. Other tracks may be unavailable on other platforms. Also note that these may not always be the same versions excerpted in the episode, due to the habit of many of these artists of rerecording the same song for multiple labels.
Information on Cliff himself came from the one biography of him,
Jimmy Cliff
by David Katz
.
Information on reggae and Caribbean music more broadly came from Katz’s
Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae
,
Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King
by Lloyd Bradley,and
Reggae and Caribbean Music
by Dave Thompson.
Information about Rastafari came in part from
Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers
by Ennis Barrington Evans
. Information about Cliff’s time at Island came from
The Islander
by Chris Blackwell and Paul Morley
. And information on Mott the Hoople came from
All the Young Dudes
by Campbell Devine
.
There are no good compilations covering all the various phases of Cliff’s work, but
this one
is about as reasonable a single-CD set as you’ll find. It’s also worth getting
the deluxe version of the soundtrack to
The Harder They Come
, which has a second CD of contemporary reggae hits by other artists.
And
The Harder They Come
has been released in multiple iterations on DVD and Blu-Ray.
This one
is the best available.
Patreon
This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of
my backers on Patreon
. Why not join them?
Transcript
Before we begin, I have to note that Jimmy Cliff, the subject of today’s episode, sadly died just a few days ago. I had actually written most of this episode when it was announced that he died, and obviously I’ve had to do a bit of rewriting as a result of that. Originally, while Cliff’s song is the hook that the episode is hung on, the episode was not going to be as much about Cliff and his career as a whole as it was a more general look at the development of reggae with Cliff’s music just the lens to see it through.
With Cliff’s death, it felt a little inappropriate to do that, so this completed version now has far more about Cliff himself than I initially intended, while still being about the development of reggae and its popularisation outside Jamaica, but this episode can still only cover a tiny fraction of the sixty-year career of one of the most important Jamaican musicians of all time (and I should note that Cliff was an extremely private man, so this really does cover his career rather than his life).
The episode also discusses racism, both anti-Black racism from white people and racism from Black Jamaicans against people of Chinese descent.
James Chambers always knew he wanted to be a singer from a very early age. He was brought up in rural Jamaica by a single father, and his early years were quite brutally poor, growing up with his father and brother in a one-room shack with no electricity and no plumbing — though there was always the river, and as he said later “I really enjoyed that period of my life, because there were rivers to go to, and the beach.”
His first experiences of music were singing in church, and even at an early age he seems to have had an ambivalent attitude to religion, saying “I enjoyed the singing of the church, but when the preaching came on, I slept.” His father was a very religious Christian, but over the years Cliff seemed to move between different religious views, investigating them all intensely, and being first a Christian, then briefly a Rasta, then for many years a follower of the Nation of Islam, before finally deciding that, as he put it “The religious thing was one of the many doors I went through. It was just another classroom I studied. I’m graduated now!” and saying “now I believe in science.”
But when he was seven, he had to move for the first time in what would become a rather peripatetic life, as he went for a while to live with his grandmother, while his father rebuilt their shack after Hurricane Charlie hit. While there he had a couple of experiences that would affect his outlook for the rest of his life. For the first time he experienced colourism — the cousins he was living with were all lighter-skinned than him — and his grandmother, who was also dark skinned, tried to instil in him a Black-is-beautiful attitude to counteract the negative messages he was getting from others.
His grandmother also became the first person to encourage him to sing — he would climb a tree and sing as loudly as he could, and if the neighbours complained, she would tell them off, saying that God had given him a talent and he was obviously going to use it.
While he was only with his grandmother a relatively short period of time before returning to his father, these lessons of hers seem to have given him the kind of confidence that most people couldn’t dream of, something that would make a huge difference in his chosen career.
On returning to his father’s home, he started to occasionally sneak into a nearby tavern — not to drink alcohol, but to listen to music. Young James’ father was a strict Pentecostal who thought that all secular music was the work of the Devil, but James disagreed, and the tavern had one of the sound systems that were becoming popular in Jamaica, playing mostly Cuban and Latin American music like son and rumba:
[Excerpt: Abelardo Barroso, “Bruca Manigua”]
He would also sneak off to listen to music with a friend who had a radio, and go to another bar where they had a jukebox. He’d listen to the songs and learn them, then offer to sing them for the customers for a glass of soda.
He was particularly impressed with New Orleans R&B like Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, whose music had many of the same rhythms that were used in the Cuban music he heard on the sound system, and in the calypso and mento made by local Jamaican musicians:
[Excerpt: Professor Longhair, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”]
He also, though, developed a broad musical taste, becoming a fan of artists as varied as Bobby Darin, Sam Cooke, and Little Richard. Of them all though it was Fats Domino who was his favourite, and his first performances, in talent shows at summer camps put on by the 4-H club (an organisation that provides hands-on education for rural children), were all of Fats Domino songs. Already a budding professional even as a child, he took on a stage name for these, saying later “I was born in the mountainous part of Somerton, up in the cliffs, where I could see all of Somerton, so I thought ‘Why don’t I use Cliff, because it’s the heights.’ And then my father used to call me Jimmy when I was a good boy and James when I was a bad boy, so ‘Why not use Jimmy?'”
James Chambers became Jimmy Cliff, and that would be the name he would use for the rest of his career.
He knew even as a child he wanted to become a professional singer, but had little idea how to go about it, and the people around him were no help — when he asked a teacher how one wrote a song, he was told “Well, you just write one!”
He did, though the song he wrote, “I’ll Go Wooing”, is seemingly lost to time, but he kept trying to perform anywhere he could. His first major performance was at the National Achievement Day run by 4-H, where children from all over the country were gathered to take part in competitions. He entered the competition and sang the Fats Domino song “Be My Guest” a capella:
[Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Be My Guest”]
At least, that’s the story told in the one biography of Cliff, David Katz’s very good book on him, but Cliff was probably misremembering the song — the biography says this happened when he was fourteen, so that would place it between July 1958 and July 1959, but Domino only recorded the track in August 1959.
I say he probably misremembered the song rather than misremembering the year because we also know that when he was fourteen, Cliff moved away from the countryside to Kingston, in order to pursue his education. Cliff’s teachers had picked him out as especially bright, and there were no opportunities where he grew up, and so he moved to the big city. His father had hoped for him to maybe become a doctor or lawyer, but when asked if he’d rather have extra tuition money so he could go into the professions, or have the money spent on a radio for him to take with him, Cliff chose the radio, and started training to become an electrician instead, while living temporarily with various of his father’s acquaintances, who put him up as a favour.
He attended night school at Kingston Technical College, but soon he heard a record that would change his life forever:
[Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Little Sheila”]
What made that so special wasn’t the record itself, but that Cliff found out that the singer, Laurel Aitken, was Jamaican and lived in Kingston. Suddenly, the idea of being a rhythm and blues star was something that could happen to him, not just to people in another country.
He entered a talent contest which gave cash prizes to the winner but also led to opportunities to get broadcast on the radio. Unfortunately, what he hadn’t realised was that the winner was chosen by audience vote, which meant in practice, as this usually means for that kind of event, that the winner was whoever had got most friends to buy tickets. As Cliff was relatively new to the city and the show was on the other side of town from where he was staying, he hadn’t packed the audience and came dead last.
However, the talent show moved to different theatres each week, and he tried again closer to home, forewarned as to what to expect, and on his second attempt performed a version of Owen Gray’s “Sinners Weep”:
[Excerpt: Owen Gray, “Sinners Weep”]
This time he won — enough money to buy himself a new pair of trousers, and give some money to the cousin he was staying with at the time.
Frankie Bonnito, the pianist in the talent show’s band, encouraged Cliff to try to record, but at first he couldn’t get anyone interested. At the time most of the record production in Jamaica was, as we discussed in the episode on “My Boy Lollipop”, done by the DJs who ran the popular sound systems, making records primarily for themselves to play. Cliff tried all the major sound system names like Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, but none of them were interested. Eventually, he went to a manager of a smaller sound system, Count Boysie the Monarch, and Boysie agreed to record a Little Richard knockoff Cliff had written titled “Daisy Got Me Crazy”. Unfortunately, Boysie did *not* agree to pay Cliff what he thought he deserved, an experience later shared by Ivan, Cliff’s character in
The Harder They Come
.
The deal Cliff was offered was somewhat worse than Ivan’s though — Boysie only offered him a shilling for his bus fare, and never actually released the record, only playing it on his own sound system.
Cliff kept trying, though. For a short while he was in a duo called Cliff and Smith, with another singer, Keith Smith, but Smith proved unreliable and Cliff was soon on his own again. His next recording was marginally more successful than his failed attempt with Count Boysie. Recording with Sir Cavalier, a new producer who’d started his own label, Hi Tone, he finally got to release a single, an original titled “I’m Sorry”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “I’m Sorry”]
That track was not a success, though it did also get licensed to Blue Beat records in the UK, but Cliff was now officially a professional recording artist, even though the amount of money he’d made from it was minimal — he got fifteen pounds, enough to buy a pair of trousers, a hat, and a chicken to eat.
That was enough, though, for him to become convinced that he could make a living as a singer. He quit technical school — and in doing so fell out badly with his father — and started taking odd jobs, living hand to mouth, while trying to become a success as a performer.
But his single hadn’t been successful enough for Sir Cavalier to want to make any more records with him. He’d tried every record producer in Kingston, and none of them saw his potential.
But that didn’t stop Cliff. One thing that comes through over and over again in Cliff’s story is that he was just not someone who would give up, no matter how impossible things seemed. So he made his own record producer.
At the time, there was a shop in Kingston called Beverley’s, owned by three Chinese-Jamaican brothers whose surname was Kong. All the accounts seem to differ as to what the shop actually sold — according to some sources it was a restaurant and ice cream parlour with a real estate business in the back, while others say it was a general store selling cosmetics, ice cream, and records. Whatever it sold, Cliff decided that if he wrote a song called “Dearest Beverley” that might persuade the Kong brothers to record him:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Dearest Beverley”]
He came to the shop one night, just as it was closing up, and made his pitch to the brothers. Two of them pointed out, reasonably enough, that they weren’t in the record business and didn’t know anything at all about record production. But Leslie Kong was interested, and asked Cliff to sing. After Cliff finished singing his song, Fats and Cecil Kong both laughed, but Leslie decided that Cliff had a great voice, and that he was going to become a record producer.
But at the time Kong didn’t completely trust his own instincts, so he asked for a second opinion. He told Cliff that they would make a record together — but only if Cliff could get Derrick Morgan to endorse him.
Derrick Morgan was an acquaintance of Cliff’s, and someone who had followed a somewhat similar path a year or two before — both were R&B fans, though Morgan imitated Little Richard while Cliff preferred Fats Domino, and Morgan had started out by winning the same talent contest, Vere Johns’ Opportunity Hour, that Cliff had tried and failed to win — but by this point he was the biggest star in Jamaica. He’d worked with Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, and Prince Buster, creating hits like “Fat Man”:
[Excerpt: Derrick Morgan, “Fat Man”]
At one point in 1960 apparently the entire top seven in the Jamaican pop charts was made up of Morgan’s records.
Kong had two different aims in mind with asking for Morgan’s endorsement. The first was to check that somebody with any kind of experience in the business thought that Cliff had a chance of success — a reasonable enough question, given that Kong was a complete outsider — and the second was to hopefully get Morgan to record for him as well. Even if Jimmy Cliff didn’t make a hit record, Derrick Morgan probably would, and that would justify Kong’s investment.
Morgan thought Cliff was very talented, but he also thought that “Dearest Beverley”, while a good song, was too slow to be commercial, so Cliff came up with another song, “Hurricane Hatty”, a bouncy track with a rather unpleasant lyrical message — that if his girlfriend didn’t treat him right, he’d be as destructive as a recent hurricane:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Hurricane Hatty”]
With Morgan’s endorsement, Kong set up two recording sessions. Morgan suggested the backing musicians — Drumbago’s All-Stars, the group of session musicians who were Kingston’s equivalent to the Wrecking Crew or Motown’s Funk Brothers. These musicians would change over the years, and eventually evolve into the Skatalites, though by that time without the eponymous Drumbago.
The sessions all featured multiple singers. At the first session, Cliff recorded “Dearest Beverley”, Morgan recorded “She’s Gone”:
[Excerpt: Derrick Morgan, “She’s Gone”]
And Eric Monty Morris, a friend of Morgan’s who was another veteran of Vere Johns’ Opportunity Hour, and who would later go on to become the lead singer of the Skatalites, recorded “Cinderella”:
[Excerpt: Eric Monty Morris, “Cinderella” ]
Incidentally, Morris later recorded that song in a more well-known version for another producer, Joe Gibbs. That sort of thing happened a lot in the Jamaican music industry, where people would often remake songs many times, the same track might be released in different mixes under different titles, and backing tracks would often be reused for other singers. Because of this, and the way those tracks have often since been collected onto compilations in rather haphazard manners, it’s possible that sometimes I’ll be using the wrong version of a song without realising it. In this case though that’s definitely the version recorded at this session.
At the second session Kong organised, Cliff recorded “Hurricane Hatty”, Owen Gray recorded “Darling Patricia”:
[Excerpt: Owen Gray, “Darling Patricia”]
And Morgan recorded “Be Still”, a song in which he, in part, mocked Gray and claimed to be better than him:
[Excerpt: Derrick Morgan, “Be Still”]
All three of “Be Still”, “Darling Patricia”, and “Hurricane Hatty” became Jamaican number one hits. But I’m not sure that what I just played you is the original version of “Be Still”. That copy is from the 1962 UK issue of the song, and the production is credited to Prince Buster. I haven’t been able to track down a copy that I can definitively source to the 1961 Jamaican issue, and this would normally not matter too much — I’d assume that it was the same recording licensed to a different producer, given it was less than a year later, but in this case I’m not at all sure that any licensing agreement between Prince Buster and Leslie Kong would or could have existed, so it may well be a remade version.
You see, many of the people in this story, including at points Cliff himself, have held to Black supremacist viewpoints, being either Rastafarians at a time when most Rastas believed that all Black people were superior to whites, or as in the case of Prince Buster (and of Cliff for much of the seventies, though not yet at this point in time) members of the Nation of Islam, a religion which has a lot of the same origins as Rastafari — both being inspired by the work of Marcus Garvey — and is essentially to mainstream Islam what Rastafari is to mainstream Christianity.
Now, the Nation of Islam holds — or certainly held at the time — the view that all white people of Western European descent (and also most Jewish people) are literal Devils, created by an evil Black scientist named Yakub, and incapable of doing good. Now, personally I think there are some problems with that belief, but then as a white person of Western European descent myself, I’m hardly likely to say otherwise, am I? That said, it is at least understandable why Black people in mid-twentieth century America where ex-slaves were still in living memory for many, or in Jamaica, still a colony of the British Empire until the sixties, might draw such a conclusion, even if one thinks it’s perhaps a tad harsh.
The official dogma of the Nation holds that this is *only* true of those groups, and that Asian people for example count as Black. Buster, on the other hand, seems to have held to a definition in which people of Chinese descent like Kong counted as white.
I’ve seen various discussions of the racial dynamics of colonialism in Jamaica and the implicit and explicit racial hierarchies held at the time — remember that at this point, Jamaica was still a colony of the British Empire — and how that fed into Buster’s ideas about Chinese people, and as a British white man there is simply nothing sensible I can say about that. But what I will say is that Buster’s response was to release a string of virulently anti-Chinese records attacking his associate Morgan for recording with a Chinese man and accusing them of stealing his work.
I will not be excerpting those here, but what I will say is that Jimmy Cliff, even at a point where he too was a member of the Nation of Islam and held similar racial views, said that what really upset Buster and the other producers of the time was that Leslie Kong actually paid the artists who recorded for him a decent amount of money, while none of the others did.
Leslie Kong was not the only Jamaican of Chinese descent to be making a mark in the early days of ska. Another, and one who would enter Jimmy Cliff’s life through the same process that led to Jamaican independence, was the bass player Byron Lee, leader of the Dragonaires, a band so prominent that they appeared in the first James Bond film the next year, 1962, which was also the year of Jamaican independence:
[Excerpt: Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, “Jamaica Jump Up”]
Lee, though, didn’t start out as a ska musician, and his move into the genre was as the result of one of the very politicians who was responsible for shaping Jamaica’s newfound independence.
We’ve talked a bit about Alan Lomax in this series, but Lomax was only one of a number of ethnomusicologists educated in the US who devoted their time to going around the world recording usually Black, usually poor, musicians in the name of anthropology, most of them inspired directly or indirectly by Lomax’s father John. Many of these people had impacts on the world of scholarship or music. Very few helped to popularise an important genre of music and change world culture. And even fewer did so as essentially their side hustle while helping to found a country.
Possibly the only one who did was Edward Seaga, the man who would become Jamaica’s fifth Prime Minister in 1980. Seaga started out as a Harvard-educated anthropologist, and after graduating in 1952 he got a job with the University of the West Indies. Seaga seems to have had a wide-ranging intellectual interest, and his early publications include one on faith-healing published in, of all places, a parapsychology journal.
While working at the University of the West Indies, in 1955, he had recorded an album of field recordings of Jamaican folk music for Folkways Records:
[Excerpt: Kumina Singers, “Kumina Country Songs”]
That experience had convinced him that there was commercial potential in Jamaican music, and he had soon started up his own record label, West Indies Records Limited, and had produced records like Higgs and Wilson’s “Oh Manny Oh”, which as we heard in the episode on “My Boy Lollipop” had been an important precursor to ska:
[Excerpt: Higgs and Wilson, “Oh Manny Oh”]
Seaga was one of the most important record producers of the early Jamaican era, but by 1959 he had started yet another career. He had been appointed to the Legislative Council, the then upper house of the Jamaican Parliament, as a member of the Jamaica Labour Party, which despite its name is actually the more right-wing of the two major parties on the island. Seaga would go on to become the country’s Prime Minister in the eighties, as part of the broad rightward shift that saw Thatcher and Reagan come to power around the same time, and was already a rising star — when he was appointed he was only twenty-nine and the youngest person ever to serve in the role, and he helped draft the constitution which Jamaica took on when it became independent in 1962.
As part of Jamaica becoming independent, Seaga was elected as an MP, and his constituency happened to be the one in which Jimmy Cliff lived — a constituency in west Kingston, a ghetto area.
As part of the celebrations of the upcoming independence, Seaga, who had ambitions towards becoming Minister of Culture, wanted to organise a tour celebrating Jamaica’s own indigenous music, and especially the music that came from his own constituency. So he got a ten-day celebratory tour organised, which would feature among others Cliff, Derrick Morgan, and the toaster Count Prince Miller. But he also wanted the tour to appeal to the more respectable middle class, as well as to the people from the ghettos, so as the backing band he got Byron Lee and his Dragonaires, a band who had long been associated with Seaga. Lee was a far more upmarket musician than most of the ska musicians — while ska was a music associated with the ghetto and the gangsters known as “rude boys”, Lee was someone who had been playing for the upper middle classes, mostly covers of American soft pop records.
But from about 1961, Seaga had been pushing him to make ska records, like “Mash! Mr. Lee”:
[Excerpt: Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, “Mash! Mr. Lee”]
Lee and Seaga would remain associates for some time, and in 1964 Lee was to buy Seaga’s WIRL studio and turn it into Dynamic Sounds. Lee would become the first Jamaican musician to become a millionaire, and he was resented by many of the same musicians and producers who resented Kong, partly because of his race and partly because he was seen as an outsider who was slumming it when he worked in ska — and of course those two things were very intertwined.
After Cliff’s first hit record, his next few were comparative failures, but he continued working with Leslie Kong at the new Beverley’s record label. He released several singles himself, like “I’m Free”, a song which used splitting up with an abusive partner as a metaphor for Jamaica’s independence:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “I’m Free”]
But as well as singing for the label, Cliff and Morgan both worked as arrangers and talent scouts, and it was in the latter capacity that Cliff would make two of his biggest contributions to music in this period. A welder called Desmond Dacres, who like Cliff had been turned down by both Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd, came to audition for the label. Cliff and Morgan thought he was impressive, but not quite there yet. They mentored the young man, and helped him come up with stronger material, and after several auditions for them he eventually went into the studio to record his first single, with Cliff and Morgan supervising the musicians. Released under the name Desmond Dekker, “Honour Your Mother and Father” made number one in Jamaica:
[Excerpt: Desmond Dekker, “Honour Your Mother And Father”]
Dekker would become the biggest star of the sixties in Jamaica, with more than twenty Jamaican number ones, and he would become the first Jamaican musician to have big hits in Britain, with his single “007” making the British top twenty in 1967:
[Excerpt: Desmond Dekker, “007”]
And of course his UK number one single “Israelites” in 1968:
[Excerpt: Desmond Dekker, “Israelites”]
While Dekker was still polishing his act, working with Cliff and Morgan to get to a point where he could be signed, he talked with a colleague who also wanted to be a singer. The colleague, like Dekker, had been turned down by every record producer in Kingston — he’d even been turned down by Kong.
But Dekker explained to him that Kong wasn’t the person he really needed to see at Beverley Records. He wanted to go and speak to Jimmy Cliff and Derrick Morgan.
As Cliff told the story, Dekker’s colleague came in to the studio while Cliff was playing piano and said what he was playing sounded good. Cliff said “I knew if he could just walk in straightaway and knew it sounded good, it had to be somebody really sensitive, what had a good sense of music. He said he came to audition and told me about Desmond and sang some of his songs, and among the songs that he sang, three of them I chose, and then when Derrick come, he liked those as well, which was ‘One Cup of Coffee”, “Judge Not”, and “Terror”. And at Leslie Kong’s next session, he recorded those three songs, and that was the start of Bob Marley”:
[Excerpt: Bob Marley, “Judge Not”]
Marley’s work for Beverley’s as a solo artist was not a success, and he soon left the label to form a group, and we’ll be hearing more about that in future episodes.
One track that Cliff himself recorded in 1963 was a pointer towards the future of Jamaican music, as well as being Cliff’s biggest hit after “Hattie”. “King of Kings” was the idea of a neighbour of Derrick Morgan’s, Courtney Green, who came up with the basic concept and worked on the song with Morgan. They decided that Cliff, rather than Morgan, should sing it, and took the half-finished song to Cliff, who completed it:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “King of Kings”]
That song was one of the earliest records to explicitly reference Rastafarianism, though as Rastas were at that time in Jamaica very much a despised underclass, and as Cliff himself was only dipping his toe in the water of that religion at the time, it does so by means of metaphor, though the metaphor in question is not a very subtle one. The lyrics are about the lion defeating all the other animals and proclaiming itself to be “king of kings”, but in the context of Jamaica at that time this would be very obviously a reference to Emperor Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia who was believed by the Rastafari, much to Selassie’s own bemusement, to be the reincarnation of Jesus, and whose official titles included “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah” and “King of Kings of Ethiopia, Lord of Lords and Elect of God”.
The song was popular, but not with everyone. Prince Buster in particular was incensed by the track, both because it was produced by his hated rival Leslie Kong and because as a member of the Nation of Islam he preferred his Black supremacist new religious movements inspired by Marcus Garvey to be in a slightly different flavour from the Rastas’ version. He produced an answer song, “The Lion Roars”, pointing out that Cliff’s record was a lie because it says the lion says he’s the king of kings, but lions can’t actually speak, so therefore Allah must be the real King of Kings:
[Excerpt: Prince Buster, “The Lion Roars”]
Buster’s distaste for people of Chinese descent didn’t stop him from working with Byron Lee himself, though, when an opportunity came for Buster and Cliff to tour the East Coast of the US backed by the Dragonaires.
This was the work of Edward Seaga, who was by this point the Minister for Development and Welfare, and of Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. The two of them worked out an arrangement to present the best ska musicians — by which, in practice, they meant musicians with connections to the Jamaica Labour Party — at the World’s Fair in New York that year. And Buster was both one of the undoubted greats of early ska and someone whose connections to the JLP were so close that they even provided his name — “Buster” was short for “Bustamante”, his middle name, which was given him by his parents in tribute to Alexander Bustamante, the leader of the JLP and at this point the first Prime Minister of an independent Jamaica.
Seaga was trying to work on getting more trade between Jamaica and the US, and creating greater cultural ties between the two countries, and Ertegun was excited at an entire new country full of musicians who had been inspired by the same music he’d been releasing.
The plan was to have the Jamaican musicians appear at the World’s Fair, have Atlantic release the cream of recent Jamaican ska singles in the US, have a brief tour of major markets on the East Coast, and have a publicity blitz including a feature on the cover of Variety. This would be great publicity for the new nation, great exposure for the musicians, and make a lot of money for everyone concerned.
The people sent over were Cliff, Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, Buster, Monty Morris, Teddy Charmers, and various dancers, and by all accounts the shows were a great success. Unfortunately, the rest of the plan didn’t work out very well financially. American mass culture only really has room in it for one exciting new foreign sound that’s the great pop sensation of the moment at any one time — if K-Pop is the latest thing, then Ukranian progressive metal is unlikely to get a foothold. And in April 1964, there was *definitely* an exciting new foreign sound already taking that place in the American musical ecosystem. The singles released by Atlantic flopped, and a planned TV documentary on ska was cancelled.
The journey to America had a big effect on Cliff, though. It was his first time out of Jamaica, and he was being treated as a star. Prince Buster, who had been to the US before, even introduced Cliff to his acquaintance Muhammad Ali, which was the start of Cliff’s own interest in the Nation of Islam.
Cliff spent the next year trying to break the American market, including participating in the album The Real Jamaica Ska produced by Carl Davis and Curtis Mayfield for American release:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Ska All Over The World”]
Nothing worked though, and Cliff eventually decided to take up a different offer.
Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, had seen Cliff performing in America, and was already aware of his work because Leslie Kong was a minor partner in Island. He’d asked Cliff at the time if he was interested in recording for him, but Cliff had decided that America seemed more inviting than Britain. But as the doors to American success seemed to be closed, Cliff took up Blackwell’s suggestion.
While by 1965 Island was already pivoting from being a ska label to becoming a rock one, and Blackwell had already started to set up Trojan Records for ska reissues so he could keep rock and ska very separate, Blackwell was convinced that Cliff was someone he could market in Britain. Ska was becoming popular with the mod subculture in Britain at the time, but other than records that were seen as essentially novelty hits like “My Boy Lollipop” it wasn’t breaking out into the mainstream. But other music loved by the mods, like soul, was, and Blackwell saw enough similarities between soul and ska — and connections between both and the white R&B bands who were becoming big in the wake of the Rolling Stones and the Animals — that he thought he could at least use Jamaican ska musicians to make British hits.
So, for example, Blackwell had headhunted the ska singer/songwriter Jackie Edwards, who had had several big ballad hits in Jamaica. In 1965, Edwards cut the song “Keep On Running” as an album track. It was soul, not ska, but it clearly had the influence of ska in its groove:
[Excerpt: Jackie Edwards, “Keep On Running”]
Blackwell then got his new signing, The Spencer Davis Group, with their young lead singer Steve Winwood, to record their own version of the song, which he licensed to Fontana Records and which became a UK number one hit:
[Excerpt: The Spencer Davis Group, “Keep On Running” about 2:10]
According to Blackwell’s autobiography, Jimmy Cliff was in the studio for that recording, and it’s him doing the whoops and hollers throughout the track — it was him you just heard shout “Hey, come on!”
Cliff did *not* like the UK — he didn’t like the weather, but also there was a level of open, virulent, racism that shocked him. In 1964, for example, there had been a shock election win in one seat when a Conservative had beaten the incumbent Labour MP on a slogan of “if you want a” and here the slogan used the n-word “for a neighbour, vote Labour” (some sources say it was “vote Liberal or Labour”). The MP in question had, of course, denied that there was anything racist in that sentiment.
Cliff himself was evicted from the first bedsit he moved into when he came to the UK, which he had booked through a letting agency, when the landlord discovered he was Black (such discrimination was legal in Britain until 1968).
But he was, despite this, eager to work with Blackwell, who took over his career. Cliff’s first release for Island — licensed through Fontana like the Spencer Davis Group record — was a ballad called “Pride and Passion”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Pride and Passion”]
That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who we’ve already heard about in the “Sympathy for the Devil” episodes, as he would go on to produce a lot of the Stones’ most successful work.
Cliff also recorded a duet with Millie Small, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff and Millie, “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”]
Cliff’s early British recordings were not very successful, but Blackwell knew that what was needed was for him to build a reputation as a live act.
Blackwell had Cliff perform backed by a white soul group called the Phil Wainman Band, who changed their name when backing Cliff to The New Generation, and they toured all the Mod soul venues throughout Britain, performing covers of Stax and Motown songs like “Knock on Wood” and “Uptight”. Their first gig was at the Marquee, supporting Steampacket, a British blues band whose three lead singers were Long John Baldry, Julie Driscoll, and Rod Stewart. As well as touring on their own, Blackwell got them support slots on a tour with the Who and the Spencer Davis Group, and Cliff apparently made a big impression on Pete Townshend.
While Cliff was not yet a success, he was convinced he would be — everything he had done in his career up to that point had been achieved by sheer determination and self-belief. Phil Wainman would later recall Cliff saying to him “Phil, it’s all out there, all you’ve got to do is go out and get it”.
The New Generation didn’t remain Cliff’s backing band for long though. The group rubbed Cliff up the wrong way, not least because of playing racist pranks like sticking a black doll they’d found in Cliff’s bed, and soon Blackwell had found him another band.
This one was called The Shakedown Sound, and initially featured Sean Jenkins on drums, Kevin Gammond on guitar, Lee Starr on bass, and Verden Allen on keyboards. This group would not back Cliff on records, because Jimmy Miller was not impressed with them, but Cliff kept releasing singles. “Give and Take” made Disc magazine’s top fifty chart, but just as it was rising higher the magazine cut their chart to just a top thirty, which the record never hit:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Give and Take”]
Another single, meanwhile, had as its B-side a ballad called “Hard Road to Travel”, which would later become one of Cliff’s reggae classics, but at this point showed how influenced Cliff had been by Sam Cooke:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Hard Road to Travel”, early version]
That was the title track of Cliff’s first album, and the Shakedown Sound did get to play on one track on that record — a cover version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, showcasing Allen’s organ playing:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”]
The group went through some lineup changes over the year or so that they backed Cliff. First to leave was Kevin Gannon, who went off to join the Band of Joy with Robert Plant and John Bonham. He was replaced by a guitarist friend of Allen’s, Mick Ralphs. Shortly before they parted ways with Cliff, Jenkins also left, and was replaced by an old bandmate of Ralphs, Dale Griffin.
But Island Records decided that it would make more sense for Cliff to be backed by another band on the label, Wynder K Frogg, and so he parted ways with the Shakedown Sound. Ralphs, Allen, and Griffin continued to play as The Shakedown Sound for a while, replacing Starr with Pete “Overend” Watts and adding vocalist Stan Tippins. After they replaced Tippins with Ian Hunter in 1969, they became Mott The Hoople:
[Excerpt: Mott The Hoople, “All The Young Dudes”]
Cliff’s records were getting nowhere. He released several more singles, produced first by Miller and then by Muff Winwood, formerly of the Spencer Davis Group, but none of them had any kind of success. He was getting miserable, and it looked very much like his career was at an end. But then his luck changed.
Cliff was friendly with the minor psych-pop duo Nirvana – not the same band as the much more famous nineties band of the same name, this was the duo of Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos, who had had a minor hit with the single “Rainbow Chaser”. Nirvana had written a song called “Waterfall”, and got Cliff to sing on the demo:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Waterfall”]
Without the duo’s knowledge, Chris Blackwell’s PA submitted that song, which became Cliff’s next single, for the Rio International Song Festival. It was accepted as the entry for Jamaica, much to Nirvana’s amusement, Campbell-Lyons saying later “I had to laugh to myself, something written by a Greek and an Irishman representing the land of reggae.” Cliff didn’t win, as he was up against stiff competition, with Paul Anka representing Canada, Francoise Hardy France, and the Righteous Brothers America, but the track struck a chord in Brazil, where it seemed to resemble the new tropicalia sound that was becoming popular. It went to number two on the charts over there, and Cliff spent a couple of months in the country, and toured other South American nations as well. While he was there he put out his second album, Jimmy Cliff in Brazil — a patchwork job, consisting of half of Hard Road To Travel, “Waterfall”, a handful of covers of contemporary Brazilian hits with new English lyrics by Paul Anka and Sammy Cahn, recorded while he was in South America, and one new song, “Hey Mister Yesterday”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Hey Mr. Yesterday (Brazil version)”]
After his time in South America, he returned to Jamaica, where in his absence the music industry had gone through two big changes.
It’s very hard to find a dividing line between ska and rocksteady, and between rocksteady and the later reggae — there’s a huge overlap between all three, they have a number of stylistic similarities, and a lot of the same musicians made records in all three styles. But basically, rocksteady bore the same relationship to the soul records coming from Motown and the Impressions as ska had to fifties New Orleans R&B. There was the same stress on the offbeats as ska, but while the guitar and horns would still emphasise the second and fourth beat, now the kick drum shifted away from the backbeat towards playing on the first and third beat. And soon the kick drum would only play on the third beat, dropping the first altogether — what became known as the “one drop” rhythm.
The music tended to be slower, and came about because sound system DJs started to notice that some people wanted slower music to dance to than the rather more frenetic ska, and would complain that they missed having slower records like those by Johnny Ace. The DJs started playing slower soul ballads as the nights drew on and people got tired, and soon the musicians started to produce similar material. The name “rocksteady” actually came from a dance, initially popularised by a dancer named Busby a couple of years before the genre itself took hold, and there are various records pointed to as “the first rocksteady record” (though as we always say in this podcast there’s no first anything) like “Baby I Love You” by Carl Dawkins or “Take it Easy” by Hopeton Lewis, which refers in its lyrics to “doing the rock steady”:
[Excerpt: Hopeton Lewis, “Take it Easy”]
But the record that really popularised the new genre, and the name for it, was “Rock Steady” by Alton Ellis, a hit in 1966:
[Excerpt: Alton Ellis, “Rock Steady”]
There were other differences between rocksteady and ska — there was a greater emphasis on electric organ rather than piano, more prominent guitar, generally less use of horns, and often more vocal harmonies, with the Impressions being a particular influence, as on “Queen Majesty” by the Techniques, a cover of the Impressions’ “Minstrel and Queen”:
[Excerpt: The Techniques, “Queen Majesty”]
The subject matter of the records was also initially mostly inspired by the poppier end of soul — the Impressions and Motown, especially Smokey Robinson’s work — but increasingly as the sixties went on, rocksteady records also started dealing with social issues, as on Prince Buster’s classic “Judge Dread”, in which with the help of an uncredited Lee “Scratch” Perry, Buster dished out punishment to the “rude boy” gangsters who were becoming an increasing problem in Jamaica:
[Excerpt: Prince Buster, “Judge Dread”]
But by mid-1968, rocksteady had moved on to become something else again. The guitars became steadily more percussive, the bass became more prominent and stuck more to the rhythm, the arrangements became sparser, the lyrics often became more political, the level of reverb used started to increase, a new bubbling electric organ sound crept in, known as an “organ shuffle”, and at least at first the music started to speed up again. There are a handful of records that get pointed to as the first of this new style — “Nanny Goat” by Larry Marshall:
[Excerpt: Larry Marshall, “Nanny Goat”]
“No More Heartaches” by the Beltones:
[Excerpt: The Beltones, “No More Heartaches”]
“People Funny Boy” by Lee “Scratch” Perry:
[Excerpt: Lee “Scratch” Perry, “People Funny Boy”]
And a handful of others, but the new music didn’t get its popular name until Toots and the Maytals released “Do the Reggay”:
[Excerpt: Toots and the Maytals, “Do the Reggay”]
Where in rocksteady the bass had had a primarily melodic function, with reggae the organ became the primary melody instrument, with the guitars adding a scratching, percussive, sound, and the bass snapping to the beat.
While in the early years of ska the musicians who later became known as the Skatalites had been the go-to session musicians, by the time rocksteady transitioned into reggae, the standard session group featured former Skatalite Tommy McCook on saxophone; Jackie Jackson on bass; Gladdy Anderson on piano; either Winston Wright, Theophilus Bickford, or Neville Hinds on organ; Hux Brown, Duggy Bryan, Ranny Bop, or Lynn Taitt on guitar; and Winston Grennan, Drummie, or Paul Douglas on drums.
This group was initially known as “Beverley’s All Stars” as Leslie Kong was the one who most regularly used them, but as other producers kept turning to this standard group of musicians they became “Gladdy’s All-Stars”, and it was this group of musicians that Cliff used when recording his next album, which was titled just Jimmy Cliff on its initial release, but which later became better known by its American title, Wonderful World, Beautiful People:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”]
That track, released as a single in 1969 on Trojan Records, Chris Blackwell’s ska and reggae label, became Cliff’s first UK top ten hit. The album it came from had Leslie Kong as the credited producer, and most of the basic tracks were recorded at Dynamic Sound in Jamaica, but the big difference came from overdubs that were done elsewhere.
Chris Blackwell had become convinced that, despite the occasional one-off success of reggae singles like Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” or the Upsetters’ “Return of Django”, reggae would not have a serious commercial presence in Britain or America in its raw form, but that it could become very popular with a little sweetening to fit ears attuned to Anglo-American pop music.
For that reason, he got Cliff to bring the multitracks to America, and there they added final overdubs, mostly strings and vocals, in American studios with American musicians. It paid off with the success of the “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” single, and while the album didn’t chart, it was heard by all the right people. I’ve read in several books on reggae that Bob Dylan said that Cliff’s “Vietnam” was the best protest song ever, (though I’ve been unable to find the original source for this quote, and there are many fabricated quotes from Dylan):
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Vietnam”]
And Paul Simon was impressed enough by that track that he would travel to Kingston in 1971 to record with the same session musicians for his track “Mother and Child Reunion” (though the piano was later overdubbed by Wrecking Crew player Larry Knechtel):
[Excerpt: Paul Simon, “Mother and Child Reunion”]
But the track that became Cliff’s most well-loved song was actually the one track that was not recorded in Kingston at all. Chris Blackwell had wanted one extra song to round out the album, and Cliff had dug out something that he’d half-written years earlier, about his continued struggles for success that he could never achieve, about his loneliness in Britain, and about how he was losing hope.
He described his thoughts about the song later, saying “When I came to the UK, I was still in my teens. I came full of vigor: I’m going to make it, I’m going to be up there with the Beatles and the Stones. And it wasn’t really going like that, I was touring clubs, not breaking through. I was struggling, with work, life, my identity, I couldn’t find my place; frustration fueled the song.”
He finished the song on the way to the studio, where it was recorded with most of the Muscle Shoals studio band backing him, and in its final form at least it seems to owe something of a debt to “Whiter Shade of Pale”, but it’s a much more aching, soulful, song than that one:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
With the success of “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, Cliff had now finally got part of the way to the success that had eluded him — he’d had a UK top ten hit and a US top thirty one.
He followed that up with another single, a version of Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” (I should note here that while he changed his name to Yusuf Islam and for a long time refused to use his stage name Cat Stevens, Islam now uses that stage name again for his music, and so I’ll be using it here). This was actually produced by Stevens himself — while the song is one of Stevens’ most popular, he wasn’t keen on it and only released it as an album track.
According to Cliff, “I went to the publisher and he played me this demo of “Wild World” and he told me that Steve had written it but he didn’t like it. I loved it right away, so he called up Steve and put me on the phone to him. Steve asked me what my key was, I said and he started playing guitar down the phone. He said we have to record it together, so he went in and did the track, and I went in the following day, helped put on the backing voices with Doris Troy, and then it was time for me to put my voice on, and Steve directed me to sing the high notes on the song. He was a really good producer and it was a big hit.”
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Wild World”]
That became another UK top ten hit for him — and rather surprisingly, given that some of his most well-known songs only came out afterwards, it would be his last.
This is partly because of what happened with his next single, “You Can Get it If You Really Want”, a song which might well be considered Cliff’s theme song, as it summed up his attitude to success in life — in a much more upbeat way, given his recent success, than in “Many Rivers to Cross”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “You Can Get it If You Really Want”]
While that is one of Cliff’s most famous recordings, the single itself wasn’t a hit — just as Cliff had had the hit with one of Cat Stevens’ most famous songs, now Desmond Dekker, who had been given his first big break by Cliff, had the hit with “You Can Get It If You Really Want”. His cover version, released almost simultaneously with Cliff’s original, made number two in the UK:
[Excerpt: Desmond Dekker, “You Can Get It If You Really Want”]
Rather surprisingly, Cliff’s planned next Island album, which would have featured both “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “Wild World” was shelved after it was recorded in Jamaica. Instead, Cliff travelled to Muscle Shoals to record a totally different album. As he said later “After Wonderful World, they started giving respectability to reggae in England, so that was good, but by then all the blues and R&B that I had been doing while playing clubs in England had become a part of me, so I welcomed the opportunity to record in Muscle Shoals, and it was a very positive experience. Another Cycle was really different from the reggae things that I was doing. Lots of people thought that it was a bad move, because I was doing good with reggae, so why change and go into a different kind of thing?”
That album, Another Cycle, seems like another attempt to capture the US market, though again it was unsuccessful, despite featuring one of Cliff’s most popular tracks, “Sitting in Limbo”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Sitting in Limbo”]
But even while he was recording that, Cliff had already made the connection that *would* make him known in the US, though it would take longer than he expected to come to fruition.
While recording his abandoned album, Cliff had been visited in the studio by a white Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell. Henzell was intending to make what would be the first ever film made in Jamaica by Jamaicans. The initial plan was to make a biopic of the notorious criminal Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, known as Rhyging. Rhyging was a bank robber turned spree killer who had killed three people and wounded four more in the 1940s, before being shot himself by the police. Despite being a truly terrible human being, he had become something of a folk hero in Jamaica, and in the late sixties and early seventies there had been a spate of films about such criminal culture heroes, like Ned Kelly (the film starring Mick Jagger that we talked about in the “Sympathy for the Devil” episodes) and, most famously and successfully, Bonnie and Clyde, the film some credit for starting the whole New Hollywood style that dominated the late sixties and seventies.
Henzell had been impressed by the photos on the cover of Wonderful World, Beautiful People — in Cliff’s words “one where I looked like a winner and the other where I looked like a sufferer”. He decided that those two photos showed enough emotional range that Cliff would be perfect to play the lead in his film — and if the film could get some new songs for its soundtrack from the man who was currently Jamaica’s biggest international pop star, so much the better.
As it turned out, Cliff only recorded one new song for the film, though it would end up giving the film its title:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “The Harder They Come”]
But Cliff did become the star of the film, and as the film progressed the story of Ivanhoe Martin got intermingled with the story of Cliff. Cliff’s character shared his name with Martin, and similarly murders policemen and is himself shot to death, but the story was updated to the late 1960s, and the character shared many biographical details with Cliff himself — he travels to Kingston from the countryside, and becomes determined to make a record and become a star, but gets ripped off by the record producers:
[Excerpt: The Harder They Come, around 44 minutes in]
However, unlike Cliff, Ivan descends into criminality — first getting sentenced to be whipped after an altercation with someone who stole his bike leads to him slashing the thief’s face; then, as he finds no success with his record, taking a job as a cannabis runner. Ivan complains about his low pay for doing the work, not realising that the whole of society is in on the crime, with corrupt police looking the other way and taking a cut off the top. Ivan is arrested to teach him a lesson about who’s actually in charge, but remembering his whipping he shoots the arresting officer instead. He then goes on a murder spree, killing three police officers and a woman he’s had a brief affair with, and realises he’s become more famous as an outlaw than he ever was as a singer. The film ends up with him getting gunned down, while we hear the sounds of a cinema audience cheering, as they had earlier at a Western film Ivan had watched.
The film itself is the kind of ultra-low-budget thing that could only really have got an audience in the late 1960s — it’s made on super-16 film, for example, but that cheap option gives the film an air of documentary realism, which is helped by many of the parts in the film being played by non-actors, including small roles for Prince Buster, Duke Reid, sound engineer Carlton Lee and record producer Joe Gibbs (something that’s also very obvious in the editing — many of the conversations are edited together from close-ups, so the actors involved don’t have to remember more than a line or two of dialogue at a time). It’s a bleak, but very powerful, film, and one which serves very much as a Jamaican answer to New Hollywood films like Easy Rider.
It’s a little out of the scope of this episode, but there’s a fascinating essay for somebody to write on the parallels and differences between The Harder They Come and Jailhouse Rock, a film made a little over a decade earlier. Both are cheaply-made but surprisingly good films which feature their stars playing sullen, unsympathetic, characters at least partly based on themselves, who want to become successful singers, who end up getting arrested for a violent crime that is at least arguably justifiable, and who get ripped off badly by record executives. Both even feature mildly homoerotic scenes of their protagonists tied up and getting whipped. But while Jailhouse Rock has the Production Code-era happy ending and redemption of its central character, The Harder They Come is very much a post-Code film with an altogether less sanitised worldview:
[Excerpt: The Harder They Come, “No Milk and Honey in the Sky” speech, 52 minutesish]
The film would cause friction between Cliff and Blackwell though. Blackwell had encouraged Cliff to star in the film, seeing it as the thing that would give him a clear image and also popularise reggae music as a whole to a greater extent. But the film dragged on nearly two years in production, because of funding difficulties and also some problems with permissions from the Jamaican government (who both definitely wanted the kudos of a home-grown feature film, Jamaica’s first, but didn’t particularly want that film to be about institutional corruption and Jamaica’s criminal underclass).
And while he was working on the film, Cliff’s musical releases were less successful. Nothing from Another Cycle charted, and nor did “Trapped”, another collaboration with Cat Stevens to follow up “Wild World”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Trapped”]
Chris Blackwell was sanguine about this, though — when the film came out it would be such a boost to Cliff’s career and reggae in general that it would supercharge everything.
And indeed these days the film’s soundtrack album regularly makes lists of the greatest reggae albums and greatest soundtrack albums of all time — even though Cliff contributed so little that in order to pad it out to full album length Island had to include alternate versions of the title track and “You Can Get It If You Really Want”. The album featured several other recent reggae hits heard in the film, like “007” by Desmond Dekker:
[Excerpt: Desmond Dekker, “007”]
And “Rivers of Babylon” by the Melodians:
[Excerpt: The Melodians, “Rivers of Babylon”]
But the core of the album was four Cliff songs — the title track, “You Can Get it If You Really Want”, his recent single “Sitting in Limbo” and his old album track “Many Rivers to Cross”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
When the soundtrack album became popular, that song became the standout, and became the closest thing to a standard that Cliff had ever written. Over the years it’s been recorded by Arthur Lee:
[Excerpt: Arthur Lee, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
Annie Lennox:
[Excerpt: Annie Lennox, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
Cher:
[Excerpt: Cher, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
Cliff’s friend Joe Cocker:
[Excerpt: Joe Cocker, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
and was a UK top twenty hit for UB40:
[Excerpt: UB40, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
and perhaps most consequentially, it was recorded by Harry Nilsson, with production by Nilsson’s friend John Lennon:
[Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, “Many Rivers to Cross”]
And Lennon liked the string countermelody he wrote for that arrangement enough that he adapted it into his hit single “#9 Dream”, one of his most popular and beloved solo tracks:
[Excerpt: John Lennon, “#9 Dream”]
But the success of the soundtrack album, like the success of the film, wasn’t as quick as anyone had hoped. Not only did the film take a while to make and get a release, it took even longer to find an audience, at least in the two big markets that mattered, the US and the UK.
It won some awards fairly early in European film festivals, and the film was such an important event in Jamaican culture that Cliff and Henzell were awarded the Order of Distinction by the new democratic socialist Jamaican government when it came out in 1972, but in the UK the film was originally ignored by the critics, and played at first only to Caribbean immigrant communities. But then George Melly happened to go and see the film.
Melly is someone we’ve mentioned in passing in various episodes, most notably in the episode on “Rock Island Line”, where I mentioned that his 1951 version of that song was the only song thus far I’d not been able to find a digital release of. Happily, that’s been rectified in the years since I did that episode, so let’s hear a clip of that now:
[Excerpt: George Melly, “Rock Island Line”]
Melly was a rather extraordinary man with a wide range of achievements — as well as his success as a trad jazz singer and one of the founders of the trad jazz movement, he was also an anarchist political activist, a renowned lecturer on surrealist art, a comic-strip writer, and the author of Revolt into Style, a book I have referenced before as the first book by a serious intellectual to take British pop culture seriously on its own terms as worth analysis from the inside rather than as an outside observer.
Among these achievements, he was also the most respected British film critic of the age, writing for the Observer, and he began his column that week with the statement “Far and away the best film of the week was the first ever Jamaican film, The Harder They Come.”
That was enough to get media interest in the UK, and the film became, if not a massive box-office success, a moderate hit with both audiences and critics.
Sadly, the same didn’t happen with the US. There, the film was licensed to Roger Corman and his company New World Pictures. Corman, who we’ve seen in the background of many episodes due to his association with American International Pictures, which he left to found New World in 1970, was one of the most important people in mid-century American independent cinema, mentoring half the most famous directors and cinematographers of the 70s and 80s, and also responsible for the US release of a lot of independent non-American films.
But as those who know the story of the release of The Wicker Man will know, for example, he was more concerned than anything else about turning a profit, and would often have films brutally edited to fit a particular mode of release, and would market films in genres other than the ones they fit in if they could make more money that way.
In the case of The Harder They Come, he tried to market it in the then-popular Blaxploitation genre, and in some ways it fit that quite well — it was, after all, a crime story with a predominantly Black cast, a great soundtrack, and dealing with the underworld in a hard-hitting, violent way. But it was not an escapist film like a lot of Blaxploitation films were, and it was also performed by actors speaking in their own natural Jamaican patois, which was at times so thick that I’ve seen claims from some that it was the first English-language film to be put on general release with subtitles, because American audiences couldn’t understand what they were saying:
[Excerpt: dialogue from The Harder They Come]
The film sank without a trace in this market, and eventually Henzell got the rights to the film back from Corman and started having it shown in one-off showings at universities and art cinemas, where it built up a cult following.
The rebel, outlaw, image of the film was so successful that the title track has since been covered by everyone from the English second-wave ska band Madness to Willie Nelson:
[Excerpt: Willie Nelson, “The Harder They Come”]
However, the time the film’s success took — it didn’t end up becoming successful in the US until 1975 — caused a massive breakdown between Cliff and Chris Blackwell. Cliff was already inclined to distrust Blackwell simply because of his race — at this point Cliff had firmly joined the Nation of Islam, though within a few years he would have moved on to become a mainstream Sunni Muslim, and so he believed that all white people were devils — but Blackwell had also been the one to push for Cliff to be in the film, on which Blackwell was an uncredited co-producer, and for which he supplied a chunk of the funding,
Blackwell wanted to use the film to promote a new, rebellious image for Cliff — one that Cliff was fine with at the start of filming, but with which he was increasingly uncomfortable as he got deeper into the Nation of Islam and its emphasis on outward respectability. Blackwell had a whole plan set up to make Cliff into a superstar, a three-pronged strategy which involved having The Harder They Come make reggae into a commercial proposition in America, continuing to sweeten Cliff’s reggae music to make it conform a little more to Anglo-American pop conventions, and promoting Cliff with a rebellious image.
Blackwell had explained his plan to Cliff at the start of making the film, when Cliff had been offered fifty thousand dollars to leave Island and sign to RCA, on the back of his initial British success. He’d told Cliff he was going to make him a star, make him rich, and popularise reggae. But after years of listening to this, Cliff resented the fact that he was in a worse place career-wise than before they’d started to make the film, and left, signing to Reprise records in the US and EMI in Europe.
So Blackwell instead used his plan on the next reggae act he signed, getting them to record their most rebellious music to fit US rock sensibilities, and getting Wayne Perkins, the white Alabaman guitarist from the Muscle Shoals band who’d played on Cliff’s records, to overdub additional guitar:
[Excerpt: The Wailers, “Concrete Jungle”]
Blackwell’s star-making plan worked — but it worked for Bob Marley, the man who a decade earlier Cliff had signed to his first record deal, rather than for Cliff himself.
Instead, Cliff found himself floundering. His initial recordings for EMI and Reprise, like “Born To Win”, are very similar in subject matter to the optimistic records he’d had his biggest success with, and might theoretically have brought him more commercial success:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Born to Win”]
But he found he was competing with his old material — the soundtrack album to The Harder They Come, from his old record label, started doing big business, and Island were also repackaging non-album singles and outtakes into new albums. And the new material he was doing, while pleasant, was not quite up to the standard of his best earlier work. He’d lost his commercial touch, and the audiences just wanted to hear the old stuff — which was new to many of them.
For the next few years, Cliff had essentially three different careers. He would play in Britain as a very popular nostalgia act, for audiences who remembered his hits from a few years ago. He would play those same songs in America as an emerging artist for audiences who were just discovering them. And as one of the few reggae artists to venture into Africa, he became hugely popular in Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal.
But his new recordings were doing nothing, and soon he was venting his frustration at Blackwell in songs like “No. 1 Rip-Off Man”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “No. 1 Rip-Off Man”]
For several years, Cliff continued doing what he had done so successfully with his Island breakthrough, recording with the best Jamaican musicians and then adding overdubs by American session players. His 1975 album Follow My Mind, for example, has a rhythm section including Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the preeminent Jamaican drum and bass duo of the seventies and eighties, but featured Dennis Coffey, the guitarist who played on most of the Temptations’ 70s funk hits, on guitar and Van Dyke Parks on keyboards:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Dear Mother”]
By the late 70s, Cliff was clearly being more influenced by the African musicians like Fela Kuti he was associating with on his frequent West African tours than by the soul and R&B singers who had been his initial inspiration. 1978’s album Give Thankx — its name taken from a Rastafarian practice — was produced by Bob Johnston, who had produced many of the finest records by Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, and Leonard Cohen, but is as far from those artists as one can imagine, often, as in “Meeting in Afrika”, foreshadowing the 80s “world music” trend and its incorporation of African pop influences:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Meeting in Afrika”]
Give Thankx was, unlike much of Cliff’s work in this period, a critical success, but it was not a commercial one. Nor was the follow-up, I Am The Living, which had another celebrity producer, this time Luther Dixon.
1982 saw the release of Bongo Man, a documentary about Cliff’s world tour of 1980, and in particular about his appearances in Jamaica during a time of great political turmoil for the nation. That documentary covers events that we will be looking at in much more detail in a future episode, as while Cliff was a peripheral figure in the events surrounding the Jamaican election, Bob Marley was far more directly involved.
The early eighties were problematic for Cliff in multiple ways. He had changed record labels to MCA, and the recordings he made during that period are widely regarded as his worst — trying to change his style up to appeal to a pop audience, and falling between two stools.
He also fell afoul of anti-apartheid activists by going to South Africa to play a show in Soweto, for an integrated audience. We’ll be talking about the complicated ethics of the cultural boycott of South Africa in a future episode, but for now we can just say that it’s very obvious that Jimmy Cliff, a very politically conscious Black man himself, was not a supporter of apartheid and believed that by playing the gig he was helping to work towards the end of apartheid, not to prop it up, while those who supported the boycott had equally good reasons for thinking that it was important to show a united front on the matter.
This disagreement was eventually resolved amicably though, and one of Cliff’s most prominent media appearances of the eighties was as one of the all-star group of vocalists who recorded the song “Sun City” under the name Artists United Against Apartheid in 1985. Among the many artists on that track were Run-DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendrick, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Reed, Hall & Oates, Pete Townshend, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Bob Dylan. Cliff’s solo line is actually harmonised with Daryl Hall, in a verse whose other lines are sung by George Clinton, Joey Ramone, and Darlene Love:
[Excerpt: Artists United Against Apartheid, “Sun City”]
It says something about how respected a figure Cliff was in the worldwide music scene that even though he had had no commercial success in the major music markets in over a decade at that point, he was considered a peer of those others, and 1985 would see several events that would affirm that status.
“Sun City” was of course just one of many multi-artist all-star singles made in the mid-eighties to support some cause or other, with similar records being released to support for example the victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, the victims of the Bradford City stadium fire, and the victims of the BBC’s decision to wait eighteen months between seasons of Doctor Who. These all came about as a result of the success of the singles that started the trend, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and USA For Africa’s follow-up, “We Are the World”, both raising money for Ethiopian famine relief.
“We Are The World” led to a full album, and for that album Bruce Springsteen, at the time arguably the biggest rock star in the world, recorded Cliff’s “Trapped”:
[Excerpt: Bruce Springsteen, “Trapped”]
In 1985 Cliff also co-starred in his second film, Club Paradise, a not-very-highly-regarded comedy film directed by Harold Ramis which also starred Robin Williams, Peter O’Toole, Rick Moranis, and Twiggy, and for which Cliff contributed several songs to the soundtrack. The film was a box-office and critical failure, but it did raise Cliff’s profile some more. And while Club Paradise was a failure as a film, the soundtrack album got a Grammy nomination. Along with odd tracks by people like the legendary Calypsonian Mighty Sparrow, Cliff contributed seven tracks, including a collaboration with Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Seven-Day Weekend”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Seven-Day Weekend”]
The same year, he guested with the Rolling Stones on the track “Too Rude”, a cover version of the reggae song “Winsome” originally by Half Pint, released the next year on their album Dirty Work:
[Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Too Rude”]
And he finished 1985, his most high-profile year in over a decade, with the album Cliff Hanger, his second to be produced by Kool and the Gang guitarist Amir-Salaam Bayyan. As well as the normal Jamaican musicians like Sly and Robbie the album featured several Kool and the Gang members plus guest spots from Jaco Pastorius and a couple of songs co-written by La Toya Jackson:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “Brown Eyes”]
The album was not a huge seller, but won Cliff his first Grammy award, for Best Reggae Album. Cliff would spend the rest of the eighties and early nineties putting out moderately successful albums that didn’t chart but which did get Grammy nominations, though they usually didn’t win, playing to huge crowds in South America and Africa, and playing to smaller but very respectable crowds in Europe and America, with occasional support slots on bigger shows by people like Steve Winwood and the Grateful Dead.
1993 saw him have what would be his final US top twenty hit, with a cover version of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now”, recorded for the soundtrack of the film Cool Runnings:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “I Can See Clearly Now”]
Over the next few decades, Cliff shifted steadily more towards live work as opposed to the studio. The albums he did release were a mixture of attempts to appeal to a pop audience and more political, rootsy, reggae, so you wouldn’t know from one song or album to the next whether you were going to get a song called “Democracy Don’t Work” with lines like “When it comes to indigenous people’s rights, why is the system always giving us fight?” and “Masses of people don’t have enough to eat, democracy is built up only for the elite” or a light-hearted cover of “O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da”, but he continued to stun audiences in live performances.
A typical album was 2002’s Fantastic Plastic People, produced by Dave Stewart, formerly of the Eurythmics, and featuring guest appearances from Annie Lennox, Jools Holland, Sting, and Joe Strummer:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff and Joe Strummer, “Over the Border”]
That track was actually the last studio recording Strummer made to be released in his lifetime. Strummer’s final band, the Mescaleros, would often cover “The Harder They Come” live, and the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton”, which Cliff would cover himself later, had lyrics referencing the film.
In the last twenty years, Cliff only released two albums. 2012’s Rebirth, produced by Tim Armstrong of Rancid, was widely regarded as his best work in years, made Rolling Stone’s list of albums of the year, won the Grammy award for Best Reggae Album, and went to number one on the US reggae charts:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff, “One More”]
While 2022’s Refugees, featuring Wyclef Jean on the title track, is an angrily political album, with tracks bluntly titled “Racism”, “We Want Justice”, and of course “Refugees”:
[Excerpt: Jimmy Cliff and Wyclef Jean, “Refugees”]
It’s hard to sum up Cliff’s life and career succinctly, because his impact on music was widespread rather than concentrated — he wasn’t the biggest star in the world, but he was moderately big *everywhere*, a truly worldwide success, and he did more to popularise the reggae genre outside Jamaica than anyone other than Bob Marley — and while I don’t consider the so-called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as having any special validity, it is notable that those two men are the only two Jamaicans inducted into the hall as of right now. When he died on the twenty-fourth of November this year, the outpouring of love for him was far, far greater than the mere statistics of chart placements and awards would suggest.
Jimmy Cliff had a career that was built on self-belief and hard work, and he changed the face of popular music. And while he didn’t reach the heights of superstardom that other artists he inspired did, he achieved more than enough to prove that in his case at least, the lyrics to one of his most popular songs were entirely correct — “you must try, try and try, try and try, you’ll succeed at last.”
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