Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican singer who was instrumental in taking reggae global, has died. Cliff’s wife, Latifa Chambers, and his family announced the news in a post on the singer’s social media pages, giving the cause as a seizure followed by pneumonia. Cliff was 81 years old.
Born James Chambers, Jimmy Cliff was a star of stage and screen, as well known for his role in the revolutionary cult film The Harder They Come as for his export of ska and reggae music across the Atlantic and back to North America. His breakout in late 1960s London followed a determined rise out of poverty in Jamaica, where he had graduated from playing Elvis Presley covers in singing contests to releasing a string of ska hits that helped the genre, fueled by the introduction of the electric bass guitar, create a party-starting fervor in Kingston.
That local success prompted a teenage Cliff’s signing to Britain’s fledgling Island Records. Upon arriving in Britain, however, Cliff “found people were not really into reggae music,” as he told Vivien Goldman in 1979. “They were more into American R&B, so I started to blend the two.” That fusion came to bear on his first two albums, released by Island: 1967’s Hard Road to Travel and his self-titled 1969 LP. The latter album spawned a UK Top 10 single in “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” (which lent its title to later pressings of the album), as well as “Vietnam,” which Bob Dylan is said to have called “the best protest song ever written.”
As Cliff rose in the public eye, Jamaica was in a period of social upheaval, with reggae as its soundtrack. Cliff cheered his working-class compatriots from afar, later telling the writer Lloyd Bradley in Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King that the desire for political change had forced rude-boy culture to evolve into a search “for something deeper” after independence. He went on, “As they started looking towards our own culture—like the government had been encouraging people to do—that led them to look more towards Africa and some sort of Black consciousness. That’s what the roots movement was all about.… Since things had been getting bad for quite a few years, they stepped up their fight to be heard and it was the musicians that provide that voice for them.”
Cliff returned to his native country, in 1969, where he soon swaggered into the lead role in The Harder They Come, director Perry Henzell’s electrifying drama about post-colonial Kingston youth. The first homemade feature produced in independent Jamaica, the 1972 release was a slow-burning word-of-mouth sensation, as was Cliff’s soundtrack. The album’s mix of reggae standards and Cliff originals rapidly accelerated the 1970s roots reggae boom, minting Cliff a superstar and setting the stage for Bob Marley—whom Cliff had given an early break in Kingston—and his major-label debut with the Wailers, Catch a Fire, soon after.
