Originally recorded in 2012 for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, and re-uploaded yesterday in tribute following his death, this acoustic session finds Jimmy Cliff revisiting songs such as “Many Rivers To Cross”, “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “I Can See Clearly Now”. The performance dates from the Rebirth era, his 2012 album that went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. It is one more reminder of a career that carried Jamaican music from Kingston sound systems into cinemas, charts and festival bills worldwide.
Born James Chambers in St James, Jamaica in 1944, he moved to Kingston as a teenager, cut early singles like “Hurricane Hattie” and then worked with Island Records as ska, rocksteady and reggae formed the core of his catalogue. By the end of the 1960s he had released albums including Hard Road to Travel and Jimmy Cliff, and singles such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam” had reached charts in the United Kingdom and United States, giving him a firmly international audience before reggae became widely linked with Bob Marley.
In 1972 he took the lead role in Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come and also wrote and recorded the title song, alongside “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “Many Rivers To Cross”. The film and soundtrack are widely credited with bringing reggae to a much larger international audience. His catalogue also fed into protest song culture: Bob Dylan called “Vietnam” the best protest song he had heard, and both “Vietnam” and “Many Rivers To Cross” have since been widely covered, including versions by Cher, UB40 and Willie Nelson.
Institutional recognition matched his audience reach. He received Jamaica’s Order of Merit and, for a period, was the only living reggae musician to hold it. His 2010 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame marked a rarer kind of double acknowledgement, placing him within both Jamaica’s national honours and the wider record of popular music history.