Jimmy Cliff, singer who helped bring reggae to global audience, dies at 81

Jimmy Cliff performs in France in 2012. (Wikipedia/Thesupermat)

By ALEX MARSHALL and ALEX WILLIAMS

Jimmy Cliff, a onetime choirboy who emerged from the rough quarters of Kingston, Jamaica, riding a rebel spirit and a fierce sense of social justice to help make the supple, bobbing sounds of reggae a global phenomenon with songs including “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come,” has died. He was 81.

Cliff’s wife, Latifa Chambers, announced his death in an online post early Monday. She said the cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia. Fueled by his searing performance as a musician-turned-outlaw in the 1972 film “The Harder They Come,” Cliff became the first worldwide reggae star.

But he set his sights even higher. Over the years, his musical journey encompassed ska, rocksteady, pop, soul and other genres. “I didn’t really want to be known just as the King of Reggae,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Washington Post. “I actually wanted to be known as the King of Music!”

Among his signature songs are the gospel-inflected “Many Rivers to Cross,” the anthemic “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” the feel-good tune “Reggae Night,” and “Vietnam,” which Bob Dylan deemed one of the greatest protest songs.

He also recorded several notable covers, including Cat Stevens’ “Wild World.” His version of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” was featured in the 1993 family comedy “Cool Runnings,” about the Jamaican bobsled team that gained international fame at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.

Cliff won two Grammy Awards over his decades-long career: best reggae recording in 1986 for “Cliff Hanger” and best reggae album in 2013 for “Rebirth.”

In addition to his own celebrated recording career, he is credited with helping to pave a path for Bob Marley and others to leverage reggae’s rhythms in spreading a universal message of defiance and hope.

Following his death, Prime Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica called him “a true cultural giant whose music carried the heart of our nation to the world.”

“The Harder They Come” became a cult favorite in the United States, running for years in midnight slots at theaters. Cliff, in the lead role, played Ivanhoe Martin, who abandons an impoverished life in the Jamaican countryside for the capital city of Kingston. Hoping to rise from the city’s shantytowns to music stardom, he is exploited by sleazy music executives and abused by the police, eventually turning into a gun-toting outlaw and martyred folk hero.

The spirit of the film is captured in the enduring lyric from the movie’s renowned title song: “I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave.”

The real-life Ivanhoe Martin was a 1940s Jamaican gangster who went on to become mythologized as an antihero. Cliff’s stirring performance in the film mirrored aspects of his own early life. He had arrived in Kingston at age 12 from a rural village dreaming of becoming a hitmaker.

“When I came to Kingston I lived in areas that were gangster-infested,” he said in a 2022 interview with The Observer of Britain. “And to be quite honest, the only thing that stopped me from joining those gangs full-time was I didn’t know where I would bury my head if my family heard that I was in Kingston firing a gun.”

The movie won Cliff a wide base of fans, many of whom bought the its soundtrack, which included “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come,” as well as Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Sitting in Limbo.” In 2003, Rolling Stone listed the soundtrack as No. 122 on its list of “500 Greatest Albums.”

Shortly after the movie’s release, Cliff played his first major U.S. concerts, although some critics seemed hesitant to fully embrace his music.

Still, by the 1990s, Cliff was a giant of the genre. Jon Pareles, in a review of a 1992 New York show for The New York Times, said Cliff’s music had developed into “what might be called arena reggae, often meshing reggae with styles from Brazil, Africa and the United States,” including bits of rap, rock and samba.

He was born James Chambers on July 30, 1944, in the Somerton district of St. James Parish, Jamaica. He grew up with eight siblings, a circumstance that taught him that he “always had to stand on my own and be counted,” he told Mojo, a British music magazine, in 2012.

His parents separated when he was a baby, “and my mother wasn’t really around,” he told The Guardian in 2012.

“My most important relationships were with my father and grandmother,” he continued. “He was a very, very strict disciplinarian. But my grandmother played an important role in my life. I was always singing — but I was told I was singing the songs of the devil. My grandmother, though, always said: ‘Leave the boy alone. He’s going to come to something one day.’”

His childhood was filled with music, including at church. He lived near the Monkey Rock Tavern, which “pumped out music all day and night,” he said. That venue, he added, was “my heaven.”

One day, in elementary school, he asked a woodworking teacher how to write a song. Receiving the instruction, “Just write it,” he tried to do just that, making a guitar out of bamboo to accompany himself, he told Mojo.

After moving to Kingston as a youth, he set out on a music career, although he had to disguise his age by adopting a gruff voice. He soon took his stage name, Cliff, an allusion to the career heights he hoped to scale.

It didn’t take long for Cliff to break through in Jamaica, where he initially sang R&B and ska songs. He had his first hit in 1962 with “Hurricane Hattie,” a song that showcased what British music writer John Doran called “one of the sweetest and smoothest voices that Jamaica has ever produced.”

In 1965, Cliff signed with Island Records, founded by Chris Blackwell, the celebrated London-born Jamaican record producer who is credited with bringing Bob Marley and many other reggae stars into the mainstream.

Later that decade, Cliff moved to England in search of wider stardom. There, he had hits including “Wonderful World Beautiful People” in 1969 (a ska track that reached number 25 on the Billboard singles chart) and his cover of “Wild World” in 1970. “I experienced racism in a manner I had never experienced before, and that was really tough for me,” he told The Guardian in 2022.

He put some of those feelings into the elegiac “Many Rivers to Cross,” which featured the lyrics “Wandering I am lost / As I travel along the White Cliffs of Dover.”

It was not until after he starred in “The Harder They Come” that Cliff fully achieved the fame he had sought in England. In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, he recalled that it was “such a low-budget movie,” filmed in stops and starts because the budget kept running out. However, he said, everyone involved had a common purpose: “We all want to be stars from it!”

Although Cliff became a reggae figurehead thanks to the movie, his preeminence was soon eclipsed by that of Marley. Mike Alleyne, author of “The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae,” said that while Marley benefited from his long tenure with Island Records, Cliff had a less stable business setup and was less rooted in the genre that he had helped popularize.

“Whereas Cliff was more eclectic and trying to consciously dabble in other genres, Marley was integrating those into his reggae projection,” Alleyne said.

In 2010, Cliff became the second reggae musician to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, after Marley.

In 2023, the movie “The Harder They Come” was turned into a musical that ran at the Public Theater in Manhattan.

In addition to his wife, Cliff’s survivors include their two children, Aken and Lilty Cliff.