Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 290 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
I was born in 1947, and like many people from my generation, I was introduced to Jimmy Cliff via the movie “The Harder They Come.” I didn’t grow up in a Black home exposed to reggae or other Caribbean music forms other than calypso via Harry Belafonte.
When the news of his joining the ancestors on Nov. 25 broke, many headlines, and stories referenced the film:
From Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone:
Jimmy Cliff, ‘The Harder They Come’ Reggae Giant, Dead at 81
Soulful singer and “original rude boy” helped spread genre’s reach from Jamaica to the world with The Harder They Come and hits like “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Wild World”
From Alex Marshall and Alex Williams at The New York Times:
His Grammy-winning records as well as his starring role in the cult movie “The Harder They Come” in 1972 boosted a career spanning seven decades.
From Gil Kaufman at Billboard:
Jimmy Cliff, Reggae Pioneer, ‘The Harder They Come’ Star and Voice of Peace and Positivity, Dies at 81
From Radhamely De Leon at Decider:
R.I.P. Jimmy Cliff: ‘The Harder They Come’ Star and Reggae Icon Dead At 81
From Jem Aswad at Variety:
Jimmy Cliff, Legendary Reggae Musician and Star of ‘The Harder They Come,’ Dies at 81
From the Mikael Wood at the Los Angeles Times:
Jimmy Cliff, reggae legend and actor known for ‘The Harder They Come,’ dies at 81
In case you’ve never seen it, here’s a full version:
To be honest, I had forgotten most of the details of the film but have never forgotten the soundtrack:
Ben Sesario at The New York Times has some listening suggestions:
Jimmy Cliff: 8 Essential Songs
A giant of Jamaican music, he gained international renown through the 1972 film “The Harder They Come,” and helped establish reggae’s themes of struggle, resistance and uplift.
Just who was Cliff?
His website biography states:
As many legends throughout history do, the whole story starts during a devastating storm…
We open on the Somerton District of St. James, Jamaica. With only one midwife tending to the entire village, a mother gives birth to a child, wraps him in a sheet, and takes him to shelter at a neighbor’s home as the hurricane blows her house away.
However, everybody agrees, “There’s something special about this boy.”
He becomes famous by the age of 14 for a hit coincidentally entitled “Hurricane Hattie.” He goes on to popularize reggae music everywhere. He changes the world. Nearly seventy years later, he doesn’t stop.
This is the story of Jimmy Cliff.
His obituary in the Guardian provides more details:
He was born James Chambers in Adelphi, an impoverished hillside community in the district of Somerton, near Montego Bay in Jamaica, where his father, Lilbert, was a tailor, farmer and community leader and his mother, Christine – who was a Maroon descended from escaped slaves – was a domestic worker.
Following the failure of his parents’ marriage, he and his older brother, Victor, were raised by their father, a Pentecostal Christian, in a two-roomed shack that was destroyed by Hurricane Charlie in 1951, forcing young Jimmy to live for a time with his aunt and grandmother on a nearby farm.
At Somerton All Age school his intelligence was noted by his teacher Robertha White (mother of the future film director Lennie Little-White), who recommended that he enroll at Kingston Technical high school to study electronics. Jimmy moved to the capital in the late 1950s to begin the course, lodging with a cousin, and was soon participating in talent contests, using the stage name of Jimmy Cliff.
Moving to the home of a family friend who lived in a tenement in western Kingston, Cliff made his first recording, Daisy Got Me Crazy, for the local sound system proprietor Count Boysie, but the song was never released.
His debut single, I’m Sorry, was issued by another sound system owner, Sir Cavalier, on his Hi Tone label in Jamaica and Blue Beat in the UK to little effect, but Cliff nonetheless abandoned his studies to concentrate on music, and he convinced the entrepreneur Leslie Kong to begin producing some of his records in 1961. The following year he scored his first hit for Kong with a ska love song called Hurricane Hattie, which made him a household name in Jamaica.
“Hurricane Hatty”:
The Reggae Appreciation Society produced this short biography.
“Story of Jimmy Cliff: Reggae's First King”:
I will close with a live 1976 performance by Cliff of “Many Rivers to Cross”
RIP Jimmy Cliff.
Please join me in the comments section below for more, and please post your favorites.
