Jimmy Cliff, the legendary Jamaican singer who along with Bob Marley popularised reggae, ska and rocksteady music over a six-decade career, has died, his wife Latifa Chambers announced on Facebook yesterday. The cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia, she said.
Born James Chambers on July 30, 1944 during a hurricane in St James Parish, northwestern Jamaica, he moved in the 1950s from the family farm to the country’s capital Kingston with his father, determined to succeed in the music industry.
At just 14 he became nationally famous for the song Hurricane Hattie, which he wrote.
Cliff would go on to record more than 30 albums and perform all over the world, including in Paris, in Brazil and at the World’s Fair, an international exhibition held in New York in 1964.
The following year, Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, the producer who launched Bob Marley and the Wailers, invited Cliff to work in the UK with him.
Cliff later went into acting, starring in the 1972 classic film The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell, which introduced an international audience to reggae music.
The movie portrayed the grittier aspects of Jamaican life, redefining the island as more than a tourist playground of cocktails, beaches and waterfalls.
Known in part for singles You Can Get It If You Really Want It and Many Rivers To Cross, as well as for his covers of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, which appeared on the soundtrack of the 1993 movie Cool Runnings, and Cat Stevens’ Wild World, Cliff was a prolific writer who weaved his humanitarian views into his songs.
In 2012, he won a Grammy Award for best reggae album for Rebirth, which was produced by punk band Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, and another Grammy in 1984 for Cliff Hanger.
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