Remembering Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy's groundbreaking album on Trojan Records

The news of Jimmy Cliff’s death on Monday, November 24th, 2025 buried me in a veritable blizzard of emotions, memories, and long-forgotten scenarios, in all of which his music had been the soundtrack.

My first job at Island Records in 1965, looking through the racks of 45s down in the basement at 108 Cambridge Road, and noting the titles by him, ‘Hurricane Hatty’, ‘Miss Jamaica’, ‘Since Lately’, ‘One Eyed Jacks’, ‘King of Kings’, ‘Miss Universe’  … along with Wifred ‘Jackie’ Edwards and Owen Gray, Jimmy was in the vanguard of Jamaicans reaching for the golden ring the UK in the early sixties. under the guidance of Chris Blackwell. So his voice was one of the first Jamaican voices to hip me to the nascent sounds of ska. And as Island started to explore the more lucrative pop market, Jimmy, in keeping with the times, embraced a more soul oriented bag, and his releases came out on Island’s pink pop series; his compositions such as ‘Give and Take’, 'Pride and Passion', ‘Aim and Ambition’, together with embryonic recordings of ‘Hard Road to Travel’ and ‘That’s The Way Life Goes’, showed his growing maturity and taste as a songwriter. Kind of ironic that his first big international hit (especially in Brazil) was ‘Waterfall’, written by Alex Spyropoulos and Patrick Campbell-Lyons from Nirvana. The first Nirvana, that is.

The biggest, most indelible memory of the late sixties was his artistic breakthrough after reuniting with Leslie Kong, the man who had produced his very first recordings in Jamaica. I remember the day in Music House on Neasden Lane, that day that the tapes containing the new versions of ‘Hard Road To Travel’, ‘That’s The Way Life Goes’, ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Suffering In The Land’, ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, and the others that were to be his first LP on Trojan, were played in the UK for the very first tine. Stark, pulsing driving reggae, the tunes, unadorned by the arrangements that were later overdubbed, throbbed with passion and energy, Jimmy’s voice high in the mix, emoting visions of unity, despair, hope, love, resignation - all the feelings of mankind, all melded together in a glorious and delicious stew of perfect musicality, tone and so in tune, both musically and in tune with life itself. 

Ah, those memories, of the hits that came from that gorgeous album, of those early and dreary London mornings when I would arrive at Jimmy’s flat in West London to drive him to Heathrow, to catch a plane to Spain or France or Germany for a TV show, and we’d sit and talk philosophy, music and politics, arrive at the airport, and be driven to the studios, do the show and be back in the UK before sundown, and I’d drop him off and head back home, mind ablaze with music and the days happennings. And the movie, Perry Henzell’s ‘The Harder They Come’ with Jimmy as the central character, Ivan, with a headful of dreams and a soulful of music, that movie that I must have seen dozens of times, taking our European licensees to a little private screening room somewhere in Notting Hill, and what a wonderful movie it still is, with the perfect soundtrack of reggae before it evolved into the rootsier style, so raw, so direct, tracks that condensed the feeling and passion of the tune into perfect three minute playlets, and then the excitement, the goosebumping sensation of driving home at night, radio tuned to a clear signal and hearing Jimmy’s voice, loud and pure, come blasting out of the speakers with ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, and indeed, it was a wonderful world, and the people were beautiful, and a great joy was there to behold. 

His songs made you smile, made you grin and then laugh out loud at the wonder of it all. 

And years later, after moving to Oakland, I found that legendary Jamaican guitarist Hux Brown lived just around the corner. Hux had been on thousands of sessions in Jamaica, including those that had made up that groundbreaking LP that Jimmy had made with Kong that had so transfixed me. Whenever Hux and I got together, the conversation would inevitably drift to Jimmy and those records.

Just as when we were kids, and eating a great meal, saving the last delicious morsel for last, I have saved the best memory to tell it now. 

Several years ago, my wife and I visited our sons in Providence, RI. Back in the 1990’s, a local artist, Barnaby Evans, convinced the city to put on an event he had created to enhance the then recently redesigned and restored waterfront around the three rivers that flow through the city to the bay. Around eighty wood-filled braziers, floating on the water, are lit at dusk, music is played through a long string of speakers along each side of the water, and folks come from miles around to walk either side of the water, stand on the various bridges, gazing at the flickering and dancing flames reflected upon the water, the cityscape and lights shimmering in the background, reveling in the scent of woodsmoke, the multitudes of people, young and old, rich and poor, a mad mix of nationalities and ethnicities, languages and accents, some with drinks in hand, now and then a waft of pot, children running and gawping, and yet, despite the vastness of the crowds, and despite the hubbub and the murmur of thousands of tongues, a kind of serenity reigns, a reflection of that which had drawn all these people to the event. It was both a spectacle and yet it invited introspection, a pondering, a wonderment, a quiescence, a silent inward smile, for such was the beauty of the evening, the beauty of the moment, the woodsmoke, the dancing lights, the great and blissful humanity of it all. And as we approached the end of the display, out of the speakers came that searching and yearning voice of Jimmy Cliff, declaiming ‘Many Rivers to Cross’, and the sound and the sentiment and the moment were quite simply, perfect.

Perfection and unity.

It is that essence of Jimmy that I will remember, will always remember, way and beyond everything else.