Jimmy Cliff, reggae pioneer, dies at 81

REUTERS/YOUSSEF BOUDLAL/FILE PHOTO

Jamaican musician Jimmy Cliff performs during the 10th Mawazine World Rhythms international music festival in Rabat, in May 2012. Cliff, the Jamaican reggae singer who helped popularize the genre around the world with songs like “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come,” has died. He was 81.

Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican reggae singer who helped popularize the genre around the world with songs like “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 a post online early today. She said the cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia.

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.” But his breakthrough in the United States came when he starred as an actor in “The Harder They Come,” a 1972 movie about a struggling Jamaican musician who turns to crime.

That film became a cult favorite in the United States, running for years in midnight slots at theaters. It won Cliff a wide base of fans, many of whom bought the movie’s 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.”

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.

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Mike Alleyne, author of “The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae,” published in 2012, said that Cliff’s legacy was rooted in his power as a songwriter of broad appeal.

With songs like the 1969 single “Vietnam,” an anti-war track, Cliff showed global audiences that reggae was more than a novelty genre, Alleyne added.

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

His childhood was filled with music, Cliff recalled in the same interview, including at church and because he lived near the Monkey Rock Tavern, a venue that “pumped out music all day and night.” That venue was “my heaven,” Cliff added.

One day at elementary school, he asked a woodwork teacher how to write a song. Receiving the instruction, “Just write it,” Cliff told Mojo that he quickly tried to do just that, making a guitar out of bamboo to accompany himself. Then, at 12, he moved to Kingston to try and make it as a musician, according to the book “Bass Culture,” a history of reggae for which Cliff was interviewed. While in Kingston, he tried to disguise his young age by singing in a gruff voice.

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 the British music writer John Doran once called “one of the sweetest and smoothest voices that Jamaica has ever produced.”

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 “Wild World” in 1970 (a cover of the Cat Stevens’ staple). He also experienced open racism in England.

“I experienced racism in a manner I had never experienced before, and that was really tough for me,” he told The Guardian newspaper in 2022.

He put some of those feelings into “Many Rivers to Cross,” a hymnlike track that 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 stardom 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 similar purpose: “We all want to be stars from it!”

Cliff realized the movie would indeed achieve that for him shortly after its release, when he saw his face in advertisements on London buses. At that time, “reggae music was still considered a novelty,” he told The Guardian, but the film “showed people where the music was coming from.”

A.H. Weiler, reviewing the movie for the Times, said that Cliff was “natural and energetic” as the hero and noted that the film’s depictions of poverty and violence countered foreign perceptions of Jamaica as a carefree vacation island.

Although Cliff became a reggae figurehead thanks to the movie, his stardom was soon eclipsed by that of Bob Marley. Alleyne, the author, said that while Marley benefited in his career from his long tenure with Island Records, Cliff had a less stable business setup and was less rooted in the genre he helped to 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 “Bass Culture,” Cliff recalled that he helped Marley secure his first recording session. As a teenager in 1960s Kingston, Cliff said, he scouted acts for record producer Leslie Kong, and one day he encouraged Marley — who had approached Cliff and Derrick Morgan, another musician, via an intermediary — to audition.

Cliff and Marley ended up playing several tracks together. “What struck me about him immediately was how he just walked in, wasn’t nervous or anything,” Cliff recalled in “Bass Culture.” As soon as Marley started playing, it was clear he was “special,” Cliff added.

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

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

In an interview with NPR in 2012, Cliff said that success to him, at that point, meant something different to him than it did at the start of his career in 1972.

“When someone comes up to me,” he said, “and says, ‘I was a dropout in school and I heard your song ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want,’ and that song made me go back to school, and now I am a teacher and I use your song with my students’ — that, for me, is a big success.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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