What I Know is What I Am: Jimmy Cliff (1944-2025) | Tributes

Anyone who found themselves at a checkout in May 2003 may have had the opportunity to leaf through Weekly Entertainmentafter spotting the enticing cover: The 50 greatest cult films of all time. In the middle was a photo of a black man wearing striped bell bottoms, a white hat, an open leopard-print shirt, a vest, snakeskin boots, and two pistols, his posture suggesting something between a soul singer’s body drop and a rehearsal for a bank robbery.

If, like me, you were 14 when you opened this issue and saw the photo of Jimmy Cliff above the words “Don’t. Fuck. Wit. Me.” it was like you were seeing the Matrix. It was the coolest, most immediate, most touching image of a person I have ever seen. Who was he? What is “The More They Come”? From which cultural galaxy did this meteor come? The name was vaguely familiar to me, but I never thought there was anything to it other than the music I knew so little about. Forty years into his career, the Right Honorable Jimmy Cliff, Order of Merit, Grammy Award-winning activist, actor, pioneer, producer, singer and writer, was about to change my life.

James Chambers was born in the eye of a hurricane one Jamaican summer, in St. James Parish, into a family of seven siblings, with another on the way. The rooms were very poor. Jimmy spent part of his childhood with his aunt even though his parents could not afford to feed him. His angelic voice illuminated the church every Sunday. A chance move to Kingston sets him on the path to fame. He went from soundtracking his neighbor’s window radio, his only exposure to new music, to performing his own songs at talent shows with a bamboo guitar he carved himself. After adopting her stage name, her first singles were “Hurricane Hattie” and “Miss Jamaica”. He was 17 years old.

However, the song that would take him off the streets and into a recording studio was “Dearest Beverly.” He sang it for record producer and Island Records co-founder Leslie Kong in 1961, a song written specifically to catch the ears of the Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneur. He owned a store called Beverly’s, from which he ran his business. Cliff was the first major artist for Beverly Records, Kong’s solo Jamaican label, and he soon worked for the label’s A&R department. Jimmy’s first discovery was a young singer named Bob Marley.

The rest of the world got its first glimpse of Cliff in 1964. He was sent to represent Jamaica at the Queens World’s Fair, and a crew was sent to Jamaica to film a program called “This is Ska!” Ska was just one of dozens of Caribbean musical forms that collectively evolved into reggae. West African folk music was introduced to the islands and its essence has remained constant for hundreds of years, making it unique among popular genres. What became Blues in America became Mento, Calypso, Dancehall, Roots, Rocksteady, Dub and finally Reggae in Jamaica.

Cliff, as he renamed himself, was lured to London to record with Kong at the island’s HQ, their resources better suited to managing a star. Cliff was asked to adapt his sound to audiences who paid to see Jimi Hendrix (who became a friend), Spencer Davis (for whom he opened) and the Rolling Stones (for whom he sang in the ’80s). The result was A difficult path to travelin which Cliff did his best impersonation of a rock singer. You can see Cliff’s rock efforts in clips of TV performances, like his cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” You could easily forget that the man who screamed and shook like James Brown in 1967 was the same man who fought his way so calmly in 1972’s “The Harder They Come.”

While “Time Will Tell,” the song that opens his 1969 self-titled album, isn’t the first pop reggae song ever recorded, it certainly seems to be the case. So full and rich, so clear and joyful; the Jimmy Cliff we all know stood in the studio with a cigarette waiting for playback, waiting for his real self to arrive. The upbeat sounds are a Trojan horse for Cliff’s painful lyrics about poverty, the Vietnam War and capitalism; exhilarating subjects that he makes human. Cliff took it to the top of the world charts. In particular, his song “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, about the death of a soldier, was so popular that they renamed the album in his honor when it was re-released.

The second song was his monumental hit “Many Rivers to Cross”, his answer to American soul and Motown, and was inspired by Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”, which Cliff covered on his forgotten second album “Jimmy Cliff in Brazil”. It was haunting and melancholy. It transcended genres. Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt, the Walker Brothers and Desmond Dekker, another Beverly Records artist, all covered it.

It was 1972’s “The Harder They Come,” a film adapted for him by Jamaican director Perry Henzell, that cemented Cliff in the annals of pop culture. The film starred Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin, a real criminal killed by police in 1948 at the age of 24. Updating the story for the early 1970s, Henzell made the first ever Jamaican film, “Breathless,” unique to the island, complete with chases, crime sprees and trips to the movies.

Cliff’s Ivanhoe arrives in Kingston looking for work, but quickly finds the streets to be an inhospitable place. After watching Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” (“The hero can’t die to the last reel!” shouts the crowd) and listening to the local sounds, Ivanhoe decides he’s going to become a rock star. When that doesn’t work, he starts stealing, dealing, and shooting with a gun in each hand. The film ends with a shootout on the seaside, as in Ivan’s real life, embellished with images from “Django”, transforming the real violence into an essay on the representation of violence.

Cliff’s title track, which becomes more and more popular with each crime he commits, plays alongside needle drops from other luminaries like Dekker and The Maytals. The soundtrack was added to the National Recording Registry in 2021, after receiving praise from Robert Christgau, Time, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. The film was a rare grindhouse film with a coherent political perspective and cultural sympathy, and the soundtrack was a rare album as rich as its inspiration. Michael Dare: “The Beatles had already done ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, Paul Simon had already sung ‘Mother and Child Reunion’, the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane had both recorded in Kingston, but it was ‘The Harder They Come’ that really put reggae on the map. Roger Corman bought and sold it, The Clash wrote a song about it, and Spike Lee called it one of the best musicals of all time.

When I first saw the image of Cliff in THISI immediately found the film, on a Criterion disc now long out of print. I had never seen a hero draw his violent self-realization from the earth. Having only seen the Caribbean in tourist cinema (including, ironically, the Steven Seagal film “Marked for Death,” which features an extended appearance by Cliff), seeing poverty on screen, a reflection of Cliff’s own experience, was a revelation. It was her Jamaica. This magnificent outlaw, with a smooth high register (he sometimes sounds like Michael Jackson), who could write perfect pop songs, showed me (and millions of others) a world I had never seen. The idea of ​​shooting a film in the streets you knew, the bands you knew, the people you knew; “The Harder They Come” went from a sleek post-pop battle cry to one of the most important films I’ve ever seen. It could be done. Jimmy Cliff did it.

Growing up with so little, Cliff left nothing in his life outside of his music. In his spare time, he fathered 19 children. He became involved in the fight to end apartheid, performing concerts, organizing festivals (see the documentary “Bongo Man”), participating in Little Steven’s Sun City fundraiser, incorporating Afrobeat into his reggae music from the late 1970s through the 1990s, and writing lyrics about the reality of life in violent and segregated societies. Even as he became a cultural legacy and staple of late-night television, working with famous artists like Joe Strummer, Tim Armstrong, Wyclef Jean and Bruce Springsteen inspired him; he never lost his empathy for the oppressed.

A series of bad reviews in the 1980s (not unrelated, arguably, unrelated to his holding the West’s feet to the fire regarding South Africa) took Cliff away from the spotlight he had worn since his teens. A starring role in the disastrous and embarrassing “Club Paradise” did little to change his perception of his drift toward irrelevance. Cliff carried it all humbly, going with the flow and staying true to himself.

Years after abandoning religion (“…now I believe in science.”), Cliff has spoken out on behalf of the gay community, condemned the violence in “The Harder They Come” after it was cited as a model for black-on-black violence, and released his latest album in collaboration with the United Nations Refugee Fund. When Jamaica named a street in Montego Bay, it was as much for its early triumphs as for its enduring commitment to its homeland and to people around the world who needed a powerful voice. He loved his life and changed the world with it.

For me, the gentleness of the real man, the care, the love and the empathy he brought to the world will always rival the lightning bolt that struck me when I first saw him in this photo: a real man and an immortal idea. In a 2006 documentary, he thoughtfully reflects: “What I learned to do… is to turn that bitterness into sweetness. Maybe I could have been a better person in this life… but what I know is what I am.”