Reggae Pioneer Jimmy Cliff Dies At 81

Jimmy Cliff, whose performance in the1972 film The Harder They Come helped reggae music dent the mainstream for the first time, died today (Nov. 24) at the age of 81. According to a statement from his family, the cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia.

Cliff had his first hit, “Hurricane Hattie” at 14, in the late ’50s, having talked his way into the record business while still at school (it was actually his third released single). Over the next few years, he had a few hits locally and helped shepherd future reggae legends Desmond Dekker and Bob Marley before moving to the U.K., having signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. In 1967, he released his first major album, Hard Road to Travel, which included a cover of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and only touched on the reggae sound to come.

Following the 1970 protest song “Vietnam,” which Bob Dylan called one of the best he’d ever heard, Cliff starred in and wrote the title song for The Harder They Come. The movie revealed for the first time the birthplace of reggae — a paradoxical place of squalor and sunshine. The movie is music-laden, and at least partially about music, but it’s not a musical. It’s a gangster film about a kid (played by Jimmy) who comes to Kingston to break into the recording business, fails and becomes a small-time bad boy in a local crime gang, kills a cop, runs from the law and — well, it ends in tears.

Although Cliff appears on only four of the soundtrack’s 10 songs, “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” “Many Rivers To Cross,” “Sitting in Limbo” and the title cut are all classics.

“The film stands up very well,” Cliff told SPIN in 2022. “The director [Perry Henzell] was saying, ‘I don’t want any actors in my movie. I just want people who play themselves.’ Mainly all of the actors in the movie were playing themselves. That’s why it stood up. Everyone was being real. But I never stole. I never killed (laughs).”

For the next 40 years, Cliff performed and recorded around the world, collaborated with the Rolling Stones, Annie Lennox and the Clash’s Joe Strummer, acted in the ’80s comedy Club Paradise with Robin Williams and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

His 2012 album Rebirth was produced by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong and included a cover of the Clash’s “The Guns of Brixton.” It debuted at a career-high No. 76 on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

Asked how he maintained a message of peace, love and unity amid constant racism and discrimination, Cliff told SPIN, “I boil it down to having grown up in the ghetto. I could have gone either way — I could have gone like Ivan, in the movie, or gone the way I have now. I had to be optimistic to survive, or you sink like a stone. So, I put it down to that. I just have to stay optimistic. That attitude has become a part of me.”