Jimmy Cliff had one of the sweetest, smoothest voices ever to come out of Jamaica, but to think of him only as a reggae star would be to understate the breadth of his talent and ambition. The pioneering singer and actor — who has died aged 81 — was a restless soul constantly in search of unexplored territory.
Some questioned whether his life would have been easier if he had just stayed in Jamaica making reggae albums instead of journeying around Europe and Africa or traveling to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama to record soul and rock music.
“I felt, ‘If I put me in this one little bag, I’m going to be suffocated. How am I going to say what else I want to say?’” he told The Independent in 2003. “And that has been a big struggle in my career. They say, ‘You’re a Jamaican, you’re known for reggae,’ so you’re supposed to do that. But I won’t… Looking for the new, that’s fundamental to me.”
I first fell in love with Cliff’s rich, mellifluous voice when I was a schoolboy, after his laid-back but infectiously cheerful cover of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” became an international hit in the early Nineties. The song was a three-minute dose of sunshine breaking through our gloomy British skies.
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 