Reggae Legend Jimmy Cliff to be given official funeral
Culture minister Olivia Grange says reggae legend Jimmy Cliff is to be accorded an official funeral, the details of which will be announced shortly. As the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon paid tribute to the singer, actor and…
Culture minister Olivia Grange says reggae legend Jimmy Cliff will be given an official funeral and that final arrangements will be announced soon.
Grange told Parliament on Tuesday that the music icon left clear instructions about how he wanted Jamaica to bid him farewell.
She shared that she spoke with Jimmy Cliff shortly before his death and he was eager to return home to help rebuild after Hurricane Melissa. Grange said he was especially focused on helping the parish of his birth, St James.
As Parliament paid tribute, Grange hailed Jimmy Cliff as one of Jamaica’s most important cultural figures whose music and work have shaped generations. She noted that his impact stretched far beyond entertainment, calling him a symbol of Jamaican pride and resilience.
Jimmy Cliff, born James Chambers, was known worldwide for classics like Many Rivers to Cross, I Can See Clearly Now and The Harder They Come, and for starring in the landmark film of the same name.
The official funeral will honour his extraordinary contribution to Jamaica and the world
immy Cliff, Jamaica’s sweet-voiced reggae star, has died at the age of 81. His brand of gospel roots reggae, with its Rastafari back-to-Africa ideology, offered hope of deliverance to “downpressed” Jamaicans and encouraged a generation of British-born black West Indians to embrace a part of their heritage – Africa – that their parents had often shunned. At the age of 28, Cliff played a Robin Hood-like outlaw in Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, The Harder They Come, released in 1972. Cliff contributed four songs to the soundtrack, including the gospel “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Sitting in Limbo”. Assembled by the film’s director Perry Henzell in under a week, the soundtrack pretty well introduced reggae to college audiences abroad. Without The Harder They Come album, reggae would not have taken hold outside Jamaica in the way it did. Fashionable dinner parties in mid-1970s London and New York often had a musical accompaniment in the Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad”, Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)” and other hits from the film. Henzell’s trailblazing film paved the way for Bob Marley’s success soon after.
Born James Chambers in rural Jamaica in 1944, Cliff was a teenager when he moved to Kingston, the island’s capital, and adopted the surname Cliff to express the musical heights he intended to reach. In 1969 he triumphed with his single “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, and the politically charged “Vietnam”, which Bob Dylan reckoned “the best protest song ever written”.
The idea for The Harder They Come had occurred to Henzell, a white Jamaican, while at his boarding school in England as long ago as 1948. Kingston had been terrorised that year by the antics of a Jamaican Ned Kelly figure called Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, who in a series of armed hold-ups killed three bystanders. After a manhunt the police shot Martin dead on Lime Cay Island off Kingston. To Henzell’s schoolboy imagination, Martin resembled the West African Anansi trickster, who eludes capture even as he taunts the authorities. Martin was the embodiment of “Anancyism” as he fought the law.
Henzell decided to update the story to contemporary Kingston, where a country boy tries his luck as a singer and drugs entrepreneur, before he goes out in a blaze of glory. Cliff was chosen to play the part of Ivan O Martin (as the outlaw was now renamed). In Martin’s story, Cliff said he saw the plight of the little man crushed by authority, and he bought a touch of rude boy swagger to the role. Filming began in 1969 but dragged on for two years as money ran out and some cast members even died. Cliff’s own song, “The Harder They Come”, provided Henzell with his title, and captured the desperation of Kingston youth fighting for survival.
