My old friend Peter Svilans gave me a cd collection of Jimmy Cliff. Cliff was my first taste of Reggae. His appearance in the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come, still sticks in my mind. I saw it at a rep-house showing in Petaluma, California, with my friend Simon Agree. Cliff played the lead character, and some of his best songs were played on the soundtrack: “You Can Get It If You Really Want”, “Many Rivers To Cross”, “The Harder They Come”, “Sitting Here In Limbo”. The first two of those are in the Trojan CD collection, and twenty-three other songs of uniformly high quality. Jimmy Cliff was eventually eclipsed in the public mind by Bob Marley, and that man’s genius is undeniable. But Jimmy’s music had a jaunty, innocent charm to it, and he should not be neglected in anyone’s collection. In his day, Reggae was still Island music, a down-home kind of thing. Marley made it cosmopolitan, universal. But Cliff, too, sometimes touched universal chords. Who is there, who has ever had to trudge through the weary ups and downs of life, who won’t respond to “Many Rivers to Cross”, the kind of song best heard late at night, stranded in a donut shop on a highway you never planned to drive.
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