Jimmy Cliff Re-Enters The Billboard Reggae Album Chart

A week after his demise, the singer reappeared as one of the genre’s top sellers. This article explores the division of his catalog among several labels.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1970: Photo of Jimmy Cliff Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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The music of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff lives on with the 2017 compilation album, Best of Jimmy Cliffrevisiting its former chart peak at #7. The singer died on Nov. 24 at the age of 81 after experiencing a seizure followed by pneumonia. With a career spanning almost seventy years, there have been multiple Jimmy Cliff collections across the globe, and several songs from his peak era such as “Hard Road to Travel,” “Many Rivers to Cross,” “Wild World,” “Sitting in Limbo,” “Vietnam,” and “The Harder They Come” have been mainstays on most such releases.

Corporate Shuffles and Cliff’s Catalog

The current Jimmy Cliff compilation on the reggae chart released by the Universal Music Group is now eight years old and is also the most recent to feature his classic repertoire from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Universal is in a unique position to capitalize on Cliff’s best known recordings as a result of industry mergers and acquisitions that occurred decades ago.

Cliff’s international career began with Island Records and his first U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart hits were licensed to A&M Records. Both Island and A&M were acquired by what was then Polygram in 1989, which was itself later absorbed into the Seagram corporate empire in a huge $10.6 billion deal. By 2000, Seagram merged with France’s Group Canal+ and was acquired by Vivendi Universal for $34 billion. The music arm of the goliath enterprise which also included former giant labels MCA (for whom Cliff also recorded) and Geffen emerged as the Universal Music Group – the world’s largest record company – amidst a series of leadership and identity changes.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1970: Photo of Jimmy Cliff Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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Audiences are probably just witnessing the beginning of a new wave of Jimmy Cliff compilations. His record label journey (with territorial variations) also included EMI from 1973 to 1975, Warner Bros Records from 1975 to 1981, MCA from 1980 to 1981, and Columbia Records from 1982 to 1987. When EMI was dissolved in the 1990s, its catalog was split between Virgin Records America and Capitol Records and subsequently acquired by Universal Music.

Each of these labels will probably be utilizing their respective archives to both memorialize and capitalize on Cliff’s creative legacy. In view of the complex multi-label situation, fans hoping for a single comprehensive career-spanning physical box set are likely to be disappointed. Adding to the division of his repertoire, Cliff’s releases since the late 1980s have been split across a variety of mostly independent labels.

Universal’s Latest Compilation

The double-disc vinyl version of the Best of Jimmy Cliff foregrounds the earlier part of Cliff’s career after he migrated to England from Jamaica to further his career in the mid-1960s. Its compiled hits such as 1969’s “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” provide a chronicle of reggae’s limited international presence on the transatlantic pop charts before the international commercial emergence of Bob Marley and The Wailers. That Cliff material also precedes the success of reggae as an album focused genre, and the emphasis on the religious, cultural, and political philosophies of Rastafarianism.

Cliff’s pop repertoire was helmed by Chinese Jamaican producer, Leslie Kong (d. 1971) who experienced a decade of commercial success before his sudden demise at age 38 due to a heart ailment. Kong was entirely committed to crossing over to the pop charts and even advocated the remixing of the music to satisfy Britain’s BBC Radio which was then the primary U.K. vehicle for achieving chart success.

Kong’s attitude of commercial compromise extended to adding unwieldy orchestral string arrangements that often sounded at odds with the Jamaican rhythm tracks, as heard on “Wonderful World, Beautiful People.” Nonetheless, Cliff scored top ten hits in Britain between 1969 and 1970, making him a notable act despite the absence of a hit LP.

UNITED STATES – JANUARY 01: USA Photo of Jimmy CLIFF (Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

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Record Sales Enigma

Despite his career longevity and considerable influence, Cliff has never sold a huge number of albums. He has no gold or platinum certifications in America, while in Britain he only has two silver single certifications (for sales of over 200,000 units) for the perennial “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “I Can See Clearly Now.”

This provides another indication that a recording artist’s career impact cannot be solely validated by sales, and that the full extent of Jimmy Cliff’s creative presence is not easily quantified. The music world will certainly be poorer without him.