(In continuing our series of serialising sections of the book Jones Town Trench Town The Journey Back written by former Jamaica cricketer, economist and politician Paul Buchanan, today we continue with a comparative look at Reggae greats Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley)

The development of the recording industry enhanced the work of the hit makers, who all received training at the ‘university’ of Studio One.

The standout graduates in their respective genres were Derrick Morgan, ska; Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe and Delroy Wilson, rocksteady; Dennis Brown and Bob Marley, reggae. Jimmy Cliff, OM, though not a Studio One product, also belongs in this ‘Ivy League’ for his phenomenal contribution and special interpretation of reggae music. He yields nothing to Marley in talent and work ethic.

Apart from Bob Andy’s early songs of social protest: I Want To Go Back Home; Too Experienced and Fire Burning, it was the multitalented Cliff, lead actor in the movie, The Harder They Come, who gave us our first definitive song of struggle and triumph, Many Rivers to Cross, which was later eclipsed by Marley’s more powerful, Redemption Song. It was also Cliff the songwriter, born James Ezekiel Chambers, who wrote the score for the play, The Lion King and also inspired us with other songs of peace, love and social agitation that continue to engage us: Wonderful World, Beautiful People, Universal Love, Vietnam, Stand Up and Fight Back and Meetings in Afrika.

Jimmy Cliff, the 1985 Grammy winner for his album, Cliff Hanger, has shown incredible relevance and reinvention in being awarded a second Grammy for his appropriately named album, Rebirth, 17 years later in 2012. Cliff, born in Somerton in the hills of St James, on July 30, 1944, was essentially the pathfinder who broke through to international recognition before the world knew Marley.

Interestingly, the universality and versatility of his art have taken him on the Jazz World stage at the Glastonbury Festival in 2008. He also performed at Carnegie Hall in the same year and was inducted in Rock ‘n Roll’s Hall of Fame on March 15, 2010.

In the early years, Cliff, a product of Beverley’s Record Studio and a welder by profession, was close to Marley. He would eventually introduce the slightly younger Marley to Beverley’s Studio and arrange a welding job for him at his workplace, Milards Welding Works, South Camp Road, in Kingston. Soon after, the 14-year-old Bob would record his first songs: Judge Not, One Cup of Coffee and Terror, with the 16-year-old Cliff as producer for Beverley’s. None of the songs were successful and his climb had begun.

Marley, who was also inducted in Rock ‘n Roll’s, Hall of Fame, went further than the slightly older Cliff. This, however, cannot be an unchallenged assessment, as Cliff, by any measure, is one of our greatest cultural icons. He remains the only living musician to be awarded the Order of Merit, the highest honour that the Government can bestow for accomplishments in the arts and sciences.

Where Cliff’s music and lyrics were nice, refined, reformist, straightforward and easily followed, Marley’s stylings, tones and poetry were deeper, confrontational, revolutionary, enmeshed with stops and starts, augmented by the unlettered nuances and language of Trench Town, which in many instances require translation and explanation.

This was directly reflected in the titles and the musical exhortations offered by albums such as: Burning, Confrontation, Natty Dread and Uprising:

“Dem belly full but we hungry”

Or

“Noh woman noh cry,”

Or

“Whoa. A Natty Congo

A Dreadlock Congo I…

A Blackman Redemption

Woe. Yo ye, ye.

A Blackman Redemption woe yoe…

In his song We an Dem, from his album Uprising, he also shows uncanny use of innercity jargon:

“We no know how we and dem a go work this out

Dem a flesh and bone…

But we no have no friends in a high society

We no have no friends, oh mark my identity

We no have no friends.

We no know how we and dem a go work it out

Again, in his song Bad Card, he warns in the unique terminologies of the ghetto:

“You a go tired fe see me face

Can’t get me out of the race

Oh man you said I’m in your place

And then you draw bad card…

I want to disturb my neighbour

Cause I’m feeling so right

I want to turn up my disco

Blow them to full watts tonight

In a rub-a-dub style, in a rub-a-dub style…

Marley’s superior reach, interpretations of inner-city denial and grass-roots phrasing, is partly due to the fact that the young Cliff stayed longer in the easy-going, rustic, river flowing, fruited hills of Adelphi, above Somerton, than Marley did in Nine Miles, St Ann.

David Katz in his informative unauthorised biography, Jimmy Cliff, effectively summarises the idyllic setting of his boyhood days:

“…Jimmy’s early days were marked by a kind of Eden-like innocence involving a simple, naturalistic way of life largely untained by pollution or negative influence; as he (Cliff) recalls: ‘I really enjoyed that period of my life because there were rivers to go to and the beach’.”

Critically, also, James who came forth in a conservative, colonial setting along with his elder sibling, Victor, like Marley, was mentored by his Maroon-descendant mother Christine, a domestic helper and father, Lilbert Chambers, a tailor and highly respected ‘village lawyer’, while the six-year-old Marley was abandoned on his initial visit to Kingston by his unstable father. During this time, too, the young likeable James was being solidly mentored by admiring teachers at Somerton All-Age.

In fact, it was Cedella, who after being informed that young Nesta was seen wandering on Spanish Town Road, had to rush to Kingston to rescue her child and take him back to Nine Miles. Marley would return to settle in Kingston five years later, but the 11-year-old ‘little brown bwoy’, born of an absentee seafaring father, had to survive on his own, as ‘Tuff Gong’, in hostile, violent and black ‘Concrete Jungle’.

On the other hand, when James, called ‘Jimmy’, came to town, he was already a mature, bright teenager, not unskilled in the art of defence, having gained experience of city life in between diving for coins from the piers of Montego Bay. Additionally, he was soon accommodated by a number of benefactors, among them, a kind lady called Miss Gwen from the same yard where his cousin lived off Windward Road, in the relatively stable world of East Kingston, not far from Bournemouth Beach, which he would have found inviting.

Beyond that, the streets of West Kingston and Back-A-Wall, where Jimmy later settled with his father’s friend, were pulsating with non-stop music, which must have seemed less threatening to the budding singer, than the merciless, indifferent ‘cold ground’ of Trench Town that Bob encountered.

Given his determination to pursue a musical career, Jimmy, who adopted his singing name, ‘Cliff’, from the hills of Somerton, though not unmindful of the ever-present political violence, would not only have found Back-A-Wall more tolerable than Trench Town, given his father’s connection, but also more enthralled by the continuous African drumbeat, which echoed through the narrow dirt-filled, zinc-fenced pathways, from Prince Emanuel’s ‘Bobo Dread’ camp nearby. The aspiring singer would also have been moved by the captivating sounds of various musical genres, from mento and ska to rhythm and blues, offered at the major dance venues, Chocomo Lawn at Wellington Street and Carnival Lawn at Spanish Town Road.

Bob’s journey, though seemingly similar, was different, very different. Firstly, despite being exposed to the musical melodies belted out from the many bars with duke boxes and the non-stop hand-clapping, feet-stomping songs of the Pocomania and Pentecostal churches of Trench Town, Bob had to lift himself up from his unstructured, unsettled ground without a father and seek relief from stepfather Thaddeus’ non-stop errands and beatings, while still an unattached youngster, hustle to survive, get an education, then focusing his wandering mind on a career.

Cliff’s base was long ago set at Somerton, by the nurturing regimen of loving parents who guided him through school, the local Pentecostal church choir, the 4-H club and a culturally uplifting grandmother, who taught him to be confident of his heritage, persona and possibilities. Importantly also, his constructive outlook and preparation for responsibilities to come, pushed him to enroll at Kingston Technical High, where he built upon the base already laid.

Importantly, Cliff was earlier grounded in mento music and also performed in talent contests during his youthful strivings. Although Bob, in his childhood, likewise developed an affinity for music and actually won a school singing contest at age five, his nomadic life without stability and support, accompanied by the unrelenting harshness of survival amid vicious poverty, made his climb that much harder. In the end, Bob who absorbed the music of Trench Town as a palliative “… to feel no pain”, evolved as the more authentic messenger of social justice, voicing the struggles and longings of the oppressed.

More than all others, Bob’s music captured the Jamaican spirit of individuality, creativity, resistance and independence, revoking stereotypes of passivity and acceptance that we have long rejected as a people. In that context, his dancing moves and castigations were centred on removing the scourge of injustice, discrimination and poverty. Once freed of the nuances associated with those themes of disrespect and denial, liberated man could find self-actualisation and growth.

Bob’s greatness and clear separation from Cliff and his fellow artistes, therefore, was his musical capacity to use his Concrete Jungle suffering and triumph as an elixir of hope to humankind in the periphery everywhere. Ultimately, his depth and vision not only provoked action but, more importantly, provided the wellspring for transformation and change amid pervading inequality and inertia.

It was this commonality of suffering with the poor, along with his embrace of persecuted Rastafarians in the sixties, which advanced his spirituality and prophesy of “good over evil”. This further enhanced his authenticity and universality, a vantage point from which he bypassed Cliff, in adding a wider and deeper dimension to reggae music: eternal message and incisive articulation of human rights. Besides Cliff, he occupies an elevated niche as primus inter pares in a constellation of singer/songwriters of undoubted brilliance: Alton Ellis, Toots Hibbert, Bob Andy, Dennis Brown, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, Garnet Silk, Beres Hammond and his most legitimate successor, Buju Banton.