A remix to the soundtrack of the 1972 Jamaican cult classic The Harder They Come could be in the works.

Justine Henzell, daughter of the film’s co-writer, director and producer, the late Perry Henzell, noted that this has been in discussions for some time now and the the final decision rests with the international record label which holds the rights to the original soundtrack album.

“It [the soundtrack] now exists on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere else. There are conversations about doing remixes so we’ll see what happens with Island Records and Universal in terms of those conversations,” Henzell announced during the question-and-answer segment of the 25th annual Bob Marley lecture organised by the Institute of Caribbean Studies at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, which she delivered last Friday .

In the conversation with researcher and lecturer at The UWI, Dr Rachel Mosely Wood, Henzell further noted that her father had painstakingly chosen the music for the film, which she said offers a snapshot of the varied musical offerings coming out of Jamaica 50 years ago.

“The soundtrack is only 10 tracks but it really acted at a time when the world was not familiar with music coming from Jamaica. It was a perfect way to get a sampler of Jamaican music. You have Johnny Too Bad and you have Many Rivers To Cross. Those two songs could not be more different tonally and in every other way, and yet they both came from Jamaica. So it was a way for people to learn about Jamaican music and Jamaican reggae artistes, but not have a similar style at all. This is why it has endured. You can say to someone who has never listened to music from Jamaica, ‘Here, listen to this,’ and there’s going to be at least one song that’s going to captivate them, no matter what style of music they like,” said Henzell.

The sound track for The Harder They Come was issued in February 1973 in North America. It peaked at 140 on the Billboard 200. In 2021 the album was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States’ Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

The film’s star, Jimmy Cliff voiced four of the tracks — title track The Harder They Come, You Can Get It If You Really Want, Sitting in Limbo, and Many Rivers to Cross. The Maytals gave Pressure Drop and Sweet and Dandy; Desmond Dekker contributed 007 (Shanty Town); Johnny Too Bad came from The Slickers; Rivers of Babylon was by The Melodians; and, Scotty’s Draw Your Brakes rounded out the soundtrack.