Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy Cliff is a Jamaican singer, songwriter and actor whose career began as a teenager and who became, alongside Bob Marley, the international face of reggae; his 1972 film "The Harder They Come" carried the music to an audience that had never otherwise have encountered it. Before his own career took off, teenage Cliff worked as an A&R scout for producer Leslie Kong alongside the senior singer Derrick Morgan, auditioning voices in West Kingston rum shops.

In early 1962, Cliff, himself not yet fifteen, gave the sixteen-year-old Bob Marley his first professional audition and session, after Kong had already turned Marley away once without hearing him. Cliff picked three songs for release: "Judge Not" and "One Cup of Coffee", issued under the names "Robert Marley" and then "Bobby Martell" (Kong reportedly disliked how "Robert Marley" looked on a label), and a third, unreleased song called "Terror".

In an interview with Bradley, Cliff recalled that ska was still an emerging option when he arrived in Kingston around 1960, but within about a year had taken over the dances even before radio caught up. He credited Prince Buster with changing studio practice industry-wide, as the first to have singers arrive with a complete song, full melody and lyrics, rather than a fragment for the bandleader to structure, giving vocalists far more control over the final arrangement; and he credited Chris Blackwell as the first to build proper wholesale distribution for Jamaican records, in contrast to producers previously supplying single shops by motorcycle courier, with artists gravitating to Blackwell partly because he paid better than most Jamaican producers.