In the post-Second World War era, the United States had the ideological East to contend. In the bipolar world, the US, seen as the harbinger of capitalism had to contend with Russia, China and East Germany as the high-priests of communism – a fear that still pervades the American body politic.

Then came 1980s when the Berlin Wall looked shaken and East and West Germany looked to be healing longstanding ideological rifts. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), then led by Mikhail Gorbachev, began tumbling like a house of cards. The disintegration of USSR for some time appeared like the ultimate dissipation of communism. There would be no more threat to US cultural, military and ideological hegemony.

However, Washington had miscalculated. The emergence reggae music symbolised and augmented both the ideological and cultural shift that has been taking around the world. Reggae music posed the greatest threat to American hegemony and the Central Intelligence warned that reggae movement represented the greatest religious or quasi-religious movement in the world since the period of Jesus Christ.

Reggae had to be obliterated before it gained a foothold in the global south, where reggae was an expression of ideological freedom, search for cultural identity and push for political and economic freedom from the West.

Jimmy Cliff, a onetime choirboy who emerged from the rough quarters of Kingston, Jamaica, riding a rebel spirit, had a fierce sense of social justice to help make the supple, bobbing sounds of reggae a global phenomenon with songs like You Can Get It If You Really Want and The Harder They Come.

Soon, Bob Marley became the most recognised exponent something of a messiah – of this music genre who main ingredient was departure from the norm and rebellion by the people classed – socially and economically – as thee wretched of the earth.

However, in 2018, 79-year-old Bill Oxley, ex-agent of America’s Central Intelligence Agency confessed to have assassinated reggae legend Bob Marley. Marley tragically died aged only 36-years-old, leading music lovers around the world to grieve as the Jamaican icon’s life and career were cut short following a four-year battle with cancer, according to the Daily Trust.

The story of cancer may seem untrue as startling claims have emerged from a deathbed confession made by Bill Oxley after he admitted to the killing. Oxley is alleged to have claimed the murder of Marley among 17 other assassinations for the American government between 1974 and 1985, at a time when he said the CIA “was a law unto itself.”

Oxley, who reportedly worked as an operative for the CIA for 29 years, is alleged to have said he was often used as a hitman on targets deemed to “represent a threat to the interests of the United States.”

In an interview shared widely online, he admitted having no problem with proceeding with the Bob Marley assassination because “I was a patriot, I believed in the CIA, and I didn’t question the motivation of the agency. I’ve always understood that sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good.”

Bob Marley was one of the many artists of African origin who used raga to advocate from the emancipation of the Black man from mental slavery, an idea that captivated the developing world in the southern hemisphere.

Jimmy Cliff (born James Chambers), who died on Monday, was an alternative to Bob Marley. Cliff was instrumental in propagation of raga culture – a movement that overshowed American pop culture that had taken Europe and Asia captive.

Tell Media brings you snapshots of fallen reggae legend Jimmy Cliff’s life in the music industry.

In a post to his official social media pages on Monday, his wife Latifa Chambers said Cliff passed away after a battle with pneumonia, which followed a seizure. He was 81.

“I am thankful for his family, friends, fellow artists and co-workers who have shared his journey with him. To all his fans around the world, please know that your support was his strength throughout his whole career. He really appreciated each and every fan for their love,” Latifa said.

Cliff, whose birth name was James Chambers, was instrumental in introducing reggae to an international audience, largely through his performance in the landmark film The Harder They Come.

He began recording soon after moving from the countryside to Kingston, making several singles before topping the Jamaican charts with his own song, Hurricane Hattie, one of his earliest efforts for Leslie Kong’s Beverly Records, according to the Jamaica Information Service (JIS).

He had several more hits that combined pop and ska influences. After relocating to London in 1965 at the behest of Chris Blackwell of Island Records, Cliff broadened his musical approach to incorporate Soul and Rhythm and Blues as he moved in the direction of reggae.

By the late 1960s he was a favourite in South America (having won a prize at a festival in Brazil with his song Waterfall), and his album Wonderful World, Beautiful People was an international hit as well as the record that prompted Paul Simon to investigate reggae.

As the star of The Harder They Come – he contributed to its sound track the classics Many Rivers to Cross, Sitting in Limbo and the title song – Cliff became reggae’s biggest star.

According The Washington Post, his Grammy-winning records as well as his starring role in the cult movie The Harder They Come in 1972 boosted a career spanning seven decades.

Jimmy Cliff, a onetime choirboy who emerged from the rough quarters of Kingston, Jamaica, riding a rebel spirit, had a fierce sense of social justice to help make the supple, bobbing sounds of reggae a global phenomenon with songs like You Can Get It If You Really Want and The Harder They Come.

Cliff’s wife, Latifa, announced his death in an online post early Monday. She said the cause was a seizure followed by pneumonia. Fuelled by his searing performance as a musician-turned-outlaw in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, Cliff became the first worldwide reggae star.

But he set his sights even higher. Over the years, his musical journey encompassed ska, rocksteady, pop, soul and other genres. “I didn’t really want to be known just as the King of Reggae,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Washington Post. “I actually wanted to be known as the King of Music!”

Among his signature songs are the gospel-inflected Many Rivers to Cross, the anthemic Wonderful World, Beautiful People, the feel-good tune Reggae Night and Vietnam, which Bob Dylan deemed one of the greatest protest songs.

He also recorded several notable covers, including Cat Stevens’s Wild World. His version of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now was featured in the 1993 family comedy Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsled team that gained international fame at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.

Cliff won two Grammy Awards over his decades-long career: best reggae recording in 1986 for Cliff Hanger and best reggae album in 2013 for Rebirth.

In addition to his own celebrated recording career, he is credited with helping to pave a path for Bob Marley and others to leverage reggae’s rhythms in spreading a universal message of defiance and hope.

Following his death, Prime Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica called him “a true cultural giant whose music carried the heart of our nation to the world.”

The Harder They Come became a cult favourite in the United States, running for years in midnight slots at theatres. Cliff, in the lead role, played Ivanhoe Martin, who abandons an impoverished life in the Jamaican countryside for the capital city of Kingston. Hoping to rise from the city’s shantytowns to music stardom, he is exploited by sleazy music executives and abused by the police, eventually turning into a gun-toting outlaw and martyred folk hero.

The spirit of the film is captured in the enduring lyric from the movie’s renowned title song: “I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave.”

The real-life Ivanhoe Martin was a 1940s Jamaican gangster who went on to become mythologised as an antihero. Cliff’s stirring performance in the film mirrored aspects of his own early life. He had arrived in Kingston at age 12 from a rural village dreaming of becoming a hit-maker.

“When I came to Kingston I lived in areas that were gangster-infested,” he said in a 2022 interview with The Observer of Britain. “And to be quite honest, the only thing that stopped me from joining those gangs full-time was I didn’t know where I would bury my head if my family heard that I was in Kingston firing a gun.”

It won Cliff a wide base of fans, many of whom bought the movie’s soundtrack, which included You Can Get It If You Really Want and The Harder They Come, as well as Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross and Sitting in Limbo. In 2003, Rolling Stone listed the soundtrack as No. 122 on its list of 500 Greatest Albums.

Shortly after the movie’s release, Cliff played his first major US concerts, although some critics seemed hesitant to fully embrace his music.

Still, by the 1990s, Cliff was a giant of the genre. Jon Pareles, in a review of a 1992 New York show for The New York Times, said Cliff’s music had developed into “what might be called arena reggae, often meshing reggae with styles from Brazil, Africa and the United States,” including bits of rap, rock and samba.

He was in the Somerton district of St James Parish, Jamaica. He grew up with eight siblings, a circumstance that taught him that he “always had to stand on my own and be counted,” he told Mojo, a British music magazine, in 2012.

His parents separated when he was a baby “and my mother wasn’t really around,” he told The Guardian in 2012.

“My most important relationships were with my father and grandmother,” he continued. “He was a very, very strict disciplinarian. But my grandmother played an important role in my life. I was always singing, but I was told I was singing the songs of the devil. My grandmother, though, always said: “Leave the boy alone. He’s going to come to something one day.”

His childhood was filled with music, including at church. He lived near the Monkey Rock Tavern, which “pumped out music all day and night,” he said; the venue, he added, was “my heaven.”

One day, in elementary school, he asked a woodworking teacher how to write a song. Receiving the instruction, “Just write it,” he tried to do just that, making a guitar out of bamboo to accompany himself, he told Mojo.

After moving to Kingston as a youth, he set out on a music career, although he had to disguise his age by adopting a gruff voice. He soon took his stage name, Cliff, an allusion to the career heights he hoped to scale.

It didn’t take long for Cliff to break through in Jamaica, where he initially sang R&B and ska songs. He had his first hit in 1962 with Hurricane Hattie, a song that showcased what the British music writer John Doran called “one of the sweetest and smoothest voices that Jamaica has ever produced.”

In 1965, Cliff signed with Island Records, founded by Chris Blackwell, the celebrated London-born Jamaican record producer who is credited with bringing Bob Marley and many other reggae stars into the mainstream.

Later that decade, Cliff moved to England in search of wider stardom. There, he had hits including “Wonderful World Beautiful People” in 1969 (a ska track that reached number 25 on the Billboard singles chart) and his cover of the Cat Stevens staple “Wild World” in 1970. “I experienced racism in a manner I had never experienced before, and that was really tough for me,” he told The Guardian in 2022.

It was not until after he starred in The Harder They Come that Cliff fully achieved the fame he had sought in England. In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, he recalled that it was “such a low-budget movie,” filmed in stops and starts because the budget kept running out. However, he said, everyone involved had a common purpose: “We all want to be stars from it!”

Cliff realised shortly after its release that the movie would indeed achieve that for him, when he saw his face in advertisements on London buses. At that time, “reggae music was still considered a novelty,” he told The Guardian, but the film “showed people where the music was coming from.”

A.H. Weiler, reviewing the movie for The Times, said that Cliff was “natural and energetic” as the hero and noted that the film’s depictions of poverty and violence countered foreign perceptions of Jamaica as a carefree vacation island.

Although Cliff became a reggae figurehead thanks to the movie, his pre-eminence was soon eclipsed by that of Marley. Mike Alleyne, the author of The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae, said that while Marley benefited from his long tenure with Island Records, Cliff had a less stable business setup and was less rooted in the genre that he had helped popularise.

“Whereas Cliff was more eclectic and trying to consciously dabble in other genres, Marley was integrating those into his reggae projection,” Alleyne said.

In the 2012 book Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley, Cliff recalled that he had helped Marley secure his first recording session. As a teenager in 1960s Kingston, he said, he scouted acts for the record producer Leslie Kong and one day he encouraged Marley – who had approached Cliff and Derrick Morgan, another musician, through an intermediary – to audition.

Cliff and Marley ended up playing several tracks together. “What struck me about him immediately was how he just walked in, wasn’t nervous or anything,” Cliff recalled in Bass Culture. As soon as Marley started playing, it was clear he was “special,” Cliff added.

In 2010, Cliff became the second reggae musician to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, after Marley. In 2023, the movie The Harder They Come was turned into a musical that ran at the Public Theatre in Manhattan.

In addition to his wife, Cliff’s survivors include their two children, Aken and Lilty Cliff.

In an interview with NPR in 2012, Cliff said that success to him, at that point, meant something different to him than it did at the start of his career in 1972.

“When someone comes up to me,” he said, “and says, ‘I was a dropout in school and I heard your song, You Can Get It If You Really Want, and that song made me go back to school and now I am a teacher and I use your song with my students’ – that, for me, is a big success.”

• A Tell Media report /Compiled from online sources