This week, Black Music Sunday falls on the fourth anniversary of the loss of life of singer, songwriter, and actor Johnny Nash. Finest recognized for the chart-topping hit “I Can See Clearly Now,” which was recorded in London in 1971 and launched in 1972, Nash additionally performed a key function within the growth of reggae.
Most folk wouldn’t affiliate reggae with a Texan, as a substitute associating the style with the island nation of Jamaica, and common Jamaican reggae artists like Toots and the Maytals or Bob Marley and The Wailers. But Nash was not Jamaican, nor of Jamaican ancestry—he was born in 1940 in Houston, Texas.
And whereas his largest hit will not be thought of “strictly” reggae, it has been lined by a number of reggae artists, together with musicians from different genres, together with R&B and pop.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly sequence highlighting all issues Black music, with over 230 tales protecting performers, genres, historical past, and extra, every that includes its personal vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll discover some acquainted tunes and maybe an introduction to one thing new.
This 9-minute documentary from the Reggae Appreciation Society on YouTube serves as a quick however detailed introduction to Nash and his function within the unfold of reggae music.
Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff are thought of by many to be Reggae’s authentic worldwide torchbearers. However earlier than they took the style world, American singer Johnny Nash set the ball rolling with a string of hits. His achievements with reggae really set the stage for it to be accepted by a world viewers
Laurie E. Jasinski wrote his biography for the Texas State Historic Affiliation, noting that his singing skills emerged early in his life.
Younger Nash sang at Progressive New Hope Baptist Church in Houston. In his early teenagers he labored as a caddy at Hermann Park golf course, however his periodic singing on the job earned him further suggestions and ultimately an everyday look on an area program referred to as Matinee on KPRC-TV, the place he sang rhythm-and-blues covers. In accordance with an interview Nash gave in 1973, in Houston he gained first place in an audition given by expertise scouts for The Arthur Godfrey Present. The well-known tv host later featured him on radio and tv reveals for some years.
Nash made his recording debut in 1956 when he signed with ABC-Paramount and launched his single “A Teenager Sings the Blues.” On the time he was nonetheless in highschool and residing in Houston together with his dad and mom. He adopted this with the one “A Very Special Love” which made it into Billboard’s Prime 40 in early February 1958. That yr his self-titled album Johnny Nash was launched, and he additionally scored a Prime 40 hit with “The Teen Commandments,” a tune that he recorded with Paul Anka and George Hamilton IV. Some media retailers touted Nash as America’s first Black teen idol, and his heat clean supply backed by lush pop preparations drew comparisons to Johnny Mathis.
The younger recording artist additionally launched into an appearing profession and appeared in Take a Large Step (1959) which garnered him the Silver Sail Award from the Locarno Worldwide Movie Competition. In 1960 he appeared within the film Key Witness. He was the voice for the theme tune of the syndicated tv cartoon sequence The Mighty Hercules from 1963 to 1966. He made appearances on various tv applications throughout the early Nineteen Sixties, together with The Merv Griffin Present, The Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson, and The Mike Douglas Present. Throughout this time, he launched a sequence of singles on numerous labels, together with Argo, Groove, and Warner Brothers, that didn’t chart.
Right here’s that first recording of “A Teenager Sings The Blues.”
And right here’s “A Very Special Love.”
In 2011, movie critic Emanuel Levy wrote about Nash’s starring function in 1959’s “Take a Giant Step.”
Along with the same old issues confronted by adolescents at this significant period, Spencer (Spence) Scott (Johnny Nash), who’s 17, has to face racism in its numerous manifestations, significantly as a result of he lives in a white center class neighborhood.
[…]
The story, tailored from the play by Louis S. Peterson and Julius Epstein, is extraordinarily properly acted by Johnny Nash within the lead, the very younger Ruby Dee because the Scott household’s housekeeper, and Beah Richards as Spence’s mom, and Estelle Hemsley as Grandma Martin in a Golden Globe nominated flip.
Right here’s a heart-wrenching, multigenerational scene from the movie, that encapsulates the middle-class Black household’s challenges in a white group within the late Fifties.
John Nova Lomax, a former senior editor at Texas Month-to-month, wrote an in-depth, three-part sequence on Nash.
By the early-to-mid 60s, Nash was spending extra time in New York, which is the place he landed the lead vocal for the theme of animated present “The Mighty Hercules,” produced by Trans-Lux (of Felix the Cat and Velocity Racer fame).
And it was in New York the place life would begin coming at him quick. It was there he met producer/svengali Danny Sims, and inside a yr or so there could be extra hit data and an exile-turned-sojourn in Jamaica, the place Nash and Sims would lay the groundwork for Bob Marley and, by extension, reggae music to leap out of Kingston and envelop the world. Alongside the best way, Nash would etch his identify within the American songbook, after which, properly, he would simply ease off into the embrace of dwelling and fireplace and family and friends in Houston.
Have a take heed to the theme tune from “The Mighty Hercules”:
Nash and Sims moved to Jamaica, the place, as Lomax explains in Half Two, Nash had a probability encounter with Bob Marley.
As he instructed Steffens: “That night, Johnny came home raving about this guy he had met named Bob Marley. He said every song he heard him sing was an absolute smash and that we should sign him immediately to our label. The next day Bob came to our house with his wife, Rita, and Bunny Livingstone and Peter Tosh, along with Planno. Bob played guitar and sang about 30 songs for me.”
And so started a five-year or so friendship / skilled relationship. Years later, Sims would declare he noticed in Marley the following Bob Dylan, nevertheless it appears now that he was pondering extra by way of the following Elvis. Sims was interested by Marley as a singer of sun-kissed love songs, not the non secular prophet / soul insurgent Marley would develop into. In accordance with some accounts, Sims allowed Marley to file his insurgent / Rasta songs on the aspect as long as he introduced the love songs to him and him alone. And Sims recorded dozens upon dozens of them, however that’s one other story…
This video compiles music recorded throughout that point interval.
From the YouTube video notes:
Fashioned in 1967 JAD Data was a file label that was co-owned by Johnny Nash, producer Arthur Jenkins, and businessman Danny Sims, whose initials shaped its brand. JAD Data was the label which signed Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Rita Marley to an unique long-term contract as recording artists from 1968 to 1972. Different notable artists to signal with the label included Johnny Nash himself, Byron Lee, Neville Willoughby and later Jimmy Cliff.
“Hold me Tight” charted in 1968, each in the UK and the U.S.
What would develop into Nash’s signature tune got here subsequent. As author, artist, and musician Luke Delalio wrote of “I Can See Clearly Now” in December, “it’s a masterpiece.”
This tune was an enormous hit within the early 1970’s and for good purpose. It’s a fantastic tune with nice performances and a killer association.
I Can See Clearly Now was written solely by Johnny Nash and he himself produced the recording at AIR studios in London in 1971. He used a bunch of studio musicians referred to as The Fabulous 5 and doubtless another gamers, however loads of the small print are misplaced to historical past.
I Can See Clearly Now’s typically credited as the primary Reggae hit, the tune that launched Reggae to the Western World, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t say it’s Reggae. The rhythm of it’s truly simple and doesn’t have the offbeat really feel that defines Reggae till the choruses, nevertheless it definitely has an enormous Reggae affect to it and it was a vastly influential file. It was a GIANT hit. It was inescapable on the radio, utilized in commercials, lined by lots of of different artists, and greater than 50 years later nonetheless will get positioned in key moments in films and TV.
As “inescapable” as “I Can See Clearly Now” stays, even in the present day, the cheerful music video is much much less well-known.
Jimmy Cliff would file “I Can See Clearly Now” for the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings,” which cemented the Jamaican bobsled group’s place in Olympics followers’ hearts endlessly.
Ray Charles added a gospel take to the tune.
My all-time favourite cowl comes from Bobby McFerrin. Recorded reside in Kaunas in 2011, he shares the efficiency with the viewers, talking to the tune’s endurance.
Nash’s Guardian obituary, written by Peter Mason, concludes Johnny’s story.
In 1970 Nash was invited to Sweden to write down the soundtrack for a movie, Love is Not a Sport, through which he additionally acted reverse Christina Schollin. Nash took Marley and Sims with him, they usually have been away from Jamaica for the perfect a part of a yr. The movie was a humid squib – it had solely a quick run in Sweden in 1971 and plans to launch the soundtrack as an album have been ditched. However the sojourn in Scandinavia introduced Nash and Marley right into a musical collaboration that bore fruits in Nash’s 1972 album I Can See Clearly Now, to which Marley contributed Stir it Up, Guava Jelly, Comma Comma and You Poured Sugar on Me, the final of which they collectively wrote. The album, and its title monitor particularly, established Nash as a family identify.
Marley was left in his buddy’s skilled wake, however the relationship had been helpful for each, giving Nash a brand new course and grooming Marley for his eventual hook-up with Island Data and superstardom.
Because it turned out, Nash had primarily begun to desert the music enterprise by the point Marley got here to world consideration. He determined to maneuver again to Houston in 1974 for a quieter life, shopping for a ranch there and embarking on his third marriage, to Carlie Collins.
By 1980, although he was nonetheless solely 40, his recording exercise had floor to a halt, and although there was another album, Right here Once more, in 1986, a lot of his consideration was by then centered on household life, church actions and serving to native causes. A eager horse rider since his youth, in 1993 he arrange the Johnny Nash Indoor Area in Houston, the place he financed weekly rodeos for kids who in any other case wouldn’t be capable to afford to get on a horse. For a few years he politely refused all interview requests.
I’ll shut with “Here Again,” the titular single from Nash’s remaining 1986 album.
Need extra about Nash? Black Kos editor Joan Mar launched many people to him in 2019, and he or she wrote a eulogy when he joined the ancestors 4 years in the past.
Be a part of me within the feedback to put up a few of your favourite Johnny Nash tunes and reminiscences.
