This week, Black Music Sunday falls on the fourth anniversary of the death of singer, songwriter, and actor Johnny Nash. Best known for the chart-topping hit “I Can See Clearly Now,” which was recorded in London in 1971 and released in 1972, Nash also played a key role in the development of reggae.
Most folks wouldn’t associate reggae with a Texan, instead associating the genre with the island nation of Jamaica, and popular Jamaican reggae artists like Toots and the Maytals or Bob Marley and The Wailers. Yet Nash was not Jamaican, nor of Jamaican ancestry—he was born in 1940 in Houston, Texas.
And while his biggest hit may not be considered “strictly” reggae, it has been covered by multiple reggae artists, along with musicians from other genres, including R&B and pop.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 230 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
This 9-minute documentary from the Reggae Appreciation Society on YouTube serves as a brief but detailed introduction to Nash and his role in the spread of reggae music.
Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff are considered by many to be Reggae's original international torchbearers. But before they took the genre global, American singer Johnny Nash set the ball rolling with a string of hits. His achievements with reggae truly set the stage for it to be accepted by an international audience
Laurie E. Jasinski wrote his biography for the Texas State Historical Association, noting that his singing talents emerged early in his life.
Young Nash sang at Progressive New Hope Baptist Church in Houston. In his early teens he worked as a caddy at Hermann Park golf course, but his periodic singing on the job earned him extra tips and eventually a regular appearance on a local program called Matinee on KPRC-TV, where he sang rhythm-and-blues covers. According to an interview Nash gave in 1973, in Houston he won first place in an audition given by talent scouts for The Arthur Godfrey Show. The famous television host later featured him on radio and television shows for some years.
Nash made his recording debut in 1956 when he signed with ABC-Paramount and released his single “A Teenager Sings the Blues.” At the time he was still in high school and living in Houston with his parents. He followed this with the single “A Very Special Love” which made it into Billboard’s Top 40 in early February 1958. That year his self-titled album Johnny Nash was released, and he also scored a Top 40 hit with “The Teen Commandments,” a song that he recorded with Paul Anka and George Hamilton IV. Some media outlets touted Nash as America’s first Black teen idol, and his warm smooth delivery backed by lush pop arrangements drew comparisons to Johnny Mathis.
The young recording artist also embarked on an acting career and appeared in Take a Giant Step (1959) which garnered him the Silver Sail Award from the Locarno International Film Festival. In 1960 he appeared in the movie Key Witness. He was the voice for the theme song of the syndicated television cartoon series The Mighty Hercules from 1963 to 1966. He made appearances on a number of television programs during the early 1960s, including The Merv Griffin Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and The Mike Douglas Show. During this time, he released a series of singles on various labels, including Argo, Groove, and Warner Brothers, that did not chart.
Here’s that first recording of “A Teenager Sings The Blues.”
And here’s “A Very Special Love.”
In 2011, film critic Emanuel Levy wrote about Nash’s starring role in 1959’s “Take a Giant Step.”
In addition to the usual problems faced by adolescents at this crucial era, Spencer (Spence) Scott (Johnny Nash), who’s 17, has to face racism in its various manifestations, particularly because he lives in a white middle class neighborhood.
[...]
The tale, adapted from the play by Louis S. Peterson and Julius Epstein, is extremely well acted by Johnny Nash in the lead, the very young Ruby Dee as the Scott family’s housekeeper, and Beah Richards as Spence’s mother, and Estelle Hemsley as Grandma Martin in a Golden Globe nominated turn.
Here’s a heart-wrenching, multigenerational scene from the film, that encapsulates the middle-class Black family’s challenges in a white community in the late 1950s.
John Nova Lomax, a former senior editor at Texas Monthly, wrote an in-depth, three-part series on Nash.
From Part One:
By the early-to-mid 60s, Nash was spending more time in New York, which is where he landed the lead vocal for the theme of animated show “The Mighty Hercules,” produced by Trans-Lux (of Felix the Cat and Speed Racer fame).
And it was in New York where life would start coming at him fast. It was there he met producer/svengali Danny Sims, and within a year or so there would be more hit records and an exile-turned-sojourn in Jamaica, where Nash and Sims would lay the groundwork for Bob Marley and, by extension, reggae music to leap out of Kingston and envelop the world. Along the way, Nash would etch his name in the American songbook, and then, well, he would just ease off into the embrace of home and hearth and friends and family in Houston.
Have a listen to the theme song from “The Mighty Hercules”:
Nash and Sims moved to Jamaica, where, as Lomax explains in Part Two, Nash had a chance encounter with Bob Marley.
As he told 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 began a five-year or so friendship / professional relationship. Years later, Sims would claim he saw in Marley the next Bob Dylan, but it seems now that he was thinking more in terms of the next Elvis. Sims was interested in Marley as a singer of sun-kissed love songs, not the religious prophet / soul rebel Marley would become. According to some accounts, Sims allowed Marley to record his rebel / Rasta songs on the side so long as he brought the love songs to him and him alone. And Sims recorded dozens upon dozens of them, but that’s another story…
This video compiles music recorded during that time period.
From the YouTube video notes:
Formed in 1967 JAD Records was a record label that was co-owned by Johnny Nash, producer Arthur Jenkins, and businessman Danny Sims, whose initials formed its logo. JAD Records was the label which signed Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Rita Marley to an exclusive long-term contract as recording artists from 1968 to 1972. Other notable artists to sign with the label included Johnny Nash himself, Byron Lee, Neville Willoughby and later Jimmy Cliff.
“Hold me Tight” charted in 1968, both in the United Kingdom and the U.S.
What would become Nash’s signature tune came next. As writer, artist, and musician Luke Delalio wrote of “I Can See Clearly Now” in December, “it’s a masterpiece.”
This song was a huge hit in the early 1970’s and for good reason. It’s a great song with great performances and a killer arrangement.
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 group of studio musicians called The Fabulous Five and probably some other players, but a lot of the details are lost to history.
I Can See Clearly Now is often credited as the first Reggae hit, the song that introduced Reggae to the Western World, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t say it’s Reggae. The rhythm of it is actually straightforward and doesn’t have the offbeat feel that defines Reggae until the choruses, but it certainly has a huge Reggae influence to it and it was a hugely influential record. It was a GIANT hit. It was inescapable on the radio, used in commercials, covered by hundreds of other artists, and more than 50 years later still gets placed in key moments in movies and TV.
As “inescapable” as “I Can See Clearly Now” remains, even today, the cheerful music video is far less well-known.
Jimmy Cliff would record “I Can See Clearly Now” for the 1993 film “Cool Runnings,” which cemented the Jamaican bobsled team’s place in Olympics fans’ hearts forever.
Ray Charles added a gospel take to the tune.
My all-time favorite cover comes from Bobby McFerrin. Recorded live in Kaunas in 2011, he shares the performance with the audience, speaking to the song’s staying power.
Nash’s Guardian obituary, written by Peter Mason, concludes Johnny’s story.
In 1970 Nash was invited to Sweden to write the soundtrack for a film, Love is Not a Game, in which he also acted opposite Christina Schollin. Nash took Marley and Sims with him, and they were away from Jamaica for the best part of a year. The film was a damp squib – it had only a brief run in Sweden in 1971 and plans to release the soundtrack as an album were ditched. But the sojourn in Scandinavia brought Nash and Marley 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 last of which they jointly wrote. The album, and its title track in particular, established Nash as a household name.
Marley was left in his friend’s professional wake, but the relationship had been useful for both, giving Nash a new direction and grooming Marley for his eventual hook-up with Island Records and superstardom.
As it turned out, Nash had essentially begun to abandon the music business by the time Marley came to global attention. He decided to move back to Houston in 1974 for a quieter life, buying a ranch there and embarking on his third marriage, to Carlie Collins.
By 1980, though he was still only 40, his recording activity had ground to a halt, and though there was one more album, Here Again, in 1986, much of his attention was by then focused on family life, church activities and helping local causes. A keen horse rider since his youth, in 1993 he set up the Johnny Nash Indoor Arena in Houston, where he financed weekly rodeos for youngsters who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to get on a horse. For many years he politely refused all interview requests.
I’ll close with “Here Again,” the titular single from Nash’s final 1986 album.
Want more about Nash? Black Kos editor Joan Mar introduced many of us to him in 2019, and she wrote a eulogy when he joined the ancestors four years ago.
Join me in the comments to post some of your favorite Johnny Nash tunes and memories.
Looking to volunteer to help get out the vote? Click here to view multiple ways you can help reach voters—textbanking, phonebanking, letters, postcards, parties, canvassing. We’ve got you covered!
