Johnny Nash
Soul/reggae voice BORN 1940
Johnny Nash’s attractive light-toned tenor had a lot in common with Sam Cooke’s, a hint of Solomon Burke in there too, but where Cooke leaned on gospel, Houston, Texas-born Nash would in the later ’60s base himself in Jamaica and adopt the lilt of rocksteady and emerging reggae. The rise was cemented when Nash took Stir It Up, a song by the then little-known Bob Marley, into the Top 15 in the UK and US in 1972/3. He would also popularise Marley’s Guava Jelly, Reggae On Broadway, their co-write You Poured Sugar On Me and others. However, Nash’s own message of sunny optimism, 1972’s I Can See Clearly Now, provided his most lasting epitaph, though 1975’s Tears On My Pillow was his final big hit, topping the UK charts. Nash had actually enjoyed a first US pop hit in 1958 on ABC-Paramount with MOR ballad A Very Special Love. Ditching the majors in the
’60s, he set up his own Joda and JAD labels, the hits starting with his first wife Margaret’s songs Let’s Move And Groove Together (1965) and You Got Soul, and his own Hold Me Tight, the last two both UK Top 10 hits in ’68. A 1969 reggaeflavoured version of Cooke‘s Cupid (Number 6 UK) laid more groundwork for reggae’s ascension as a mainstream UK genre. However, his own rise hit a wall. “In most cases, when you get a hit single from the album, the album moves too,” he said when I last interviewed him in 1977. “That‘s [never] happened in my case. I’d hate to think that the albums are that bad.” They weren’t. He also mentioned his continuing efforts to find a distributor for Love Is Not A Game, a film he’d acted in and soundtracked in Sweden in 1970. But the most significant event of that visit would be the time spent evolving a reggae style with Marley, who he’d taken along on the trip. In the latter part of the ’70s, after the hits, Nash moved back to Houston and, essentially, out of the music business.