It’s such an exuberant song with such an optimistic uplifting message of hope. The perfect message for our times really. It’s not quite reggae and Johnny Nash isn’t really a reggae singer. He’s not even Jamaican – he’s American, from Houston, Texas.

 

But he lived in Jamaica – and played a crucial role in the career of its most famous musical family, Bob Marley and the Wailers.

 

Nash’s music career actually dates back to the late Fifties, when his sweet voice led to him being marketed as a rival to Johnny Mathis, as can be heard on his jazzy debut single A Teenager Sings The Blues. Also a successful actor as a young man, he moved in the mid-Sixties to Jamaica, where he met Marley performing with his band, then called The Wailing Wailers.

 

Bob, along with his wife Rita, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, introduced him to the Jamaican music scene, and Nash in turn signed them up to his publishing company – thus playing a crucial role in their career.

 

Encouraged by his new musical discoveries, Nash then determined to break the new rocksteady sound back in America and had hits with Hold Me Tight on both sides of the Atlantic, and a cover of Marley’s own Stir It Up.

 

That gave him a hit single just two months before this self-penned tune, recorded in London with the Jamaican veterans Fabulous Five Inc, took him to No.1 in America and No.5 in the UK chart, where he’d already had hit singles with Cupid, You Got Soul and Hold Me Tight and would go on to have more  with There Are More Questions Than Answers, What A Wonderful World and the chart-topping Tears On My Pillow.

 

I Can See Clearly Now became a hit again 11 years later when it was covered by Jimmy Cliff for the soundtrack of the movie Cool Runnings.