I Can See Clearly Now, Lorraine Has Gone

I apologize unreservedly for the mondegreen.

I don’t follow pop music much these days. I have no idea if radio stations are even still a thing. Here in western Maine, musical tastes tend toward county music, the kind de-boned for weak musical teeth. All the pop songs I’m subjected to at family gatherings are generally those autotuned Taylor Slow songs complaining about boys enough to make Patsy Cline blush. The hardware store and similar environs play ambient music that’s strictly Top 40 arena Rock from the seventies. If I had to come up with a single word to describe the whole musical zeitgeist, I’d use “angry.” Everyone’s not happy, and anxious to tell you so.

Johnny Nash was not angry. I happened upon him in the seventies, like everyone else, when Stir It Up, and I Can See Clearly Now, topped the charts. The latter sold over a million singles, which was a feat at the time. It remains the sunniest record to be burped out of the radio I’ve ever heard, even though it’s a song about getting over a bad time, not avoiding it all together. Redemption has always sold better than good luck as subject matter in the arts. Otherwise, one of Cinderella’s sisters would have married Prince Charming. No plot, the end.

Reggae music is pretty sunny stuff, in general, at least in its original rocksteady iteration. Like the American blues genre, and old fashioned country music, even the sad songs were mostly wry and cheeky. Bob Marley eventually got more famous than his contemporaries and decided to get a political hair across his Jamaikeister, and decided he was Martin Luther Kong, but for every I Shot the Sheriff, there were four Alton Ellis or Toots and the Maytals records to fall back on.

It’s funny, but the best Reggae songs were birthed by Americans, not Jamaicans. Johnny Nash was from Houston. He was a child performer on local, and then national TV, and then went on to become a producer as much as a performer. He went to Jamaica to see if he could peddle rocksteady music to America, and boy howdy did he. He signed Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and Rita Marley to publishing contracts in one afternoon.

Another example of the Americanization of Irie, so to speak, is Sitting in Limbo, by Jimmy Cliff:

It’s from the most reggae thing ever, the movie The Harder They Come. It was recorded in Jamaica, of course in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, by the same group of guys who made things like Bob Seger records. By the way, if you want to watch the movie, I suggest leaving the subtitles on. They’re technically speaking English, but not so’s you’d notice by listening to them.

Johnny Nash died four years ago, full of years and surrounded by his family. He made the world a happier place before he shuffled off. How many people can claim that?