Johnny Nash is 74 years old today. A pop singer-songwriter, Nash is best known in the United States for his 1972 comeback hit, I Can See Clearly Now.” He was also the first non-Jamaican to record reggae music in Kingston. Born John Lester Nash, Jr. in Houston, Texas, he began as a pop singer in the 1950s. He also enjoyed success as an actor early in his career appearing in the screen version of playwright Louis S. Petersons Take a Giant Step. In 1965, Johnny Nash and Danny Sims formed the JAD label in New York. One of the more interesting signings was four brothers from Newport, Rhode Island, ages 9, 11, 15 and 16, called The Cowsills, before their first million selling hit single, The Rain, The Park & Other Things.” Besides I Can See Clearly Now, Nash recorded several hits in Jamaica, where he travelled in early 1968, as his girlfriend had family links with local TV and radio host and novel writer Neville Willoughby. Nash planned to try breaking the local rocksteady sound in the United States. Willoughby introduced him to a local struggling vocal group, The Wailers. Members Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh introduced him to the local scene. Nash signed all three to an exclusive publishing and recording contract with his JAD label and financed some of their recordings, some with Byron Lees Dragonaires and some with other local musicians such as Jackie Jackson and Lynn Taitt. None of the Marley and Tosh songs he produced were successful. Only two singles were released at the time: Bend Down Low (JAD 1968) and Reggae on Broadway (Columbia, 1972), which was recorded in London in 1972 on the same sessions that produced I Can See Clearly Now. It sold over one million copies. JAD Records ceased to exist in 1971, but it was revived in 1997 by American Marley specialist Roger Steffens and French musician and producer Bruno Blum for the Complete Bob Marley & the Wailers 1967-1972 ten-album series for which several of the Nash-produced Marley and Tosh tracks were mixed or remixed by Blum for release. Nashs biggest hits were the early reggae (rocksteady) tunes Hold Me Tight (a #5 hit in the US and the UK, the tune used more than a year earlier in Score commercials) and Stir It Up, the latter written by Bob Marley prior to Marleys international success. For many years Nash seemed to have dropped out of sight, with the exception of a brief resurgence in the mid-1980s with the album Here Again (1986), which was preceded by the minor UK hit, Rock Me Baby; however, in May 2006 he was singing again at SugarHill Recording Studios and at Tierra Studios in his native Houston. Here’s Nash singing “I Can See Clearly Now” in 1973.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 04:12:38 +0000
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