Mick Hartley

Singer Johnny Nash died earlier this week.

I was amused to learn that his big hit from 1972, which I'd always assumed was about some kind of spiritual or emotional rebirth, was quite literally about being able to see clearly now. He wrote it, allegedly, while recovering from an operation for cataracts. 

That's according to the Times obituary, at any rate – which also details Nash's role in the rise of Bob Marley:

One night in early 1967, Johnny Nash was invited to a Rastafarian yard party in Kingston, Jamaica. As the ganja was passed around the blazing fire, a young singer named Bob Marley played guitar and sang.

Struck by the power of his songs, Nash took him to meet his American business partner Danny Sims. They concluded that at the time the 22-year-old Marley’s skills as a songwriter outstripped his ability to perform them himself and signed him to a publishing contract with the primary purpose of providing songs for Nash to record. “Them seh me voice nuh good enough but me songs are,” Marley later recalled in his distinctive Jamaican patois.

Over the next two years Marley practically lived at the uptown villa which Nash and Sims were renting while they groomed his burgeoning talents. The arrangement proved beneficial to both parties. “Johnny taught Bob how to sing on the mic, and Bob taught Johnny how to play the reggae rhythm,” Sims noted.

By the time Nash moved to Jamaica and discovered Marley, he already had several showbusiness lives behind him as a child star on American television, a teenage tenor in the style of Johnny Mathis, and as a movie actor taking the lead in Take a Giant Step (1959), regarded as a landmark in African-American cinema.

Nash took Marley with him to London and to Sweden, where they stayed for the best part of a year while Nash was making a film. In return, he wrote several hits for Nash, including Guava Jelly and Stir It Up which introduced reggae to the pop mainstream and exposed Marley’s songs to a wider audience for the first time.

Yet despite the brilliance of his songwriting protégé, Nash’s biggest and most memorable hit ironically came with one of his own compositions. Allegedly written while lying in a hospital bed recovering from an operation for cataracts, the irresistible pop-reggae groove of I Can See Clearly Now and its promise of a “bright, bright sunshiny day”, took Nash to the top of the American charts in 1972 and made the top five in Britain.

I'll admit it does have the sound of an urban myth, that cataract story. Someone perhaps said it as a joke, and it kind of stuck.

What an incredible voice, though. The way he holds and moves that note starting at about 1:30….