In the early 1960s, Johnny Nash was a Houston-born singer marketed as a rival to Johnny Mathis, all smooth ballads and TV-ready charm. That image had earned him a chart entry with a cover of Doris Day's 'A Very Special Love', but it was a borrowed identity, not his own. By the middle of the decade, Nash needed a different road. He found it not in another American studio, but on an island where the rhythm moved slower and hit harder. Johnny Nash died on October 6, 2020.
From Houston ballads to Kingston
Nash's ballad 'Let's Move and Groove Together' reached the top five of the Billboard R&B chart, proving he could still connect with listeners. Yet he was restless. With his manager Danny Sims, he had already started a New York label called JoDa Records, which collapsed within two years. That failure pushed them to try something bolder: move to Jamaica and bring the local rocksteady sound to the United States.
Jamaica in the late 1960s was a small island with a huge musical pulse. Nash and Sims opened a publishing company, Cayman Music, and looked for artists who could carry the new sound abroad. A local singer named Neville Willoughby took Nash to a Rastafarian party where a young group called Bob Marley & The Wailing Wailers was performing. That night changed everything.
Signing the Wailers to Cayman Music
Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh and Rita Marley became Nash's guides to the Kingston scene. Nash signed all four to an exclusive publishing deal with Cayman Music, paying each of them fifty Jamaican dollars a week. It was a modest sum, but it kept the songwriters working and gave Nash access to a stream of original material no American label had.
Soon after, Nash, Arthur Jenkins and Danny Sims launched JAD Records, taking the initials of their first names. They recorded at Federal Records in Kingston, where the air was thick with rocksteady grooves. Nash's single 'Hold Me Tight' came out on JAD and climbed into the top five in both the United States and the United Kingdom, reaching number one in Canada. The gamble was starting to pay.
Breakthrough with 'I Can See Clearly Now'
The real payoff arrived a few years later. Nash recorded a cover of Marley's 'Stir It Up', which became a hit in the UK, and then released his own song 'I Can See Clearly Now'. That single sold more than a million copies and topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks. The album of the same name included four Marley originals published by JAD: 'Guava Jelly', 'Comma Comma', 'You Poured Sugar on Me' and 'Stir It Up'.
Nash never repeated that level of success, but the connection he forged in Jamaica outlived the charts. JAD Records shut down in 1971, only to be revived decades later for a ten-album series of Marley and the Wailers recordings from that era. Nash died of natural causes at his home in Houston on October 6, 2020, surrounded by family. He was eighty years old.
The man once packaged as another Johnny Mathis had, in the end, built his own bridge between Texas and Kingston. He didn't just visit Jamaica; he signed its songwriters, recorded in its studios, and carried its rhythms into American pop. 'I Can See Clearly Now' remains the proof that the clearest view sometimes comes after you leave home.
'I Can See Clearly Now' remains the proof that the clearest view sometimes comes after you leave home.