Inside the Studio: How Jimmy Cliff Wrote “Many Rivers to Cross”
In a rare 1994 BBC interview, Jimmy Cliff walked through the writing of his most-covered song line by line. The story behind those four chords is darker, lonelier, and more specific than the soaring gospel arrangement suggests.
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May 14, 2026
Almost every list of “greatest reggae songs” eventually arrives at the same surprise: Many Rivers to Cross isn’t really reggae. The arrangement is closer to American gospel and Southern soul. There’s an organ. There’s a choir. The riddim, if you want to call it that, is just a slow walking bass. So why is it always on the list?
Because Jimmy Cliff is a Jamaican songwriter, and because the song is now inseparable from the film The Harder They Come, and because — most of all — once you hear it you can’t un-hear it.
The writing session
In a 1994 BBC interview that’s now hard to find, Cliff walked through the writing of the song line by line. He’d been in London in 1969, alone, broke, between record deals, watching a music industry that wasn’t sure what to do with him. The first line — many rivers to cross / but I can’t seem to find my way over — wasn’t a metaphor when he wrote it. It was a description of a winter afternoon on Edgware Road.
The chord sequence came from a hymn his mother used to sing in church. Cliff added a bridge that resolves nowhere, and an outro that just stops mid-phrase. “I didn’t know how to end it,” he said, “because I didn’t know how the story ended.”
The covers
Joe Cocker. Linda Ronstadt. UB40. Annie Lennox. Cher. Each one finds something different in those four chords. The Annie Lennox version from Diva (1992) is the one that brought the song back to a generation that had missed the original.
But Cliff’s recording remains the definitive one — partly because of the vocal performance, partly because everyone who has covered it since is, consciously or not, singing it back to the man who wrote it from a place no one wants to be.