By appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in July 1973, Edwin “Countryman” Lothan, who has died of cancer aged 70, helped spread the notion of Rastafarianism, of which he himself appeared to be the personification, to a wider world.

The story, written by Michael Thomas and entitled The Wild Side of Paradise, was an epic piece about Jamaica’s Rasta culture. Memorably, it described how, when Countryman (referred to in the article as Cunchyman) felt under pressure, he would slip away from his fisherman’s hut and swim out into the Caribbean until “he’s fighting for air and his arms are like lead and his toes cramp up” and he could swim no more. Then he would try and swim back.

This mythical image was only reinforced when, nine years later, he starred as himself in the film Countryman (1982), a magical realist tale directed by Bob Marley’s one-time manager, Dickie Jobson, in which Countryman took the part of a mystic bush sage, a roots Superman.

Publicising the film at Cannes, its producer, and the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, observed that, although “Country” had been bought his first pair of shoes and a jacket for the plane ride to France, he would walk along the Croisette and into screenings wearing only his swimming trunks, “because that’s all he ever wore. He would run barefoot through alligator swamps. The first time I met him, at Hellshire beach where he lived, I had to leave to get a plane to England. He laughed: ‘I’ve never been to England. Why would I leave here? Here I have everything.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Countryman in 1973. Photograph: Arthur Gorson

Although he became an early figurehead for Rastafari, something of a black separatist movement, Countryman’s blood was three-quarters Indian and one-quarter African. “That’s why Country was so beautiful,” said Thomas. “And then he opened his mouth and started talking poetry.

“I knew nothing of Rastafari until I was taken out to Country’s shack, where I met this guy who turned out to be an athlete and a poet, a real star immediately we met him. I realised this Rasta thing was big news.”

Today Hellshire is Kingston’s main beach. Then, it was a handful of fishing huts, unconnected by road to the capital. Thomas and Arthur Gorson, the photographer he worked with, had gone there with Blackwell and Perry Henzell, the director of the then just released The Harder They Come (1972). “Perry wanted to put him in his next movie,” said Gorson. “He saved my life once. I stepped on a sea urchin and was in agony as its poison surged through my body. Countryman had all the Rastas of the area come and pee on my foot all night long, the traditional cure.”

At first known as Countryboy, he had in fact been born in the city, in Kingston, to Agnes Thomson, a housewife, and George Lothan, a farmworker, into a large family of three brothers and four sisters. Their mother died when Country was three. Their father, said his sister Ruby, “never care much about him. So he have to go by himself from that age.” Somehow the next year he came to Hellshire. “He have to look after himself,” said Ruby, “and even then would go out to sea with fishermen.”

When he met the white Jamaicans who would transform his life, Countryman was illiterate. But he taught himself to read, using the Bible and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, learning verbal twists to apply to pieces of received wisdom. “We used to speak of the good old days,” said Sally Henzell, Perry’s widow. “Country would translate that as ‘When former things was is and everything was nice’.”

Although Henzell’s next movie, No Place Like Home (1973), suffered funding issues, Countryman had a part, playing a role for which he was almost typecast, a spiritual guide who represents the truth of the island. Following his relative success in the film Countryman, he would be overheard declaring himself on the phone as “Countryman, fisherman and movie star”.

But Country was usually broke. When Mama Delsey, his partner since he was 17, complained they did not possess a radio, he waited until she went away. On her return he presented her with a brand new set. Though to buy it, he had sold the zinc sheet that formed their shack’s roof.

Countryman is survived by Mama Delsey, and by his son, John, and daughter, Indiria.

• Countryman (Edwin Lothan), fisherman, born 26 May 1946; died 18 September 2016