The 1990s was a transformative era for Jamaican music. Not since Bob Marley and the Wailers in the 1970s had the island’s music spread its tentacles around the world with such ferocity. Dancehall music had become a global phenomenon led by artistees like Shabba Ranks, Ninjaman and Yellowman.
Another category of artistes, notably Cocoa Tea and his contemporaries Freddie McGregor, Beres Hammond, Frankie Paul, combined streetwise dancehall with melodic, soulful rhythms.
The death of the musician affectionately known as Sweet Sweet Cocoa Tea on March 11, 2025 is a blow to fans for whom his music was the soundtrack of an era as reggae’s uplifting conscious messages and infectious rhythms gained mainstream appeal.
The singer’s wife Malvia Scott told Jamaica’s leading newspaper, The Gleaner, this week that the 65-year-old died following a cardiac arrest at a hospital in Florida. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2019.
Cocoa Tea’s unique timbre delivered sweet romantic songs, but also carried his strong social, political and spiritual messages.
He added the smooth vocal edge to the raw toasting (rapping) of dancehall star Shabba Ranks on Pirates Anthem (1989), a massive song in support of the pirate radio stations in England that were an outlet for music from the Caribbean.
“Dem a call us pirates…just before we play what the people want,” sings Cocoa Tea in the hook supporting the stations that were facing a crackdown from the authorities.
A similar synergy yielded an international hit with the 1998 cover version of Bob Marley’s Waiting in Vain a collaboration with dancehall star Cutty Ranks.
The 1990s was the most prolific period for Cocoa Tea with a string of hit songs that made him a household name across the world. He had a huge fanbase in Africa though he only ever performed on the continent once, in Zimbabwe, in 2011. In the pre-Internet age, it was thanks to radio airplay and the reggae sound systems that the music of Cocoa Tea transcended borders to reach a global audience.
“The Kenyans, they are killing me. The Gambians, they are killing me. The Nigerians, they are killing me,” he told US journalist Stephen Cooper in 2019. “They say, “why are you not coming to Africa.” Every African is asking,” Cocoa Tea’s songs were a radio staple such as 1993’s Young Lover with the memorable hook, “go home to your mama…. you are too young to be my lover”.
He gained fame in the US with 1990’s Rikers Island, named after the largest jail in New York City, inspired by the gang warfare he witnessed in the US city. Other stand out songs from the Cocoa Tea catalogue are I Lost My Sonia (1991), Rocking Dolly (1991), Informer (1991), Tune In (1994), Hurry Up and Come (1996) and Bruck Loose (1998).
In early 2008, Cocoa Tea recorded the song Barack Obama praising the then candidate who went on to win that year’s US Presidential election. In later years, he expressed regret for the song saying: “If I could do it again, live my life over, I would never do a song like that,” he said in 2014.
Calvin George Scott was born on September 3, 1959, in Rocky Point, Clarendon, a small fishing town on Jamaica’s southern coast. In his youth he worked, first as a fisherman, then became an apprentice horse jockey, a period which he says toughened him up because he often had to sleep at the stables to ward off any sinister motives of competitors.
He first tested his singing in the dancehalls with the sound systems using his childhood nickname that referenced his love for hot cocoa, known in rural Jamaica as cocoa tea.
He recorded his first song Searching in the Hills, at just 14 in 1974 and shortly after, moved to Kingston and discovered the Rastafarian faith that gave his songwriting a more cultural inclination.
From his first major hit Rocking Dolly in 1984, the trend of hit songs continued in latter half of the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s. He toured extensively across North America, Caribbean, Japan and Europe.
The diminutive performer attributed his boundless energy on stage to a disciplined program of physical fitness, including running ten miles every morning.
Cocoa Tea considered himself a dancehall music pioneer and dismissed later incarnations of the genre as people “jumping up and down and making noise”. He recorded for the biggest reggae labels, and then started his own label Roaring Lion.
Nonetheless he remained keen on promoting the next generation of dancehall stars such as when he introduced the young Grammy award winning artiste Koffee on stage at the 2018 Rebel Salute annual festival in Jamaica. The following year, she won the Best Reggae Award at the Grammy Awards, the youngest person to ever win the award at 19.
Cocoa Tea’s last major single was Weh Ya Gone in 2021.
“He has been a staple in the industry for so long,” said Jamaican Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Olivia Grange. “He is one of the greatest reggae singers who have ever lived and his work will stand the test of time.”
