Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Why Everybody Started Getting Weird

Photo: Jean-Luc Ourlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

Screamin' Jay Hawkins was one of those unforgettable musicians who changed the shape of rock ‘n’ roll. He created a bizarre performance style all his own. Emerging on stage out of a coffin, carrying a skull on a stick (affectionately called Henry) and performing with live snakes does raise the bar! And he influenced a range of artists, including Dr. John, Arthur Brown and Screamin’ Lord Sutch.

But he started out studying classical piano. And initially wanted to become an opera singer,  “Something I wanted to do but never did is sing opera. That goes back to my respect for Paul Robeson and Mario Lanza, but when I got into the music business opera didn't get into the charts; they were just putting rhythm and blues out.”

You’d have thought his dramatic baritone voice would have been well-suited to opera. But the racial bias inherent in the American classical music tradition must have presented a real challenge.   

Intriguingly, he didn’t even begin in the music business.   

Hawkins enlisted in the US Army in 1942, at age 13, with a forged birth certificate, and was sent to front-line combat duty in the Pacific. He switched to the Air Force in 1944 and was honourably discharged in 1952. In the meantime, he’d taken up boxing while he was in the forces, winning the Alaska Middleweight Championship in 1949.

His first real break came in 1951 when he joined guitarist Tiny Grimes' band as a pianist, saxophonist and singer. He subsequently got a residence in the Baby Grand Club in Harlem and started to develop his unique stage persona, long before it was considered acceptable, even in rock n roll, sporting a stylish wardrobe of leopard skins and wild hats.

Singles for Gotham, "Why Did You Waste My Time"; Timely, "Baptize Me in Wine"; and Mercury, "[She Put The] Wamee [On Me]” followed. But his first real success was "I Put a Spell on You", released in 1956 on Columbia's OKeh Records. Promptly banned by most radio stations for its overt sexuality and what was dubbed its 'cannibalistic' style, it featured screams, grunts and moans. And went on to sell over a million copies!

Hawkins had originally planned to record "I Put a Spell on You" as a gentle blues ballad. But, as Hawkins tells the story, the producer "brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version... I don't even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.”

"I Put a Spell On You" became one of those cult classics that everyone wanted to record. From Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Animals to Bryan Ferry. The standout cover is probably the version by Nina Simone. It offered a lush string arrangement which very much made it her own, but, retained a clear homage to the original in her vocal phrasing.  

Curiously, asked in an interview how he felt about the exploitation of performers endemic to the music business, Hawkins said, “The rip off that I got from this world and the people and the record companies and the agents and the promoters is that they didn’t want to admit that they had an artist out here was a teeny bit different from other artists, crazy and weird. My act started people like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Manfred Mann, Alan Price, The Who, The Trackers, Alice Cooper. Everybody started getting weird after there was a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins…”

It was Alan Freed, the renowned DJ, one of the first to put black and white performers on the same bill, who came up with the idea that Hawkins emerge from a coffin on stage after he heard "I Put a Spell On You". Hawkins was initially sceptical, considering this exploitative and likely to undermine his authenticity as a musician. But it became a trademark part of his live act.

This led to a bizarre dispute with conservative commentators who thought his music was not only corrupting youth but making fun of death. The National Casket Association even banned him from renting coffins when he was on tour. Hawkins’ inspired response was to buy a coffin along with a hearse. Which he had painted in zebra stripes.

Hawkins’ maverick career continued – he was particularly popular in Europe and Japan – and he went on to release left-field material with titles such as “Baptize Me In Wine”, “Constipation Blues” and “Feast of the Mau Mau". Nothing had the astonishing success of "I Put a Spell on You". But, unlike some of his fellow musicians, he was a survivor. He’d seen a lot of his peers fall by the wayside because of drink, drugs or other problems and as he said, “You come into this world naked and broke… and you go out naked and broke, but you have to live along the way, you can’t go on wallowing in a barrel of rotten apples.”

Hawkins’ larger-than-life persona was introduced to a younger generation through appearances in two films: Mystery Train and A Rage in Harlem. He died in 2000 at the age of 70. But his demented voodoo jive lives on!