Screaming’ Jay Hawkins: “I Put a Spell on You” (1956)
Let’s hear it for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, hurrah hurrah!
Screamin’ Jay was one of the great Might Have Beens of my musical life. He grew up IN Cleveland and I grew up NEAR Cleveland but he was seven years older than me and long gone by the time I first heard him at a high school record hop, hosted by Cleveland’s best, deejay Bill Randle. From the start, Screamin’ Jay was more of a legend than a reality for me. He was like a meme: he showed how far you could stretch the musical proprieties of that still very proper age.
He only had two songs of note in his career. (He died in 2000.) One was “Constipation Blues.” The title tells you what it’s about. The other was “I Put a Spell on You,” his one hit. The song was recorded later by the Creedence Clearwater Revival (pretty good), Joe Cocker (not bad), Samantha Fish (barely passable), and Jeff Beck and Joss Stone (truly horrible). Hawkins may have been a musical Johnny One Note but the note he hit was worth it.
By all accounts, he put on a great show. He was brought on stage in a coffin. When the lid raised, out he’d pop, ivory tusks jutting above his mouth and a cane with a skull on it in one hand. There were red lights in the skull’s eye sockets and Screamin’ Jay would light a cigarette and give it to the skull to smoke. It was heavy camp, long before Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Nina Hagen, Lena Lovich hit the music scene.
If you weren’t a white boy growing up in the forties and fifties, you won’t understand how liberating a performer like Screamin’ Jay was.
He wasn’t the only one. The Toppers sang “Baby Let Me Bang Your Box,” about a boy whose girlfriend owned a piano on which he apparently wanted to play you guess what. (Hint, hint. Wink, wink.)
There were the honkers too, sax men like Earl Bostic and Big Jay McNeely who got down on their knees or lay on their backs on stage while they screamed into their horns. (There is a great four-CD collection of these players: The Big Horn: History of the Honkin’ Saxophone [2003].)
Players like McNeely, Bostic and Frank “Floorshow” Culley weren’t the only ones who honked in the forties and fifties: straight ahead jazz musicians played that way too and it shaped the way they made their sound, playing ballads and blues. I’m talking serious players like Illinois Jacquet ( whom I saw at the Tavern on the Green in New York in the late ’80s), Arnett Cobb, Willis Jackson, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. (“Lockjaw” was one of my favorites.)
Twenty years on, into the sixties, that approach –super-hard reeds, hard blowing and squawks and squeals, upping the amp in intensity– would be echoed in the playing of modernists like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler.
(Listen to Kirk jamming with George Adams and other Mingus albums on “C Jam Blues” on the 1974 Charles Mingus Carnegie Hall Concert recording.)
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
The Toppers: “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box” (1954)
Big Jay McNeely: “Insect Ball” (1957)
Charles Mingus, “C Jam Blues,” Carnegie Hall Concert (1974)
MUSIC & ME 