Screamin’ Jay Hawkins never made the Billboard charts, and he resented the adjective his record label affixed to his name.
“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be Screamin’ Jay Hawkins,” he told an interviewer in 1973. “James Brown did an awful lot of screamin’, but never got called Screamin’ James Brown … Why can’t people take me as a regular singer without making a bogeyman out of me?”
The nickname originated in the tune that made Hawkins famous. When he set out to record his composition “I Put a Spell on You” in 1956, he envisioned it as a ballad. But he got drunk before the session and what emerged was a high-volume performance full of screams and grunts that were sexually suggestive enough to get it banned from many radio stations.
DJ Alan Freed loved it, though, and offered Hawkins $300 if he’d sing it after emerging from a coffin. “No black dude gets in a coffin alive,” he replied. “They don’t expect to get out!” When Freed upped the offer, Hawkins agreed, and shock rock was born. He added stage props like rubber snakes and a skull on a stick he called Henry, wore outlandish costumes and put tusks in his nose. The act might seem hokey today – its comic overtones earned Hawkins a reputation as the “Black Vincent Price” – but it inspired acts like Screaming Lord Sutch, Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson.
Hawkins wasn’t wrong about the song itself. Alan Price of the Animals, Creedence Clearwater Revival and most famously Nina Simone all reached the charts with straightforward versions in the ’60s.
Dozens of people have covered it since, usually arranging it as a bluesy ballad. One exception was this moody rock interpretation by Bryan Ferry.
