In 1956, ex‑boxer, soldier and R&B sideman Jalacy Hawkins recorded a song so shocking that, once he sobered up, he tried to destroy the tape, insisting it could not possibly be his work. The still chilling, much‑covered ‘I Put a Spell on You’ is a landmark in popular music, not only for its macabre songwriting but for the way it opened the door to outlandish stage props, horror‑inflected performance and a new kind of rock spectacle.
Despite being banned on many radio stations, the single sold strongly in the United States, its notoriety fuelled less by the lyrics than by Hawkins’s utterly unhinged delivery, screaming, grunting and spluttering against a polka‑like backing that made the whole thing sound like a ritual. Hawkins later said the session had been a party atmosphere engineered by the producer, that everyone had been drinking and that the take captured something he could scarcely remember. Accident or design, the result read as exorcism, vaudeville and raw blues all at once.
His early years are a tangle of myth and fact. Born in 1929, Hawkins spun stories of being a prisoner of war in the Pacific during World War II and of escaping in spectacularly violent fashion. What is certain is that he became the middle‑weight boxing champion of Alaska in 1949. The bravado of those years fed directly into the persona he would later perform.
Before the coffin and the skull, Hawkins paid his dues as a working sideman. In the early 1950s he worked as pianist and occasional vocalist with Tiny Grimes and his Rocking Highlanders, cutting studio sides that later turned up on reissues and compilations. Those records show him in a far more conventional musical role than the one he later cultivated, piano parts and vocal features that preserve his technique and nascent blues‑shout style and place him among respected session players of the day.
A pivotal moment came when he accompanied Grimes to an Atlantic session in 1953 and was allowed to cut a couple of his own numbers. The raw, raucous vocal he delivered was judged too unpolished for release, a rebuff that nudged him away from straight jazz sideman work and toward the theatrical front man he would become. The surviving session credits make clear his musicianship was real; he read music, played piano fluently and had studied voice, and the theatrical Screamin’ Jay was built on a solid studio foundation rather than sprung whole from gimmickry.
Hawkins adopted the moniker ‘Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ and cultivated a reputation for flamboyance: womanising, heavy drinking and alarming stage outfits, leopard skins, leather, massive hats, whatever would register. His rich baritone might have suited opera, and he sometimes spoke of such ambitions, but his instincts favoured spectacle. The success of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ prompted DJ Alan Freed to dare him to emerge from a coffin at a show, and three hundred dollars later, the coffin entrance was born. From then on, his act used a consistent vocabulary of shock: coffins, capes, flash bombs, rubber snakes, fake tarantulas, boar’s teeth and his constant companion Henry, a cigarette‑smoking skull on a cane. He would lie in state, the lights would dim, smoke would roll in and, in a burst of noise and outrage, he would erupt from the coffin, part resurrection, part vaudeville gag, wholly theatrical.
Those props were not random gags but deliberate iconography. Voodoo paraphernalia threaded through his sets and many of his songs dealt explicitly with the religion’s trappings, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Alligator Wine’ and ‘Feast of the Mau‑Mau’ among them, while others mixed the macabre with the absurd. ‘Constipation Blues’ is as much physical comedy as novelty song, and on one notorious occasion, he performed it sitting on a prop toilet. The stunts could be grotesque, comic or filthy depending on the audience, but they were always calculated to provoke a reaction and to make each show an event rather than a gig.
Television and film amplified the oddness. Hawkins made a string of small‑screen appearances and cameos that exploited his persona. He appears in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Mystery Train’ (1989) as an eccentric night clerk, stealing the scene with a plum and an ornamental fly. He also turns up in the supernatural horror film ‘Night Angel’ (1989), performing ‘Sirens Burnin” in a nightclub sequence that feels like a miniature Screamin’ Jay show smuggled into a B‑movie. These appearances distilled his stage self into compact, unforgettable moments.
His own lines help explain the man behind the mask. He could be mordantly self‑aware and self‑mythologising in the same breath. “I don’t sing them. I destroy them,” he said of his performances, a remark that captures both the theatrical violence of his delivery and his frustration at being boxed into a single image. On coffins, he joked, “When I go, I don’t want to be buried. I’ve been in too many damn coffins already.” Fellow musicians and later admirers, from Screaming Lord Sutch and The Cramps to Alice Cooper, The Clash and Nick Cave, variously described him as a genius of showmanship and a man who paid a price for it.
By the 1960s, the stage show was as important as the songs, his drinking and unpredictability adding to the drama and sometimes to the danger. He continued to record and to reinvent himself, touring with younger garage and punk acts and releasing a live album with The Fuzztones in 1984. His theatrics found their way into film and television, and his influence was acknowledged by a wide range of artists who invited him to share bills and stages.
In 1991 he released the provocative ‘Black Music for White People’, an album that briefly embroiled him in licensing rows over a cover used in advertising, but he kept working into the 1990s, revamping older songs for new audiences and incorporating more electric guitar into his sound. He spent much of his later life in France, performing sporadically and courting both admiration and controversy.
Hawkins spent his final decade living in France with his last wife, Monique, a private presence who stayed entirely outside the spotlight and never involved herself in the circus that surrounded him. She was with him during his late tours, during the ‘Last Call’ recording years and during the quieter stretches when he performed only occasionally. Unlike the earlier marriages that blur into rumour and contradiction, Monique is the one partner who appears clearly in the record, present in the background of his final years and at his side when he died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in February 2000. Her absence from interviews, publicity and the later ‘Jay’s Kids’ project gives her a quiet gravity in the story, a private counterpoint to the chaos that defined so much of his life.
After his death, a very public effort to locate the many people who claimed to be his offspring coalesced around a loosely organised project often referred to as ‘Jay’s Kids’. His biographer led an outreach campaign and a website that drew hundreds of responses, and the story became the subject of a Channel Four documentary in the UK, ’57 Screamin’ Kids’, which followed a reunion of claimants and attempted to untangle the myth of his supposed fifty-seven children. The family hunt became a postscript to his career that was equal parts human drama and tabloid spectacle.
In the years since, critics and historians have steadily broadened the conversation about Hawkins beyond novelty. Reissues, archival releases and retrospective essays have increasingly emphasised his trained baritone, his piano skills and his songwriting craft alongside his theatrical innovations, reframing him as a formative figure in the genealogy of shock rock, punk and goth performance rather than simply a one-note oddity.
He left behind an enormous catalogue of albums, many sadly out of print. Newcomers are still advised to begin with a well‑chosen anthology to hear both the straight blues shouter and the man who turned the stage into a small, glorious theatre of the macabre.
1958 At Home with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Okeh, Epic)
1965 The Night and Day of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Planet, 52e Rue Est)
1969 What That Is! (Philips)
1970 Because Is in Your Mind (Armpitrubber) (Philips)
1972 Portrait of a Man and His Woman (Hotline)
1977 I Put a Spell on You (Versatile, studio recordings 1966 to 1976)
1979 Screamin’ the Blues (Red Lightnin’, studio recordings 1953 to 1970)
1983 Real Life (Zeta)
1984 Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and The Fuzztones Live (Midnight Records, live)
1988 At Home with Jay in The Wee Wee Hours (Midnight Records, live)
1988 Live and Crazy (Blue Phoenix, live)
1990 The Art of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Spivey)
1991 Black Music for White People (Bizarre, Straight, Planet)
1991 I Shake My Stick at You (Aim)
1993 Stone Crazy (Bizarre, Straight, Planet)
1994 Somethin’ Funny Goin’ On (Bizarre, Straight, Planet)
1993 Rated X (Sting S, studio)
1998 At Last (Last Call)
1999 Live at the Olympia, Paris (Last Call, live with one new studio track)
2000 Live Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Last Call, contains new studio material)
Newcomers to Screamin’ are recommended to start their musical education with his 1999 best of ‘Portrait of a Man’, an excellent collection of his ‘straight-up’ songs as well as his gibbering, unhinged offerings. A cad perhaps, a genius most certainly.
Daz Lawrence
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