Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
He Put a Spell on Us!
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was born Jalacy Hawkins in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18, 1929, and from there he became a pioneer. He could sing, play piano, box, and tell stories with equal conviction, but his enduring genius was something stranger. He understood, early and instinctively, that performance could be a spell all its own and that a stage was not merely a platform but a threshold between worlds.
That spell became permanent in 1956 with “I Put a Spell on You,” a recording that transformed him from a hardworking blues and R&B singer into something altogether more mysterious. The song sold millions, and has since been covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. But no reinterpretation has quite captured what the original contains: lust, rage, longing, and mischief rolled into an ecstatic, unholy howl. It sounds like something summoned rather than sung.
The Theatrical Séance
And then came the theatrics. Hawkins did not merely perform the macabre, he dressed it in bone and shadow, dragged it onstage, and let it grin back at the audience with gleeful malevolence. Famous DJ Alan Freed reportedly encouraged him to emerge from a coffin, and soon Hawkins was making spectacle with skeletons, voodoo imagery, skulls on sticks, rubber snakes, and all manner of dread-soaked props. He painted his face. He moved like something possessed. He transformed the concert stage into a graveyard, and audiences loved him for it.
That was not mere novelty. It was a new language entirely. It told future rock and rollers that danger, humor, and horror could coexist beneath the same spotlight. It said that a performer could be both entertainer and enchanter, both showman and shaman.
The Shadow He Cast
That is why his influence stretches so far and so deep. Hawkins was far more than a one-hit wonder. He was a blueprint. The shock-rock descendants are easy enough to name: Alice Cooper, David Bowie, KISS, The Cramps, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, Gwar, and the whole lineage of black-leather, fire-and-brimstone theatricality that followed in his wake.
But the deeper inheritance reaches beyond any single gimmick. Screamin’ Jay proved that a singer could become a character, that a stage could become a graveyard, and that the grotesque could be glorious. He did it before the formulas became established, before the imitators arrived, before “shock rock” had a name anyone could quite agree on. In the middle of the last century, when rock and roll was still learning how to misbehave, Screamin’ Jay showed it how to haunt. Hawkins is truly a gothfather to many who followed.
What made him different was not merely costume or theatricality. It was that he seemed to genuinely believe in the magic he was performing. He was not winking at the audience, he was beckoning them into something darker, stranger, and infinitely more interesting than what rock and roll had offered before.
And while his personal life was as outlandish as his stage presence, we’re choosing to gloss over his many marriages and dozens of children born in or out of wedlock to instead pay homage to his mark on music and pop culture.
The Birthday Remembrance
So for his birthday, July 18, we tip our black hat to the man who made the scream theatrical, the macabre musical, and the cursed little corner of rock and roll permanently more interesting. He showed us that entertainment could be transgression, that music could be witchcraft, and that the grotesque, when performed with enough conviction and joy, becomes transcendent.
The grave was not always his destination, but he certainly knew how to dress for the occasion, and to make us all want to join him there, if only for the duration of a song. And technically, Hawkins never made it to the grave. He died in France at age 70 back in the year 2000 and was subsequently cremated, with his remains scattered in the Atlantic Ocean. His legend and influence, though, live on.
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I did not know the origins of this song. Very interesting.