Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Because You're Mine: Hits & Rarities - Extended Liner Notes
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Because You're Mine: Hits & Rarities
Rock and roll assumed its eternal flair for theatrics the moment Screamin’ Jay Hawkins donned his black cape, climbed into his coffin, and fully embraced his outrageous stage persona.
Unleashing his rafter-rattling baritone while wielding a grotesque cigarette-smoking skull on a stick named Henry and setting off strategically timed flash pots, Screamin’ Jay appeared altogether immune from anything resembling fear. He sang without reserve of the unholiest of commodities: voodoo, demons, a wide array of spirits both earthly and otherwise (including the questionable joys of quaffing copious amounts of wine), dark incantations, and painful bouts of constipation, his rants often poured over sinister minor keys. Jay’s signature theme “I Put A Spell On You” was enough to give anyone of sane mind a bad case of heebie-jeebies.
The music industry had never encountered anything remotely like Screamin’ Jay and had no idea what to do with him. “My idol is Paul Robeson, and I always wanted to do opera,” said the late Hawkins. “But opera don’t know choice. I attribute my screaming to the fact that I have an operatic voice, and I can make use of it in the blues. Hollerin’ and holdin’ a note. That’s the only thing I can attribute that to.” That mighty bellow never let him down. “I found out there’s very few people in the world can keep screamin’ four or five one-hour shows a day for seven days without going hoarse,” bragged Jay. “I put a lot of ‘em under the wind.”
This collection traces Screamin’ Jay’s incredible recording career from some of his early New York-cut waxings through his glory years and well into the 1970s, offering considerable insight into his singular musical conception and indelible personality. Warning: be prepared for a treacherous journey.
Born July 18, 1929, Cleveland, Ohio native Jalacy Hawkins lived life entirely on his own terms. It wasn’t an easy road to travel. “I was taken from an orphanage home at the age of 18 months old, and raised by a tribe of Indians called Blackfoot Indians. The woman’s name was Edolph Randolph,” remembered the late Hawkins. “When you think of the ghetto, you think of dirt. You think of paper, you think of rats and dogs and gangs hanging out and junkies and dark spots people are afraid to go to. My ghetto was gorgeous. I lived on a street with pure green grass. Trees were trimmed right to a proper pace. The grass was always cut. There was hardly any garbage on the ground. It was beautiful. The trees bore fruit. And I had the best clothes in the world, even if I was an orphan. And my real mother would come visit.
“The agency that had turned me over to Mama Randolph, I refer to her,” he continued. “(They) also paid her to keep me per month, and then they also gave away clothes, brand-new clothes. And then my mother would come and leave me money, and buy me good clothes. So I never had a bad ghetto, understand what I’m talking about? It’s just that I never had a mother. I never had the love that I wanted. The only thing that moved me was piano. So there I stuck my life to it, until I found out that these kids didn’t like how I dressed, and was called all funny names. This was even before I learned about religion.
“I remember a girl by the name of Betty. This was elementary school. I’m talking about like 1936 or ‘37. I remember this girl just loved to beat up all the boy kids in her class. And I never knew anything about fighting. Didn’t think about it. I’m a young dude growing up, you know. I’m doing my chores,” he said. “So then it came to the point where you either keep being called names, or you learn how to fight. Then they ran me home. So Mama said, ‘I’m not letting you in the house until you fight back!’ I says, ‘Well, they’ll kill me!’ She says, ‘Jay, you gotta grow up. You are growing up. You’re gonna fight one day!’
“I began to hang out at gyms, and I began to pick up on boxing. I was a southpaw--that is, until I really got good, then they switched me to right-handed. I got good at what I was doing in the boxing ring. And then it was me who was standing in the schoolyard, waiting on the gangs to get out of class,” said Hawkins.
“When I was 14, the board of education, the people that run this orphanage home, and of course, my mother Mama Randolph, they all come to the point where, ‘You’re running with gangs. You’re making up gangs. You’re fighting. You’re getting in trouble. You’re staying out late at night. You’ve got a choice. You’re either gonna have to go to the reformatory, or you’re gonna have to go to the war.’ Put your age up one year.’ So of course, I put my age up because I was only 14. But they was taking ‘em from 15 on up during the Second World War. I put my age up, and I went to war. And they said, ‘GoodBwe got rid of that son of a bitch! He won=t live long over there!’
“I boxed during the Army. I had two hitches in the Army, and then a hitch in the Air Force. I boxed in the Air Force. I also boxed while I was in the Army on a civilian card. Went in the town, which I wasn’t supposed to do, but I used a pseudonym, another name. And that’s when I fought Billy McCann in Alaska for the middleweight championship of Alaska,” said Hawkins. “He beat the living shit out of me. God bless the man, he sure won the fight, but he didn’t. He lost all the points from the first round up to the tenth. The last round was his round, but I didn’t go down. Thank God. I got the belt, and then I decided, ‘No more fighting.’ I quit boxing. I retired.”
A wiser Hawkins concentrated on musical pursuits from then on. “I was just a piano player and a tenor saxophone player. I gave up blowing the horn because you gotta hold your lips a certain way. And when you do that, then you try to go back singing, you find your lips a little numb--like novocaine, when a dentist gives that to you. I found I couldn’t do the two together.” Piano retained his attention a little longer. “I did that until I got to the point where I had learned everything I needed to learn by ear. I needed to learn how to read, so then I went to school. I studied harmony and theory, modulation and improvisation. Then I quit. I quit because I don’t want to learn to much of anybody else’s style. If I do that, I can=t formulate, generate, build up my own style. And I want to be original. But if somebody put sheet music in front of me, I will always be able to read it.”
Those operatically inclined pipes factored into Hawkins’ lifelong professional billing. “That was in Charleston, Virginia in 1950,” he said. “I wasn’t even out of the service yet. I was home on leave. I had just got back from Germany. Spent three years over there. I joined this show. They wanted a singer, just a blues singer. So I joined this show. As a matter of fact, I was an emcee too. I brought people on, then I did my little act. This girl was drunk. I mean, it’s not that she wasn’t enjoying the music, but she was drunk too. She liked it enough to keep hollering, ‘Scream, Jay! Scream! Scream, baby!’ And I liked the title. I said, ‘There’s my name: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins!’”
Out of the military and eager to pursue a musical career, Screamin’ Jay snagged a gig with jazz guitar legend Lloyd “Tiny” Grimes, who fretted dazzling four-string axe but wasn’t a vocalist. Their relationship was rocky at best. “Tiny Grimes came in, I think a pitiful third,” said Hawkins with a derisive snort. “I worked for him a year for $30 a week, and only seen it twice. Ate hot dogs. I drove his car. I was his bodyguard, his dogwalker, his chauffeur. I carried some of his money. I was also his only other musician sometimes.
“We didn’t have the other men in the band, so we’d go to another city and go to the musicians’ union and get the rest of the musicians. Then we’d rehearse ‘em and take ‘em to where we had to play. Then him and I would go hit the road again. I said, ‘You got the nerve to go out on the road without a band? And you got the nerve to treat me like a dog? And I should punch you in your damn mouth, but I’m young, dumb, and I’m gonna learn. So from you I shall learn. But you owe me. You owe me your life, and the day will come when you will have to pay!’
“I think it was five years later, I worked in a place called the Zanzibar in Buffalo, New York, after I had a couple of hits under my belt. And they brought in the house band. Lord have mercy--would you believe it whose band it was? Tiny Grimes’! And I said to him, ‘Let me make this perfectly clear. You know what? I can get your ass fired. I can demand another band, because you can=t play. You ain’t shit. I don=t like you. Maybe you can play. Maybe you’re the greatest player in the world. Because you screwed me around, I’m gonna make your ass jump this week. So I hope you make one mistake. I hope you do not play good. I hope you mess up, because you need the gig better than I do.’ He says, ‘I took you off the road when you were nothing. You just come out of the service.’ I said, ‘How often did you pay me? No matter what else you say, tell me, how often did you pay me, okay?’ He said, ‘You’re right there, but you know, I looked out for you. You were my main man.’ I said, ‘I was the only man you had!’”
Despite the rancor, Grimes and his Rocking Highlanders gave Hawkins his first chance to record for Philadelphia-based Gotham Records in 1952, Jay theatrically breaking down in tears while shouting the slow blues “Why Did You Waste My Time?.” A January ‘53 jaunt to a New York studio with Tiny for Atlantic amounted to nothing, his “Screamin’ Blues” going unissued.
An all-star New York aggregation awaited Hawkins at his first solo session for the Timely label that September, including Grimes, pianist Ray Bryant, and tenor sax wailer Red Prysock. The date spawned two singles credited to Jalacy Hawkins (he penned all four songs). A raucous, unrepentantly sacrilegious “Baptize Me In Wine” was the first indication that Hawkins was a unique talent possessing rafter-rattling pipes and an off-the-wall lyrical bent. Guitarist Mickey Baker broke out his bottleneck for the flip, the forceful slow blues “Not Anymore.” Jay wasn’t done extolling the joys of fermented grapes; the second Timely platter from the date coupled “I Found My Way To Wine,” Baker peeling off bent shards of blue notes behind Jay’s mighty roar, and the splendid after-hours ode “Please Try To Understand.”
Hawkins didn’t get along any better with Greensboro, North Carolina-born sax blaster Prysock than with Grimes. “You can’t get Red Prysock under the roof with me,” he ranted. “I had to take a chair--one of these folding chairs--and smack him across the head in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and let him know he can’t be messin’ with no 135-pound cat. I was skinny in those days. But he didn’t want to play the gig right because I was screamin’ my blues ass self off. I’m trying to give the audience what they came for, and he was messin’ up my music.
“We went in the back to argue about it, and I was standing in front of him. When I turned, I guess he had himself posed to hit me. Except when I turned, I was in a crouch and the shot went over my shoulder. And I come up in his gut, and I stayed there, and I come up again in his chin. And he went down, I just stepped on his face, and I just rammed it. Then I reached back, I thought I really would hurt him, and right between his legs, I kicked him in his balls. Yes, I did that. I’m not ashamed of it. And I told him as long as you live, I will beat your ass if you work with me.” Blowing those sky-high notes on his golden horn must have been a trifle harder than usual for the leather-lunged Prysock for the rest of that night’s engagement.
Chicago’s Mercury Records was Hawkins’ next label stop. “Mercury came to me when Nipsey Russell gave me a job at the Baby Grand on 125th in Harlem,” he said. “The people from Mercury came to the club, and they set there two nights before they spoke. They spoke the second night. And they told me what they had in mind. And I recorded right there in New York.” The backing band for his first Mercury date on January 10, 1955, produced in New York by veteran A&R man Bobby Shad, was an extremely impressive crew with Sam “The Man” Taylor and Big Al Sears providing unbeatable tenor sax muscle, drummer Panama Francis keeping immaculate time, and Baker back on his instantly identifiable slip-and-slide guitar.
Hawkins split his writers’ credits with bandleader Leroy Kirkland on both sides of his first Mercury platter, simply billed on its label as by Jay Hawkins. “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)” was the great and ominous precursor to “I Put A Spell On You,” set in a doomy minor key with Jay bellowing about mojo bones, evil spells, and threats of a firearm-induced demise over a lurching stop-time groove. Its B-side “This Is All” was just as striking minus the voodoo imagery, Hawkins’ pipes shaking the studio walls to their foundation. Two more splendid sides, the mid-tempo pounder “In My Front Room” and a frantic “What That Is” that sounded like Jay was singing in tongues (it was a first cousin to Bobby Lewis’ “Mumbles Blues,” which Hawkins claimed he wrote) were undeservedly banished to Mercury’s vaults.
Shad brought Jay back on May 11, 1955 for an encore Mercury session with much the same distinguished backing cast. He was shifted over to the label’s Wing subsidiary for a rumbling “Well, I Tried,” another co-write by Hawkins and bandleader Kirkland set to the same shambling groove that Jay granted his immortal “I Put A Spell On You,” and its flip “You’re All Of Life To Me,” a blues ballad crooned disarmingly straight by the belter (Kirkland penned it with Alicia Evelyn). The remaining tracks were twinned for his Wing farewell; the zesty Latin-tempoed “Talk About Me,” another Hawkins/Kirkland copyright boasting a melodic sax solo that was likely Sears’ doing shared the platter with Leroy and Evelyn’s ballad “Even Though.”
Jay gave Herb Slotkin first crack at his greatest hit of all, but Slotkin clearly didn’t know what he had on his hands. His Philadelphia-based Grand Records, best remembered for its series of doo-wop classics by the Castelles, didn’t even bother to press Hawkins’ first rendering of “I Put A Spell On You” up. It was cut November 9, 1955 at Reco-Art Recording in Philly with all the ingredients firmly in place, from Jay’s unhinged vocal to the doom-laden minor-key feel (the drummer wasn’t sure precisely where the backbeat belonged). Unfortunately for Jay’s future earnings, Slotkin did think enough of “I Put A Spell On You” to affix his name as its co-writer.
Slotkin went with two other impressive Hawkins originals as his only Grand single: the steady-building “Take Me Back,” draped over a rumbling upbeat groove, and “I Is,” a highly amusing grinder set to a tension-filled stop-time beat. Slotkin billed him as Screaming Jay Hawkins on the early ‘56 release. Herb left two more fine Hawkins performances in the vaults: a swaggering “$10,000 Lincoln Continental” was another stop-time winner incorporating plenty of current song titles as he bragged about his tricked-out luxury auto (Chuck Berry would have approved, especially since “Maybellene” cameoed) and the relatively romantic blues “Pauline.”
Jay confessed on more than one occasion that inspiration for writing “I Put A Spell On You” came from a real-life incident involving a girlfriend flamboyantly ending their relationship in an Atlantic City nightspot by dropping the keys to their apartment onstage mid-set, then blowing Hawkins a smooch bye-bye on her way out the door!
Grand Records may have not been interested in “Spell,” but OKeh Records A&R man Arnold Maxin saw sufficient value to schedule it at Hawkins’ first date for Columbia Records’ R&B imprint on September 12, 1956. A contingent of top-shelf New York R&B sessioneers was on hand, led as usual by Kirkland. Saxist Taylor and drummer Francis were back for more along with guitarist Jimmy Shirley, pianist Ernie Hayes, and bassist Lloyd Trotman. First up was the superbly crisp houserocker “Little Demon,” Jay sharing authorship with Philly manager Irv Nahan even though its way-out storyline obviously sprang from the outer limits of the singer’s imagination. OKeh never released the date’s next jumping selection, “You Ain’t Foolin’ Me.”
Much has been made about the inebriated condition Hawkins allegedly was in when he waxed the celebrated OKeh version of “I Put A Spell On You,” though an in-depth listen to the Grand original on this package reveals that the two versions weren’t very different. Nevertheless, Jay insisted that he was so hammered that Maxin had to fill him in at a later date.
“He says, ‘No, Jay, a gallon of wine was brought in, and we decided ‘I Put A Spell On You’ should not be a love ballad. It was something more like a novelty act. You didn’t get drunk, you passed out! Every once in a while, while we were playing the music, you would decide to come in. We recorded all night waiting on you. And you took your time. You laid on the floor. You rolled over. And then 10 days after that, when I gave you the record and you listened to it, you could not believe it!’”
OKeh paired “Spell” and “Little Demon” as his initial offering. Although it never did crack the charts (being banned on more than a few radio stations due to Jay’s grunts, groans, and wails didn’t help), “Spell” endured as the screamer’s signature theme for the rest of his career, later garnering remakes by everyone from Nina Simone to Creedence Clearwater Revival. “I was under the impression for the first 22 years of my life after that that I had to be that drunk to go on the stage and do ‘I Put A Spell On You’ before I finally stopped drinking altogether,” said Jay. “People always expected me to be drunk and screwed up when I do ‘I Put A Spell On You.’ That’s why when I go on the stage, I let ‘em know--I’m not ready to go crazy yet. I know you’re waiting on me to lose my mind, but let me build up to it!”
At his next OKeh session in February of ‘57, Hawkins delved into Tin Pan Alley fare for his encore single, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It).” It sounded like a parody, Jay unleashing a barrage of bizarre vocal effects rendering the chestnut all but unrecognizable. Its flip “Darling, Please Forgive Me,” penned by Jay with an alleged assist from Nahan, was strange in its own right; on its surface a fairly sober ballad of contrition, a second Jay was overdubbed way off in the background wailing wordlessly as though in serious distress.
The day’s other two masters, both originals, were considerably more fascinating. Hawkins never got more lyrically surreal than on the astonishing rocker “Yellow Coat,” which should have been his encore single but was instead shuttled over to his Epic debut album, At Home with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. His vivid description of a one-of-a-kind wardrobe staple was supremely riveting; the studio band anchored by guitarist Billy Mure and Sam the Man on sax was just as spectacular. “Hong Kong” was equally outlandish, Taylor blowing wildly over Gus Johnson’s crashing cymbals before Jay broke into unintelligible lingo that he thought sounded Asian over a lurching minor-key beat. It too was limited to LP-only status.
Even without a hit, Hawkins was garnering notice. Ebony magazine ran a three-page spread on Jay in May of ‘57, christening him the “Clown Prince of Rock ‘n’ Roll” complete with a large photo of a top-hatted Jay cradling a skull while enveloped in smoke and four smaller shots of the belter mugging unashamedly for the camera. Hawkins was too untamed for the producers of Alan Freed’s alleged biopic Mister Rock and Roll—his lip-synch of his next OKeh single “Frenzy” was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it was Jay’s outfit that got it excised—he sported African warrior garb, his hair flowing wildly. “They got mad,” recalled Jay. “Who’s got a better right to look like a savage? Who’s got a better right to look like a Mau-Mau? Black folks! We originated from Africa, or allegedly we were supposed to.”
The ferocious minor-key stormer “Frenzy,” the work of Brill Building regulars David Hess and Bobby Stevenson, was laid down at a May ‘57 date with Kirkland directing Kenny Burrell and Everett Barksdale on guitars and a rhythm section of Hayes, Trotman, and Francis (Cash Box’s reviewer likened Hawkins’ boisterous delivery to that of “a walrus under water”). On the flip, Teddy McRae and Charles Singleton’s clever blues standard “Person To Person,” Hawkins’ booming delivery rendered his version dissimilar from Eddie Vinson’s.
The rest of that debut album was laid down during two sessions in July and October of 1957 and saw Jay edging closer to his inner Paul Robeson—if the opera singer had hailed from Mars. Revered pop tunes--“I Love Paris,” “Temptation,” “Ol’ Man River,” “Deep Purple”—were the order of day. “That was beautiful. That was done by O.B. Masingill. He did everything,” said Hawkins. “Remember the guy Roy Hamilton, who put out that song, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone?’ That was the arranger that arranged it. Oh, he was magnificent. Like working with a Jerome Kern or a Sammy Cahn, or something like that.” A demented-sounding Screamin’ Jay throttled the cowboy anthem “Give Me My Boots And Saddle” with a chirpy choir in tow. Masingill transformed the demure Nat Cole standard “Orange-Colored Sky” into sonic cacophony, Taylor (we think) stepping up for a whirlwind sax solo midway in. Even the timeless spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was deconstructed by Screamin’ Jay.
OKeh gave Jay one more studio shot in March of ‘58, bringing back Kirkland, Burrell, and Francis for the session. The label acquired Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Alligator Wine” for the plug side. It was an inspired choice of material, complete with overdubbed jungle sound effects and a throbbing African drum adding to the atmosphere. The B-side “There’s Something Wrong With You” was a gloriously weird Hawkins original draped over the “Spell” beat.
“I left OKeh because they wasn’t doin’ nothin’,” Jay said. “They pushed so many songs, then they stopped pushin’.” Other major labels weren’t lining up for his services, so he paused at Nahan and Red Schwartz’s Philly-based Red Top label in 1958 for a one-off pairing two originals, “The Past” and the uproarious rocker “Armpit #6” (it was a brand of rancid perfume), the latter co-starring someone named Little James doing we’re not quite sure what.
Even though he edited Jay out of his movie, Alan Freed was a longtime fan, booking him for eight days at his gala 1956 Christmas show at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount Theater alongside The Moonglows, The Dells, Mac Curtis, and George Hamilton IV. The motor-mouthed Freed, always in search of a new gimmick, was the one that roped Jay into emerging from a coffin as part of his stage act.
“Alan Freed kept throwing $100 bills down on my dresser, saying, ‘You will do it.’ I said, ‘You’re full of shit! Not me. No black dude gets in no coffin alive, man. They don’t expect to get out!’” said Hawkins. “But them $100 bills got heavy and thick and looked good, you know. I’m used to splittin’ my money now with the booking agent and with my manager. Then I take my share. But his money I didn’t split with nobody. He just kept throwing out hundreds ‘til finally he hit two grand. I told him, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll try it.’”
That coffin nearly killed Hawkins at Harlem’s world-famous Apollo Theatre, thanks to the unwise hijinks of one of the top R&B vocal groups on the circuit. “If I could have gotten my hands on the Drifters at the time that I wanted, they would not be alive today,” said Jay. “Do you know how much air is in a coffin? Three-and-a-half minutes. Then you’re breathing your own, and that’s not breathable. They locked me in that coffin, and I couldn’t get out. And if it wasn’t up on a display stand--like the coffin, even in a funeral parlor, is not sitting on the floor like this. It’s sitting on a display rack that’s got wheels. If that coffin hadn’t have been there, I wouldn’t be here today. Because I kept doin’ this, and the coffin kept doin’ that on that stand, and finally it fell off. And when it hit the floor, it just shattered. I shit on myself, pissed on myself, I was crying, I was praying to the Lord. I didn’t want to die. I was scared.
“I had peed in the front, and I was in this white outfit. Shit was going down my back leg, and the band was dying happy, they was so happy. I forgot to sing, and I kept sidestepping my way ‘til I got off the stage, saying, ‘Excuse me, I am unable at this time to continue. But if you don=t mind, I’m sure there’ll be another act on, and I’ll come back as soon as I get myself together. I had a horrible accident!’
“The Drifters was dying laughing. And I punched Charlie (Thomas) in the mouth as I walked by him, and I went out to reach for Ben E. King--he was with ‘em then--and Ben was, ‘Don’t, Jay, don’t!’ And he’s dying laughing. It ain’t like he was afraid that I’m gonna hit him. He was dying laughing. I said, ‘You son of a bitch, it’s your group--you couldn’t keep ‘em in line? I’ll knock your damn teeth out!’ Then the next thing I knew, a couple of dudes grabbed me. There was a cop in there. He said, ‘Man, it was an honest mistake.’ I said, ‘You got that damn gun--take that sucker off!’ Bam! And I smacked him across the face.
“It took me seven years before I even said so much as hello to the Drifters.”
He may have suffered a bad experience with his coffin, but that didn’t mean he didn’t take care of his trademark stage prop. “If you ever messed with his casket, he would go off,” recalled the late Weldon A. McDougal III, bass singer of the Larks, who lived near Hawkins in Philly. “The thing that was so ironic about it, it was sitting outside his door!”
Hawkins didn’t meet with many of his show biz acquaintances from October of ‘58 to November of ‘60—he was in jail for having sex with a minor and cannabis possession. But he resumed recording after he was paroled, inking a pact with New York’s Enrica Records and cutting a single in January of 1962, backed by a band dubbed the Chicken Hawks (saxist/label owner Teddy McRae’s orchestra was also credited). “I Hear Voices” was one of Jay’s own concoctions, as scary as a horror movie with goosebump-inducing screams and eerie diminished chords abetting the minor-key terror and Hawkins laying the organ chords on thick.
Its opposite side “Just Don’t Care” was an irresistible call-and-response houserocker with punchy horns, Jay switching over to piano. “On ‘Just Don’t Care,’ I was in jail for assault and battery on a police officer,” he remembered. “I’d been in a fight with a cop. Spent the night in jail. This dude was walking along, sweeping the jail floor, a trustee. And he gave me the idea, every time I screw up, ‘Seems like you just don’t care.’”
Teaming with female singer/significant other Pat Newborn (she later seriously stabbed him when he married someone else), Jay stopped at Bob Marcucci’s Chancellor label long enough to wax a 1962 one-off pairing “Nitty Gritty” and his own “Ashes” well removed from the sanitized output of the Philly label’s teen idol duo of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore produced Hawkins’ 1964 Roulette 45, coupling an exotic remake of his Mercury single “The Whammy” and a rollicking “Strange.”
Guitarist Welton Young, the male half of the hitmaking duo Dean and Jean (“Tra La La La Suzy” in late ‘63) and lead guitarist on Tommy Tucker’s ‘64 smash “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” led the band on Jay’s late 1965 release “Poor Folks,” waxed at New York’s Allegro Studios and issued on the Providence imprint. Once again, Hawkins was blustering in a minor key but this time pleading for a better understanding of poverty with a snort or two thrown in for good measure. Its plattermate “Your Kind Of Love” (also out on Providence as “My Kind Of Love”—take your pick) was an exuberant shuffle ignited by Hawkins’ leonine roar.
Producer Dick Jacobs brought together some of Jay’s old studio cohorts (Ernie Hayes, Panama Francis, bassist Al Lucas, Leroy Kirkland) in July of 1966 for a Decca date that gave him big band backing on the torrid original “All Night” and an easy-swinging “I’m Not Made Of Clay,” the latter sung so hard that Hawkins sounded ready to bust his larynx. Guitarist Eric Gale and drummer Bernard Purdie were on Jay’s December ‘66 Decca date that produced his encore single, a remake of “Spell” backed by “You’re An Exception To The Rule,” arranger Bert DeCoteaux devising a Motownish groove for the soul-steeped piece.
Hawkins’ profile rose when he signed with Mercury’s Philips imprint to make his 1969 live album …What That Is! at Club Amigo in North Hollywood (its cover photo showed Jay lying in repose in his coffin). Doubling on piano and backed by the cream of L.A. sessioneers (saxist Plas Johnson, drummer Earl Palmer, guitarist Herb Ellis, and bassist Lyle Ritz among them), Jay launched into an all-original set that included his unforgettable “Feast Of The Mau Mau” and “Constipation Blues.” The latter immediately emerged as his other signature theme—to the point where he grunted out the flatulent tirade while seated on a custom-made rollaway commode on the main stage of the 1996 Chicago Blues Festival.
“I wrote ‘Constipation Blues’ when I was in Hawaii and I was constipated. I was in the hospital. And I didn’t have no paper, but I had a pencil. So I took the toilet roll off, and started writing on that,” revealed Jay. “It feeds me. It keeps a roof over my head. It enables me to feed my toilet.”
The mainstream slowly caught up with Screamin’ Jay, even as he mostly enjoyed the good life in sunny Hawaii from 1962 to 1971. “I said, ‘Y’all keep America!’” he said. “Well, that=s still America, but it ain’t to me. There=s a body of water between that island and the mainland. ‘Y’all stay over here with these crazy people. I’m going over there with them natives, live in a bamboo hut. Eat from the ground and the ocean and the trees.’ You can live over there and do that without a nickel in your pocket.”
Hawkins did find time to guest on a 1966 episode of Merv Griffin’s TV show in glorious full regalia. His visionary mindset influenced the theatrical presentations of many a major rock act, including Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, and Ozzy Osbourne. And Jay kept on recording. His 1972 set A Portrait of a Man and His Woman for Nashville’s Hot Line Records is represented on this collection by its unsettling original title track “Portrait Of A Man” as well as well-crooned covers of Chuck Willis’ “Don’t Deceive Me,” Jesse Belvin’s “Guess Who,” and Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” and a revisited “I Put A Spell On You” in front of a band that included ex-Dave Dudley guitarist Jimmy Colvard, former Buddy Holly axeman Tommy Allsup on six-string bass, drummer Kenny Malone, and Jay’s wife Ginny occasionally popping up on vocals.
A new generation of Screamin’ Jay fans was generated in 1989 when he co-starred in Jim Jarmusch’s offbeat 1989 film Mystery Train. Decked out in a blinding red suit, Hawkins sardonically portrayed a night clerk at a rundown Memphis hotel, displaying a natural flair for comedy. He followed it up with appearances in the movies A Rage in Harlem (1991) and Perdita Durango (1997). Yet Screamin’ Jay was at his best being himself on a stage in front of a cooking combo, a bigger-than-life character that was truly one of a kind. He kept on making news even after his February 12, 2000 passing in France at age 70; a website was set up to track down all of the offspring the uncommonly prolific Hawkins fathered over the decades, variously estimated as somewhere between 57 and 75 in all.
Screamin’ Jay knew precisely how he wanted to be remembered. “As somebody who gave people something different, other than the same thing most singers do--stand up and sing their hit records,” he said. “I tried to entertain people. I would like to be known, really, as an entertainer, more than just a singer or a musician.”
He will be.
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Liner notes, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins—Screamin’ Jay Rocks, by Bill Millar (Bear Family BCD 16687 AR)
Discogs website: www.discogs.com
Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamin%27_Jay_Hawkins
YouTube website: www.youtube.com