Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

By Jay Luster

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins theatrically rising from a coffin, signaled the rise of a brand-new genre of music, which would eventually become known as Shock Rock. Fifteen years later, artists like Kiss, and Alice Cooper began reaching international fame for their plethora of hit records, and their elaborate stage shows. However, before Cooper brought snakes onto the stage, Hawkins had already done it. He’d seen artists like Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong play their hits live, receive their well-deserved applause, and then retire. While that was pretty cool, he realized he could create a stage show which could be more elaborate. Inspired by Paul Robeson, the first black opera star, he wanted to create a more interesting show for the people who paid the price of admission to see him.

In 1942, just as World War Two was beginning, 13-year-old Hawkins forged a birth certificate and joined the military. Spending much of his wartime service entertaining troops, he went on to become an army boxing champion. Claiming to have been captured and interred at a German POW camp he said, upon liberation, he put a grenade in his captor’s mouth and pulled the pin. True or not, the story certainly illustrates his imagination for the macabre. He served until 1952, and then decided it was time to put his powerful baritone to good use.

Upon his discharge, Hawkins began singing with bands around Cleveland. Eventually, he traveled to New York where he recorded “I Put A Spell On You,” twice. The first version was crooned similarly to the singers he saw during his youth. As the story goes, late at night, while black out drunk, the band did a second version of the song where Hawkins showed the screaming side of himself. Apparently, until the next morning playback, he didn’t even remember doing it. One way or the other, the song found its way into the hands of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame disc jockey Alan Freed. Freed had been playing R&B on his radio show for many years, bringing black music to his white audience. When Hawkins heard the song on the radio, he went to Freed and thanked him personally. Freed told him to bring his new recordings to the station anytime.

Singing with a total abandon, he alternated between his on-demand vibrato, and comical guttural screams. He’d loom over his audience like a comic book Dracula, and paced around wild eyed like Colin Clive’s Victor Frankenstein when his monster arose from the slab. Though much of his antics had been employed in operas, and carney shows, no one before him had brought them to the rock and roll stage. Howlin’ Wolf was said to have been a scary looking guy who used his considerable size to menacingly loom over his audience. Nonetheless, until Hawkins, no one used coffins, ghoulish extras, wore hoodoo inspired robes, carried an oversized walking stick adorned with a cigarette smoking skull, or had literally pierced his nose with an upturned bone. Bo Diddley said, “That cat there was a talented man. He put an act together by himself that caught on big time because he was different. He was comical and scary.”

It didn’t take long for his influence to begin showing up in other artists’ work. Jim Morrison’s rasping scream on “Break On Through,” or Arthur Brown’s insistent, “I am the God of hellfire,” in his song “Fire,” wouldn’t exist without Screamin Jay Hawkins. Arthur Brown, and another early Hawkins inspired shock rocker named Screaming Lord Sutch, are often cited as influences by Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls, and many others. Along the way bands, like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer created music with dystopian lyrics which owe much to Hawkins. Even the glam rockers, and hair bands of the 70’s and 80’s owe their lamé fabric, and feather boa adorned costumes to the theatricality first brought to the rock and roll stage by the Father of Shock Rock, Screamin Jay Hawkins.

Born in Cleveland Ohio, July 18, 1929, Jalacy J. “Screamin’ Jay” Hawkins died February 12, 2000, from an aneurysm, in Neuilly-sur-Sienne, France, just a couple of miles Northwest of the Arc-de-Triomphe. Despite single-handedly inventing the Shock Rock genre, and being from Cleveland where the museum is located, it’s a travesty Hawkins, unlike his musical Godchildren Kiss, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper, is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.