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77: SCREAMIN' JAY HAWKINS
I Put A Spell On You/ Little Demon
(Okeh, 1956)

LIKE so many of the singles I have featured thus far in my top 100, I Put A Spell On You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins defies adequate description and renders all adjectives largely superfluous.

However, I'll give it a go as I have a column to fill - besides which there's always the chance that some readers may not yet have stumbled upon this comically feral cameo from the dawn of rock and roll.

Screamin' Jay was born Jalacy J Hawkins in 1929 and was adopted from an orphanage at the age of 18 months by a family of Blackfoot Indians, displaying a precocious musical talent even as an infant. In his teens, a spell in the US Army and a stint as a successful middleweight boxer led him, circuitously, back to music and a dues-paying interlude as a jobbing R&B pianist.

Jay's irrepressible exuberance and retina-scorching dress sense soon got him noticed, but often led to conflict. Simply everything about him was loud, so his tenure in Fats Domino's band was summarily curtailed as there was no way to reconcile Domino's low-key twinkle with Jay's bellowing theatricality.

Striking out on his own, Jay signed a deal with the Okeh label and, so the story goes, recorded I Put A Spell On You in the midst of a good-natured, drunken free-for-all. Whether or not his claim to have no recollection of recording it is to be believed, there is no getting round the eye-popping fervour of his performance.

In 1956, Elvis Presley's grease-gun hip-swivelling was shocking enough; but Screamin' Jay's shrieking, gibbering, cackling pantomime demon was the sound of another world entirely. His career thereafter was characterised by flaming coffins, skulls on sticks and Mephistophelean thunderflashes, all deployed with lip-smacking panache and robust good humour.

He was a bit of a genius.

9:26am Friday 11th July 2008

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