What a man and his cigarette-smoking skull unleashed…
In the late 40’s or early 50’s, one-time boxer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins wrote the lost-love lament that would become “I Put a Spell on You.”
It began as a blues ballad but was transformed in the recording studio in the mid-50’s. Hawkins claimed his producer “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version. I don’t even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.”
Because of Hawkins’ screaming and his groans and growls, a handful of prudish (and, no doubt, racist) record store owners and radio station managers banned the record. It found its way to the Top 40 all the same.
Here is Hawkins and his cigarette-smoking skull “Henry” performing the song on television in 1984:
The incredible thing about this song is that the it always seemed to put a sort of spell on the person singing it. For Hawkins, the spell changed him forever. For others the spell lasted at least as long as the singer was inside the song. Here’s an clip of Nina Simone doing the song in London, 1968. Notice how she works Alabama into the song. In the long shadow of Selma, you can’t help but hear “I can’t stand the way you put me down” in a whole new light.
I first heard Diamanda Galas sing the song more than a decade ago and her interpretation remains the most haunting piece of music I have ever heard. I rarely make it through the whole thing. And whether I make it part of the way or the whole way, I wind up with a knot in my stomach every time. Her lunatic refrain “I love you I love you—how much I love you” which she practically whispers is as jarring to me as her desert-dry shrieks. Here she is performing the song live:
Nick Cave has done the song too. I have this theory about Nick Cave: I think he didn’t really “find” his voice until sometime in the last 10 years. What makes everything he did up to that point so enticing to me is his raw struggle to find that voice. Here’s Cave clawing his way through the song in 1984:
