Born Jalacy Hawkins on July 18, 1929, Screamin' Jay Hawkins grew up in Cleveland, spending the first year of his life in an orphanage. About his family history, Jay has this to say:
There were seven of us with one mother and different daddies. My sister once told me that as long as my mother didn't mess with no black people, she had it made. She had babies by a Chinese man and a baby by a white man. My father was from Arabia. My mother traveled, just like Paul Robeson.
She had a lot of money that was inherited. There's a bunch of Hawkinses in Washington, D.C., who are filthy rich; I have no idea how they made their money.
I understand when my mother was pregnant with me in Washington, D.C., they stoned, beat, and kicked her and forced her to get on a bus and go to Cleveland. That bus arrived in Cleveland just in time for her to have me and drop me at the nearest welfare center. Then she talked a tribe of Blackfoot Indians who were very wealthy into taking me out of that welfare home when I was eighteen months old and raising me.
I learned all about roots from living in the forest without no blanket and no food. I learned how to eat certain bark, plants, and flowers, how to get certain stones out of ponds and rivers and make rock soup and how to cure pains and cuts with certain plant--strictly old home remedies. If my Blackfoot Indian mother was from Africa, you would call her a witch doctor; if she was from New Orleans, you'd call her a voodoo priestess. I just put it to music.
At the age of 14,
Jay began boxing. Two years later in 1947 he was a Golden Gloves amateur
champ and won the middleweight championship in 1949. That year, he also
cut the original (ballad) version of "I Put A Spell On You,"
the first disc to bear the artist credit Screamin' Jay Hawkins, for Grand
Records. The single started in Philly and Trenton, spread to Baltimore,
then fizzled. (While the dates are disputed Jay claims it was 1952; label
records say it was September 1956). Further confusing the
timeline is Jay's story of how he got his nickname:
I went to a place called Nitro, West Virginia. This is 1950. There was a big, big huge fat lady at the bar . . . she was downing scotch and Jack Daniel's at the same time and whenever she looked up at me she shouted, 'Scream, baby, scream'.
At any rate, Jay
had also spent some time in the armed forces. In 1944 he enlisted
to the army, then moved to the air force, where
he began entertaining GI audiences at service clubs in the US, UK and
Japan. Other of his military experiences sound quite harrowing indeed:
I went through two wars and I'm still here. I got more marks on my body than the average crossword puzzle from knives, bombs, bullets, and being cut in half by a Japanese colonel in a prisoner of war camp.
Jay's musical tastes were also beginning to develop. He learned piano at an early age and added the tenor sax when he went into the armed forces. He credits a variety of influential records with getting him interested in music:
"0l' Man River"
"Summertime"
"My Mother's Eyes," by Paul Robeson, whom I liked because he was a rebel who fought the system in the United States during the '20s and the '30s, went to Russia, and made motion pictures there because he didn't get too much work here and refused to be an Uncle Tom like Stepin' Fetchit, Eddie Rochester Anderson, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, or Buckwheat
"Caldonia," by Louie Jordan
"Shake A Hand," by Faye Adams
"After Hours," by Erskine Hawkins
"Long Gone," by Sonny Thompson
Anything by Tiny Bradshaw, Arnette Cobb, Amos Milburn, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stift, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Shirley and Lee, Nat King Cole, Charles Brown, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Tiny Grimes, and Fats Domino, even though he is conceited, self-centered, and an asshole on top of that
As he remarked to researcher Norbert Hess in 1976:
Once in a while, in some of the concerts and tours I go on, I'll take out time to play the piano in my act, or I'll take out time to blow the sax, or I'll do 'em both and sing at the same time.
As for his secret wish:
Something I wanted to do but never did is sing opera. Again, that goes back to Paul Robeson, but when I got into the business, opera didn't get into the charts; they were just putting rhythm and blues out.
Some time in 1951 he was listening to the Tiny Grimes band in a local club. Grimes' Rockin' Highlanders, dressed in kilts and tam o'shanters, were popular and had recorded extensively for Atlantic and Gotham. Jay "walked up to Tiny and asked for a job" and was hired, in Jay's own words:
As Tiny's valet, body guard, dog walker, piano player and blues singer and all this for $30 a week!...I'd come out in a Scottish kilt, and I'd have these two small Carnation milk cans hanging off my chest, like tits. I sang 'Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean' and the cans would be jiggling all over the place. Ruth Brown came to see me. She said, 'This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me.
Hawkins was included in a session for Gotham. Although its date is not known, it probably dates from some time in 1952, although the order to print the labels was not given until May 18,1953. CORONATION JUMP was a standard Grimes combo workout, likely with Hawkins on piano, but the flip featured 'Screaming Jay' Hawkins as the featured vocalist. An unissued vocal, entitled NO HUG NO KISS when it was discovered and released on album in 1986, possibly features Hawkins, although he emphatically denied his presence when it was played to him.
The Gotham release did nothing for Hawkins and remains a remarkably rare item. Nonetheless, as one of his early documenters points out, 'right away, he asked serious questions of the listener's commitment. These intimidating, even blood-curdling performances had no obvious precedent. He started way over the top and worked upwards.'
Jay has been asked what makes him scream. His reply:
Being black.
Prejudice.
Marrying
a girl who said she was pregnant after I'd just spent two years in
Alaska and was too foolish to know better
Jay had also enjoyed a very brief stint in Fats Domino's band, but was fired for upstaging Fats by wearing a gold and leopard-skin outfit and turban. At Atlantic Jay recalls cutting "Screamin' The Blues" for Jerry Wexler:
He'd stopped me five times during the take. Finally he starts shouting, 'No, no. no, I want you to sing it just like Fats Domino, man!' I said, 'Now listen, Fats is off to a good start, he's doing okay. I'm singing here with Tiny Grimes, and I've got a chance to record the song I chose. If you want Fats Domino, then go out and get him.' He started up again and pow! I just 6 punched him in the mouth.
Hawkins left Tiny Grimes and played with a slew of performers, including Gotham saxman Johnny Sparrow in Philadelphia. Soon he was singing in jazz clubs on 52nd Street in New York City or rocking Atlantic City clubs like Herman's nightly on 8 p.m. to 9 a.m. shifts, cutting up in color-coordinated cuff its ("down to the socks and cuff links") of orange, pink and fluorescent blue:
I charged one club owner $1500 a week and three suits," Jay laughs. The commitment to high impact performing didn't stop at the stage either. "it was always my object to do whatever I had to, to capture the interest of people who were just casually listening to the radio; the housewife ironing, or whatever. I figured, if I could hold their attention for the first eight bars, I'd sold a record.
Jalacy J. Hawkins didn't sell a lot of records...yet!
