Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Cow Fingers & Mosquito Pie

THE REVIEW

To be placed somewhere between R&B, early rock'n'roll, and the freak show phenomenon, Jalacy Hawkins (1929-2000) chose the nickname "Screaming" well before embarking on a career as a musician.

We are in the early 50s. Up until that moment, his life had been that typical of an African-American born in the year of the Great Crash, meaning a tumultuous life: abandoned in an orphanage, adopted by a family of Blackfoot Indians, left school, enlisted in the army, fought in the Pacific, became the middleweight champion of Alaska (!).

Endowed with a great voice, one of his dreams was to become an opera singer, and he began recording his first songs in 1952. Titles such as "Baptize Me In Wine", "I Found My Way To Wine", "Screamin' The Blues" already give a sense of the character. The real opportunity came in '56 with recordings for OKeh Records. When they played them back to him, he thought it was a joke: baritone "screams", grunts, murmurs, loud snorts could only be made by a drunk, and indeed he was. "I Put A Spell On You", covered over the years by almost everyone, from Nina Simone to Brian Ferry to Marilyn Manson, is Hawkins' definitive song: a "dance hall" rhythm and disordered screams claiming a woman's love "because you're mine." Period. Banned from the radio, in the "cleaned" version it managed to sell something like a million copies.

In the meantime, he began to take his outrageous show on the road with an entrance in a coffin, fireworks, snakes, gaudy costumes, and the company of the smoking skull Henry, in an imagery between voodoo and cannibalistic truly unusual for those times. "Cow Fingers And Mosquito Pie" is practically the first LP "At Home With Screamin' Jay Hawkins" with bonus-extra and contains other minor hits like the stuttering r'n'r of "Little Demon", the vaguely spaghetti-western ante-litteram of "Frenzy", the blues for a documentary on the Louisiana bayous "Alligator Wine". If rock'n'roll is (also) excess and carefree fun, then we demand a nice spot in its Hall of Fame for Screamin' Jay.

All in all, there are plenty of people who dressed not exactly soberly, there.

*(No, there isn't. Michael Jackson is, but not him).