Podcasts about I Put a Spell on You

FROM ACROSS THE POND SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND MUSICIAN STEPHEN RIDLEY JOINS THE ANGEL OF WORDS PODCAST. SPILLING THE ENGLISH TEA ABOUT HIS PERSONAL LIFE, AND THE HISTORY BEHIND BECOMING ONE OF THE PREMIERE PIANIST IN THE WORLD. DIVULGING THE DETAILS OF HOW HE WENT FROM BANKING TO MUSICIAN. INCLUDING WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO FOLLOW YOUR PASSIONS. PLUS HE TALKS ABOUT THE INTERNET SMEARING OF HIS MUSIC ACADEMY "THE RIDLEY ACADEMY". THE EPISODE ENDS WITH A MAGNIFICENT PERFORMANCE OF HIS REMIX TO THE SONG "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU". THE BREAKDOWN:0:00- INTRO MONTAGE4:38- FRAMINGDALE, ENGLAND/JOHNNY DEPP6:46- CONNECTING WITH AUDIENCES8:20- OVERCOMING HARDSHIPS12:05- CLASSICAL VS FREESTYLE22:48- HISTORY OF STEPHEN RIDLEY35:29- ANGEL OFF TOPIC QUESTION36:34- LEAVING A CORPORATION48:56- FOLLOW YOUR PASSION/ENGAGEMENT53:30- FALLING IN LOVE WITH PIANO1:05:43- DODGING RECORD LABELS1:09:15- THE RIDLEY ACADEMY1:23:00- WORKING WITH CHILDREN1:32:43- 5 WORDS WITH ANGEL (GAME SHOW SEGMENT)1:46:03- FINAL INSPIRATION1:48:17- STEPHEN RIDLEY "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU"

Annie Lennox reprend "I Put A Spell On You" de Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Ce 31 octobre, Marjorie Hache propose une émission spéciale Halloween dans Pop Rock Station, mêlant classiques et nouveautés aux ambiances sombres. Parmi les incontournables, on retrouve Creedence Clearwater Revival avec "I Put A Spell On You", Siouxsie and the Banshees avec "Spellbound", The Misfits avec "Vampira" et Black Sabbath avec "Electric Funeral" en long format. En ce qui concerne les nouveautés, elle présente "Goat Brain" du groupe psychédélique suédois Goat et "October 31st" d'Acid Witch. Le live de la soirée est "The Devil in I" de Slipknot, enregistré au Mexique en 2017. La reprise du jour est "Bela Lugosi's Dead" de Bauhaus, revisitée par les Écossais de Chvrches. Marjorie célèbre également l'anniversaire de Frank Iero de My Chemical Romance en diffusant "Welcome to the Black Parade". L'émission se clôture en beauté avec "Shackled to a Corpse" de Neckbreaker, apportant une touche de black metal danois pour finir cette soirée riche en frissons. La playlist de l'émission : Creedence Clearwater Revival - I Put A Spell On You Siouxsie And The Banshees - Spellbound My Chemical Romance - Welcome To The Black Parade The Rolling Stones - Beast Of Burden Steve King - Satan Is Her Name Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return) The B52'S - Devil In My Car Goat - Goatbrain Supergrass - Strange Ones The Sonics - Psycho The Specials - Ghost Town The Horrors - Jack The Ripper Cvhrches - Bela Lugosi's Dead Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl The Smashing Pumpkins - Wyttch Kate Bush - Hammer Horror The Cramps - Surfin' Dead Slipknot - The Devil In I AC/DC - Highway To Hell Acid Witch - October 31 St Bettye Lavette - Witchcraft In The Air Guns N' Roses - Right Next Door To Hell Misfits - Vampira Alice Cooper - Feed My Frankenstein Black Sabbath - Electric Funeral Neckbreakker - Shackled To A Corpse

Bienvenue dans cet épisode de La Partition, où nous plongeons dans l'univers fascinant de Screaming Jay Hawkins, l'un des artistes les plus singuliers du rock'n'roll.

Les classiques du jour : - The Cure "Lullaby" - Alice Cooper "Feed My Frankenstein" Les nouveautés du jour : - Tom Gregory "Wreck" - Tears for Fears "Say Goodbye To Mum And Dad" - Bastille "Drawbridge & The Baroness" Le journal de la musique : - The Last Dinner Party annule la fin de sa tournée - Les pieds de Lily Allen lui rapportent plus d'argent que sa musique - La chanson posthume de Liam Payne est finalement reportée - 3 films d'horreurs avec des rockeurs à regarder pour Halloween La cover : Annie Lennox reprend "I Put A Spell On You" de Screamin' Jay Hawkins Le live du jour : Michael Jackson "Thriller" (live at Wembley Stadium July 16, 1988)

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN with special guest ARTHUR BROWN. The eponymous ‘The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown,' which included the smash hit single ‘Fire,' was released in 1968. With Vincent Crane on keyboards, Drachen Theaker on drums and Nick Greenwood (billed as Sean Nicholas) on bass guitar, and with Brown's extraordinary vocals, it was perhaps an album that could never be repeated and it remains an exhilarating slice of psychedelia at its prime and extremity. Arthur Brown is a seminal figure in the realm of psychedelic rock. Emerging in the late 1960s, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown melded surreal stage antics with pioneering sounds, cementing their place in rock history. Brown's captivating persona, marked by his operatic voice and wild, face-painted performances (including wearing a flaming helmet during the rendering of 'Fire') became a hallmark of their shows, influencing future generations of theatrical rock artists. Their music remains a symbol of the experimental and boundary-pushing spirit of the psychedelic era, continuing to inspire with their enduring legacy and ongoing musical contributions. Arthur Brown's influence on shock, progressive rock and on electronic and heavy metal music also cannot be underestimated. It was a fascinating interview with a fascinating man that included one of Arthur's famous helmets being set alight on the CAT Club stage during the video screening of the legendary 1968 Top of the Pops performance of ‘Fire!' The gathering culminated with a stunning live performance with Arthur singing ‘I Put A Spell On You' along to the original backing track ripped from the featured album. JASON BARNARD did an admirable job in the interviewer's chair it must be said. This event took place on 24th October 2024 in the Pigeon Loft at The Robin Hood, Pontefract, West Yorkshire. To find out more about the CAT Club please visit: www.thecatclub.co.uk Happy Trails.

Listeners will vibe to remixes like Netsky's take on Benny Benassi's "Satisfaction" and Mista Trick's remix of *Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put A Spell On You," plus an exclusive from Merv Vega$ himself, “Open Your Eyes.”Expect bass-heavy hitters like Aries & Benny Page's "Herbsmoke" and S.P.Y's "Steady Jam," before rounding off with high-octane anthems like Kanine's "Get Down" and Rusko & Mozey's "Hands In The Air."Tune in for a worldwide trip through the latest releases, exclusive remixes, and some serious bassline mastery.For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/rzn8/Tune into new broadcasts of Rzn8 with Merv Vega$, LIVE, 1st and 3rd Saturday from 6  - 8 PM EST /11 - 1 AM GMT (Sunday).//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's time for our occasional, somewhat-annual Halloween Spooktacular episode, where we pick a song appropriate to the season and see what terror awaits us. And what better way to get into the Halloween spirit than an examination (autopsy?) of the original “shock rock” song—“I Put A Spell On You” by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tony Nominee, Robyn Hurder joins us to Take A Bow ahead of a MAJOR announcement and the annual Broadway spooky season celebration I Put A Spell On You! In this episode, hear all about: Moulin Rouge The fandom Chicago A Beautiful Noise The Broadway Community Gavin Creel Dancing How she learned to sing Being A Mom Showgirl to leading lady and feeling like she was starting over Getting replaced in a show + So much more! Curtain up, Robyn Hurder Connect with Robyn Hurder on Instagram: @robynhurder Connect with Take A Bow on social: @takeabowpodcast Connect with host, Eli Tokash on social: @tokash_eli Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody's heard of I Put A Spell On You, the immortal Halloween classic tune, but how much do you know about the performer behind the music? On this very spooky episode of TRAPPO's Old Music Showcase, we're taking a closer look at the man behind the music, the one and only Screamin' Jay Hawkins. So if you're ready for an unhinged history lesson, you've come to the right place! What do you think about Screamin' Jay Hawkins and his music? Tell us what's on your mind by CLICKING HERE to leave a comment on our official blog, or CLICK HERE to send those thoughts in a haunted email, which we would definitely appreciate. We're also all over Threads, so CLICK HERE to follow us on that particular social media platform and we'll probably follow you back. And if you can't get enough TRAPPO in your life, CLICK HERE to subscribe (for free) to The TRAPPO Town Gazette, and receive new editions in your inbox every Wednesday. That's a pretty good deal, kids. Thanks for listening!

It's time for our occasional, somewhat-annual Halloween Spooktacular episode, where we pick a song appropriate to the season and see what terror awaits us. And what better way to get into the Halloween spirit than an examination (autopsy?) of the original “shock rock” song—“I Put A Spell On You” by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. "I Put A Spell On You" (Words & Music by Jay Hawkins) Copyright 1956 (Renewed 1984) EMI Unart Catalog Inc. — Ready for more? Head over to the Pantheon Podcast Network for further musical adventures. And remember to follow this show, so you never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we dive deep into Nina Simone's classic album, I Put A Spell On You, ranked #88 on Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time. Join us as we explore the intricate details of each track, from the hauntingly beautiful title song to the iconic "Feeling Good." Discover why Nina Simone's unique blend of jazz, blues, and soul continues to captivate audiences decades later. We'll break down the musical elements, lyrical themes, and Simone's powerful vocal performances that make this album a timeless masterpiece. Plus, we'll discuss interesting facts about Nina Simone's life and career, shedding light on her influence on the music industry and beyond. Whether you're a long-time fan or new to Nina Simone's music, this episode offers an in-depth look at one of the greatest albums of all time. Tune in for insightful analysis, engaging discussions, and a newfound appreciation for the legendary Nina Simone.  

Nina Simone – I Put A Spell On You – 2:35 Van Morrison – The Way Young Lovers Do – 1999 Remaster – 3:17 John Coltrane – My Favorite Things – 13:44 Marzio Scholten – The Day We Lost It All – 5:09 Fire! Orchestra – Enter, Pt. 1 – 13:43 Nina Simone – When […]

Welcome to Season 3!! In this episode I talk about Halloween in the Victorian age, Halloween news and I share three versions of "I Put A Spell On You" https://www.midnightsyndicate.com/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4312175/ https://www.universalorlando.com/hhn/en/us Patreon.com/TheHappyHalloweenPodcast Instagram.com/TheHappyHalloweenPod TikTok: TheHappyHalloweenPod TheHappyHalloweenPod@gmail.com https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheHappyHalloweenPod https://ko-fi.com/thehappyhalloweenpodcast --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/happyhalloweenpod/support

Sintonía: "Night Of The Vampire" - The Moontrekkers"Psychotic Reaction" - Count Five; "Through My Eyes" - The Creation; "Ain´t Got No Home" - Clarence "Frogman" Henry; "Liar Liar" - The Castaways; "In The Nighttime" - The Strangeloves; "Brand New Cadillac" - Vince Taylor; "Shake Some Action" - The Flamin´ Groovies; "Eighteen" - Alice Cooper; "I Put A Spell On You" - Screamin´ Jay Hawkins; "I Can´t Control Myself" - The Troggs; "You Better Move On" - Arthur Alexander; "Joue pas le Rock ´n´ Roll pour moi" - Johnny Hallyday; "The Pill" - Loretta Lynn; "We Sell Soul" - The Spades; "Valerie" - Jackie And The StarlitesTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación "SEX: Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die" (Only Lovers Left Alive Ltd - OLLA 001/EMI, 2003)Escuchar audio

From the Broadway Revival of Parade, to starring as Raoul in the 30th Anniversary Broadway cast of The Phantom of the Opera, Jay Armstrong Johnson is the prom king of Broadway. U Guys, we're talking Golden Globes nominations in this week's BroadwayWorld Recap, brought to you by BroadwayWorld.com. Then I am joined by Broadway star, Jay Armstrong Johnson, to talk all things Bway! Jay is a true triple threat, from singing incredible scores like Phantom, to dancing Michael Bennett's original choreography in A Chorus Line, to acting the role of Will Olsen on ABC's Quantico. A Texas native, Jay shares his experience as a young artist in the South, and his journey to New York City and working consistently on Broadway. His Broadway credits range from Hair, to On The Town, to Catch Me If You Can. While consistently working on the stage and screen, Jay also flexes his creative muscles in ways that benefit incredible organizations like the Ali Forney Center for LGBTQ youth, and Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS. You can see Jay's Hocus Pocus inspired Halloween show, I Put A Spell On You, annually, and he has starred multiple times in Jerry Mitchell's, Broadway Bares. Jay is such a love, U don't wanna miss his episode! Follow Jay on Instagram: @Jay_A_Johnson Follow the pod on Instagram: @ohmypoduguys Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sintonía: Instrumental de Augustus Pablo "I Put A Spell On You", "My Lonely Sad Eyes", "Out Of Sight", "It´s All Over Now Baby Blue", "Bad Or Good", "Hello Josephine", "Don´t You Know", "Hey Gir", "Bring ´Em On In", "Turn On Your Love Light" (Alternate Version), "Here Comes The Night" (Mono), "Friday´s Child", "Time´s Getting Tougher Than Tough", "Richard Cory" y "Don´t Start Cryin´ Now" Escuchar audio

In our final week of Gothtober your fiendish-yet-friendly ghouls bring you an episode straight from the block party! We're having an old-school Halloween cul de sac trick-or-treat party! We're going to spin some of those traditional Halloween novelty jams that you always hear when you go to a party this time of year! However, what vile and twisted interpretations can be made by our rock n' punk n' metal ambassadors??? Listen if you dare…What is it we do here at InObscuria? Every show Kevin opens the crypt to exhume and dissect from his personal collection; an artist, album, or collection of tunes from the broad spectrum of rock, punk, and metal. Robert is forced to test his endurance and provide feedback, as he has no idea what he will be subjected to every week. Our hope is that we turn you on to something that was lost on your ears, or something you've simply forgotten about, or that (in our opinion) should have been the next big thing.Songs this week include:The Ghastly Ones & Rob Zombie – “Halloween (She's So Mean)” from Halloween Hootenanny (1998)Small Town Titans – “Monster Mash” from Monster Mash - single (2018) The Tomb Tones – “The Ghost Of Toast / Halloween Mart” from The Ghost Of Toast (2023)Jhett Black – “I Put A Spell On You” from I Put A Spell On You - single (2020)Reel Big Fish – “Evil Approaches” from Punk Rock Halloween – Loud, Fast, & Scary! (2017)The Sinclairs – “Halloween Wings” from Halloween Wings (2020)The Spears – “Hallowmean” from Punk Rock Halloween, Vol.2 – Louder, Faster, & Scarier (2019)Muse – “You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween” from Will Of The People (2022)Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://twitter.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/InObscuria?asc=uCheck out Robert's amazing fire sculptures and metal workings here: http://flamewerx.com/If you'd like to check out Kevin's band THE SWEAR, take a listen on all streaming services or pick up a digital copy of their latest release here: https://theswear.bandcamp.com/If you want to hear Robert and Kevin's band from the late 90s – early 00s BIG JACK PNEUMATIC, check it out here: https://bigjackpnuematic.bandcamp.com/

With no guest this week, Eli brings you this week's news on Broadway, chats about what's to come, seeing him in a cabaret tonight, October 26th, and I Put A Spell On You! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're kicking off October with our definitive, totally accurate, completely biased, and entirely subjective yet correct Halloween playlists. We each compiled a list of 10: 5 must haves and 5 honorable mentions, and there is surprisingly little overlap. We talk classics, we talk contemporary, and we talk a lot of alternative choices (Jess loves some weird hard rock music; Amanda decided dancing was a criteria). Let us know your favorite Halloween songs at any of the links below. OUR SOCIALSInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ninetiesbabiesnostalgia/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgmyQV7STEmjISJKCZr362w Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nineties_Babies TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@90sbabiesnostalgia Theme Song by Patrick Dunnevant, (https://www.youtube.com/c/AcappellaVGM)Artwork by Dawn Wheeler (https://www.instagram.com/wool_and_stoneNineties Babies Nostalgia supports unions and the incredible writers, actors, and other creatives striking at WGA and SAG-AFTRA. During the strikes, we will be highlighting content from independent and/or foreign productions, with the understanding that the domination of streaming makes it nearly impossible for us to cover works that remain entirely untouched by the industry's inequities.

What's more inspiring than the start of a new day? Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot share their favorite songs inspired by the morning. The hosts also review new albums by Ratboys and Noname. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: The Beatles, "Good Morning," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Noname, "gospel? (feat. $ilkMoney, billy woods & STOUT)," Sundial, self-released, 2023Ratboys, "The Window," The Window, Topshelf, 2023Ratboys, "Making Noise for the Ones You Love," The Window, Topshelf, 2023Ratboys, "Empty," The Window, Topshelf, 2023Ratboys, "Black Earth, WI," The Window, Topshelf, 2023Noname, "black mirror," Sundial, self-released, 2023Noname, "namesake," Sundial, self-released, 2023Noname, "potentially the interlude," Sundial, self-released, 2023Kris Kristofferson, "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," Kristofferson, Monument, 1970Stevie Wonder, "Happier Than The Morning Sun," Music of My Mind, Tamla, 1972Nina Simone, "Feeling Good," I Put A Spell On You, Phillips, 1965The Polyphonic Spree, "Light & Day/Reach for the Sun," The Beginning Stages of..., Good, 2002Margot and the Nuclear So-And-So's, "Waking Up and Walking Out," The Bride On The Boxcar - A Decade Of Margot Rarities: 2004-2014, Joyful Noise, 2015Harry Nilsson, "Gotta Get Up," Nilsson Schmilsson, RCA Victor, 1971Kurt Vile, "Wakin On a Pretty Day," Wakin On a Pretty Daze, Matador, 2013Bill Withers, "Lovely Day," Menagerie, Columbia, 1977Joni Mitchell, "Chelsea Morning," Clouds, A&M, 1969The The, "This Is the Day," Soul Mining, Some Bizarre/Epic, 1983Beck, "Morning," Morning Phase, Captiol, 2014Outkast, "Git Up, Git Out (feat. Goodie Mob)," Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Arista, LaFace, 1994Juice Newton, "Angel of the Morning," Juice, Captiol, 1981Echo & the Bunnymen, "The Killing Moon," Ocean Rain, Sire, 1984Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Broadway Legend Jay Armstrong Johnson stops by to talk about the impact of the Tony Award-Winning Revival of Parade on the future of Broadway, his path into performing, and figuring out the journey of a character throughout a show. Jay has been a star throughout the theatre industry having performed in Phantom of the Opera, On The Town, Hair, Hands on a Hardbody, Catch Me If You Can, and in several regional theatre productions across the United States. With his stellar voice and natural instincts as a dancer, his performance as Britt Craig in the Tony Award-Winning Revival of Parade is breathtaking and hard to put into words. Just announced (officially): Jay's annual fundraiser “I Put A Spell On You” will continue in 2023 at Sony Hall on Monday, October 23rd. This year, the Sanderson Sisters are in their “Witch ERA”. Tickets are available NOW at https://ipasoy2023.cbo.io/. This event benefits the Ali Forney Center. I am very honored to have Jay joining my show, especially for this episode as I celebrate both my 17th Birthday & my two-year anniversary on the Broadway Podcast Network! Join our conversation as we discuss: Michael Arden's beautiful, Tony Award-winning production of PARADE (closing August 6th, 2023) & the impact the story, inclusivity of the production process, and raw emotion will have on the future of Broadway Tips on how to go from a mover to a dancer (primarily for Mason's benefit) In relation to his performance of The Seraph by Ryan Scott Oliver (Mason's favorite song ever), how he creates a journey through song and through a character study His thoughts on the long-pawned question, education or experience! The annual Halloween party “I Put A Spell On You” he hosts, started with the help of Broadway Cares / Equity Fights AIDS & so much more! Check out Jay on all the things! Instagram – @jay_a_johnson Website – Jay Armstrong Johnson See PARADE while you still can: paradebroadway.com  Thank you so much for being here and for your support!! I hope that this show continues to be a resource for artists of all interests to find the place they deserve in this wonderful industry… Join me for future interviews and content below! BPN.fm/RealTalk Instagram: @_RealTalk_Pod Twitter: @_RealTalk_Pod TikTok: @RealTalkPodcast Facebook: Real Talk with Mason Bray Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Singles Going Around- Rollin' and Tumblin'The Yardbirds- "Baby What's Wrong"Larry Williams- "Bony Moronie"The Clash- "Wrong Em Boyo"The Beatles- "Wait"Joe South- "Down In The Boondocks"Howlin Wolf- "You'll Be Mine"The Velvet Underground- "White Light/White Heat"The Rolling Stones- "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"The Ventures- "Pipeline"Huey "Piano" Smith- "Don't You Just Know It"Donovan- "Sunshine Superman"Pink Floyd- "San Tropez"Creedence Clearwater Revival- "I Put A Spell On You"The Stooges- "I Wanna Be Your Dog"Eric Clapton- When Things Go Wrong, It Hurts Me Too"*All selections from Lp's. 

In this fascinating episode of Ultraculture, host Jason Louv sits down with Steve Bergsman, the author of "I Put a Spell On You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins." This book brings together hundreds of interviews with the larger-than-life musician Screamin' Jay Hawkins, his family, and bandmates to weave a new tale of the life of this seminal rock and roll pioneer. In our conversation, Steve dives into the life of Screamin' Jay, a man who was as enigmatic as he was influential. Known for his haunting performances where he emerged from a coffin singing “I Put A Spell On You,” Screamin' Jay has long captivated audiences and left an indelible mark on the landscape of music and black identity. Join us as Steve shares insights into Screamin' Jay's self-created myth and the nearly unbelievable truth of his life, drawing from his extensive research and interviews. This episode is a must-listen for any fan of rock and roll history, music lovers, or anyone interested in the complex interplay between identity and performance. And after listening, consider diving deeper into the mystical with our new Magick of Tarot course...! Guided by world-renowned occult author Lon Milo DuQuette, this comprehensive course offers over 4 1/2 hours of insightful video content, guided meditations, and thought-provoking exercises to help you unlock the mysteries of the universe and transform your life. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned practitioner, this course promises to enrich your practice, ignite your spiritual evolution, and guide you toward your ultimate destiny. Experience highlights like a guided meditation journey through all 22 major trumps and even create your own Tarot deck, a tangible reflection of your journey. The Magick of Tarot respects your time with its self-paced and fully recorded design, offering lifetime access across all your devices. Regardless of your experience level or gear, this course promises to be transformative for everyonee. Invest in yourself today by enrolling in "The Magick of Tarot." Your future self is already thanking youu.. Change your reality one conversation, and one course, at a time...!

Singles Going Around- Bayou BoogieThe Yardbirds- "Boom Boom"David Bowie- "Queen Bitch" (2021 Mix)Rolling Stones- "Mercy Mercy" Otis Day- "Day Tripper" (Live)Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels- "Oo Papa Do"Cream- "Stepping Out" (BBC Recording)Captain Beefheart- "Moonlight On Vermont" (Live)Joe South- "Down In The Boondocks"Creedence Clearwater Revival- "I Put A Spell On You"Everly Brothers- "Hi Heel Sneakers"Rolling Stones- "Miss Amanda Jones"Elvis Presley- "Wearin' That Loved On Look"Eric Clapton & Duane Allman- "Mean Old World"Beach Boys- I'm Waiting For The Day"The Byrds- "Mr Tamborine Man"The Monkees- "Salesman"Cream- "Spoonful"*All selections taken from vinyl.

In the annals of rock ‘n' roll there have been a lot of strange characters, but there probably hasn't been anyone as bizarre as Screamin' Jay Hawkins, He was larger than life as he emerged from a coffin with a skull on a stick singing “I Put A Spell On You.” He was a whirlwind performer, a lusty singer, a prolific songwriter and a man who was a total stranger to the truth. And with that one song, Screamin' Jay, who also studied piano and sang opera, became the embodiment of the sexually insatiable, voodoo-empowered, black man feared by 1950s America.  We speak with biographer Steve Bergsman, whose book I Put A Spell On You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins explores the legendary bluesman's life, work and influence on rock'n'roll music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the annals of rock ‘n' roll there have been a lot of strange characters, but there probably hasn't been anyone as bizarre as Screamin' Jay Hawkins, He was larger than life as he emerged from a coffin with a skull on a stick singing “I Put A Spell On You.” He was a whirlwind performer, a lusty singer, a prolific songwriter and a man who was a total stranger to the truth. And with that one song, Screamin' Jay, who also studied piano and sang opera, became the embodiment of the sexually insatiable, voodoo-empowered, black man feared by 1950s America.  We speak with biographer Steve Bergsman, whose book I Put A Spell On You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins explores the legendary bluesman's life, work and influence on rock'n'roll music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The closest Nina Simone ever came to pop, before her civil rights activism, black nationalism and Marxism led to her being blackballed from the mainstream. Featuring stunning interpretations of everything from showtunes and blues workouts to the French balladry of Charles Azvanour, I PUT A SPELL ON YOU (1965) showcases her inimitable blend of classically-trained piano, smoky jazz-contralto and steely vulnerability that demolished the stereotype of the “angry black woman”. This week on Enjoy An Album with Liam Withnail and Christopher Macarthur-Boyd we talk all about I PUT A SPELL ON YOU, as well as the ‘recent' Netflix documentary about her life and the ethics of using music in advertising. All that, plus Secret Posho, Unhinged YouTube Comment of the Week, the obligatory mention of Muse, and Tattoo Woohoo/Tattoo Boohoo. Enjoy! Thanks to this weeks Sponsors MANSCAPED Manscaped | https://manscaped.com 20% off with the promo code: ALBUM20 #sponsored #ad Show less

Nina Simone has us Feeling Good this week with her twelfth studio album, I Put A Spell On You! She's come to be known as the High Priestess Of Soul, and for good reason -- her classically-trained piano playing and expressive vocals lend themselves perfectly to the soulful R&B and jazz music she chose to sing. As a vocal figure during the Civil Rights Movement she helped give rise to the protest song as a tool and art form, and her career was fraught with turbulence from within and without. We'll talk about the wildlife of Barbados, a record-breaking vocal performance, and a time she REALLY lost her temper as we Take Care Of Business with this record. Happy New Year!Keep Spinning at www.SpinItPod.com!Thanks for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Willkommen zu Folge 16 mit Nic Cester! Das ist Nic Cester. Der Musiker aus Melbourne, dessen Wurzeln in Italien liegen, hat seine musikalische Karriere schon früh gestartet - Zusammen mit seinem Bruder Chris Cester gründete er 1979 die legendäre Band Jet, jetzt geht er seinen eigenen Weg und zwar als Solo Künstler. Bei Nachts um Halb 1 erzählt er uns heute, wie es sich anfühlt, wenn man wirklich das Gefühl hat angekommen zu sein, wie seine erste Tour mit den Rolling Stones war und beeindruckt uns nicht nur mit seinen Deutschkenntnissen, sondern auch mit seinem eigenen Kinderbuch. Wie immer bei Nachts Um Halb 1 gibt es Songs in einer einzigartigen 3D-Audio-Version. Nic Cester spielt für uns: God Knows (Live at Nachts Um Halb 1) Did I Just Fall in Love (Live at Nachts Um Halb 1) I Put a Spell on You (Live at Nachts Um Halb 1) Also Kopfhörer auf und herzlich Willkommen zu Nachts Um Halb 1 – dem Musikpodcast direkt aus St. Pauli. Für uns geht es jetzt in die Winterpause - Wir hören uns am 06.02.2023 wieder! Feedback oder Fragen gerne an nachts@germanwahnsinn.de! Gefördert von der Behörde für Kultur und Medien der Freien & Hansestadt Hamburg. Nic Cester Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nic_cester/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NicCesterOfficial Nachts Um Halb 1: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nachts.um.halb1/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nachtsumhalb1 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6DneT7qmJgZJGRr4UU4Knw German Wahnsinn: Website: https://germanwahnsinn.de Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/germanwahnsinn/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GermanWahnsinn

It should come as no shock that we're talking about the shock rock/Halloween classic, "I Put A Spell On You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins for our Halloween episode. Covers by: Nina Simone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Kim Nalley, Nowlab, The Holophonics, William Shatner and Pat Travers Spotify playlist here

Marc Alghini's Music Monday segment on The Greg and Dan Show celebrates Halloween with this week's edition featuring Michael Jackson's classic "Thriller," the iconically-scary "I Put A Spell On You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the infamous "Monster Mash." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Click Here for the Official You're Not Listening Spotify Playlist!  To hear these songs on Youtube, click the links below!-I Put A Spell On You Live Performance-The Twilight Zone Main Theme (video)opOther Links from this episode:-Check out more amazing music podcasts at www.pantheonpodcasts.com!-Listen to Shaun's personal Halloween Playlist on Spotify!If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure you SUBSCRIBE, rate & review, and reach out to us!Click here to visit our website!Twitter: @YNLPodcastFacebook: You're Not ListeningInstagram: @YNLPodcastYNL Gear: TeeSpring Store!If you'd like to Support You're Not Listening, please check out our Patreon page and become a patron to get access to all of our extra content, exclusive playlists, and more!For your FREE in-home trial of 5 different glasses frames from Warby Parker, go to www.warbyparkertrial.com/notlistening! Thanks so much for (not)listening!

Click Here for the Official You're Not Listening Spotify Playlist!  To hear these songs on Youtube, click the links below!-I Put A Spell On You Live Performance-The Twilight Zone Main Theme (video)opOther Links from this episode:-Check out more amazing music podcasts at www.pantheonpodcasts.com!-Listen to Shaun's personal Halloween Playlist on Spotify!If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure you SUBSCRIBE, rate & review, and reach out to us!Click here to visit our website!Twitter: @YNLPodcastFacebook: You're Not ListeningInstagram: @YNLPodcastYNL Gear: TeeSpring Store!If you'd like to Support You're Not Listening, please check out our Patreon page and become a patron to get access to all of our extra content, exclusive playlists, and more!For your FREE in-home trial of 5 different glasses frames from Warby Parker, go to www.warbyparkertrial.com/notlistening! Thanks so much for (not)listening!

We had the pleasure of interviewing Ginger Ming over Zoom video.Drag Race and singer/songwriter Ginger Minj returns to the big screen in the new Disney+ film, Hocus Pocus 2. Along with the film release, Minj released her own rendition of the song, "I Put A Spell On You” with an original music video. The master performer is on tour supporting her Hocus Pocus Halloween Bash, a 9-city tour that kicked off in Atlanta, GA at the OutFront Theatre on September 23rd. Since releasing her debut country music album, Double Wide Diva, one year ago to critical acclaim, Minj has kept a stacked schedule and toured the world including residencies in the UK, Las Vegas, and Provincetown, MA. Signed to PEG Records with distribution by ADA/Warner Music Group, Minj just released a new collaboration, "Sunshine State" with country music artist and songwriter Brandon Stansell. She has spent the past decade touring the world, performing showtunes for Broadway royalty on national television, starring in the 2018 Netflix feature film Dumplin' (Jennifer Anniston, Dove Cameron), and recording her three studio albums.We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com. www.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #GingerMing #HocusPocus #HocusPocus2 #IPutaSpellOnYou #Disney+ #LGBTQ #PRIDE #DragRace #RuPaul #DoubleWideDiva #NewMusic #zoomListen & Subscribe to BiB https://www.bringinitbackwards.com/follow/ Follow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpod

British rock outfit The Animals are one rocks most defining acts, ever.Period.Starting in the 1960s around the same time as The Beatles, The Animals revolutionised public perception of rock music, churning out hits like House of The Rising Sun, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, Boom Boom, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, I Put A Spell On You, It's My Life and more.The band were only the second British band to top the American charts - the other being The Beatles - and they introduced a sound to the world that has been copied and built on ever since.Now, almost 60 years later, The Animals return to Australia for their Greatest Hits Tour, with, surprisingly, original drummer John Steel still occupying the drum stool.HEAVY caught up with Steel recently to discuss the tour and the legacy of The Animals."It was just before the big lockdown happened," he said when asked when The Animals were last in this country. "We were supposed to be back in 2020 but that was cancelled, and another one was postponed and so on, so here we after 3 years and it's been a big miss because we love playing in Australia. It's a great country with great hospitality, great food, great wine... everything's good. What's not to like (laughs)? There's sunshine too!"Although the title of the tour gives pretty much everything away, we press Steel on what fans can expect from the run of shows."We will be doing the big hits," he affirmed, "but we've got a good repertoire of B sides and album tracks that we can mine. Danny, the lead singer and guitarist, he's an encyclopedia on 60s music, particularly The Animals, and he's a big Beatles fan, but he keeps digging around and bringing up songs that I haven't played for 50 years. He's like "Johnny, how about this one?" (laughs). So we give it a try and if it works we throw it in. It keeps the set fresh so that we're not playing the same thing every night, the same way every night, which is good for us and good for the audience too."In the full interview, Johns talks about keeping the songs fresh and interesting despite playing them for over 50 years, how The Animals stage show has changed from when they started to now, the early days of the band and the musical climate they came into, The House Of The Rising Sun and it's phenomenal success, if he thinks the band were ready for what came after, recording that song in one take, their formula for success, the enduring success of The Animals and more.

Das sechste Studioalbum von INXS "Kick" erschien im Oktober 1987 und verhalf der Band zu internationaler Popularität. Weltweit wurde die Platte 20 Millionen mal verkauft. 1977 startet die Band zunächst mit dem Namen "Farriss Brothers", ab 1979 nennen sie sich INXS. In Australien gelten sie als ausgezeichnete Live-Band, spielen in sogenannten Pub Gigs in Kneipen. 1982 schaffen sie es mit der Single "The One Thing" dank MTV in die US-Top 30 und spielen als Vorband von Queen. Mit "Kick" hatten sich INXS vorgenommen, international durchzustarten mit einer Mischung aus Rock, Funk und Soul und einem Album, auf dem jeder Song eine Hitsingle hätte sein können - am Ende waren es fünf an der Zahl - der größte Hit, "Need You Tonight" erreichte in den USA Platz 1 der Single-Charts. Dabei weigert sich das Plattenlabel Atlantic Records zunächst, die Platte, die in Sydney und Paris aufgenommen wird, zu veröffentlichen. Erst eine erfolgreiche Collegeradio-Tour führt dazu, dass die Platte schließlich doch erscheint. Ein Erfolsgeheimnis von INXS ist, dass sie Funk mit Rock verweben und so einen treibenden Groove generieren. Dabei nutzen sie alle zur Verfügung stehenden musikalischen Mittel: Exzessiven Drum Computer, Schlagzeug, dominante E-Gitarren, Saxophon. Typisches Stilmittel im Sound dieses INXS-Albums sind die Spannung erzeugenden Pausen, wie besonders in "Need You Tonight" und "Never Tear Us Apart". Texten und Komponieren funktionieren beim Album "Kick" kongenial: Musikalisches Mastermind war Andrew Farriss, Michael Hutchence dagegen konnte singen und texten. Für das Album haben die Brüder erstmals Musik und Texte alleine produziert, ohne die Hilfe des Labels oder anderer Autoren. Warum dieses Album so bedeutend war, worin die Raffinessen in der Komposition bestehen und viele andere Hintergründe zu "Kick" – darüber sprechen wir in dieser Folge des SWR1 Meilensteine Podcasts. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album "Kick" wird im Podcast gesprochen 09:40 Mins – "Guns In The Sky" 15:13 Mins – "New Sensation" 29:54 Mins – "Devil Inside" 37:30 Mins – "Never Tear Us Apart" 48:00 Mins – "Never Tear Us Apart" (Soul-Version) 54:06 Mins – "See You Tonight" __________ Über diese Songs wird außerdem im Podcast gesprochen 12:37 Mins – "Housequake" von Prince 49:25 Mins – "I Put A Spell On You" von Screamin Jay Hawkins 50:58 Mins – "The Show Must Go On" von Queen __________ Links zum Podcast: 10 Dinge, die man über INXS nicht weiß: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/inxs-kick-10-things-you-didnt-know-127082/Die offizielle utobiographie: https://archive.org/details/inxsstorytostory00inxsClassic Rock Review zum 30sten: https://classicrock.net/review-inxs-kick-30-limited-deluxe-edition/Rolling Stone Review zum 30sten: https://www.rollingstone.de/reviews/inxs-kick-30/YouTube Channel von INXS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAldEKRD6LXGd8FAXI6Oo3w__________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Schreibt uns an: meilensteine@swr.de

As fellow citizens of planet earth, we here at ATTT HQ hope you are all doing well and are keeping your heads on a swivel in this mind-boggling day and age. Malevolent forces are all around, using hapless rubes to do their evil bidding and making this world into the current shitstorm of misinformation and propaganda we see every day. Don't listen to 'em! Listen to us. We may not have all the answers but at least we're going to give you what you want - music and more music! Ryan Stockstad is back for Part 2 of a very prescient and vital topic - Songs About Mind Control. Do what you can to keep yours under your own control.If you missed Part 1 go here:https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/alltimetopten/episodes/2022-09-12T04_00_00-07_00Listen to the entire Top Ten Songs About Mind Control playlist on Apple Music:https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/episode-529-530-top-ten-songs-about-mind-control/pl.u-76oNlPbuvJx25EG?ls&fbclid=IwAR3V0CTZ_CCGDEIF3KnOpROvODBKZaWLubA5GSWokmtC-GFrg2rrdvRX2gECan't get enough Ryan Stockstad? Neither can we. With Halloween coming up you should get in the spirit of the season by binging Ryan's awesome YouTube series Halloween Horror Picks:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVRiDw73ddw&list=PLi45zQyp9B6FkqCHlxqndk3iLU0qEOx5MAlso check out his other show Macon County Movie Club:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn17pT_AS4U&list=PLjWAPdF9m6GnMCJRNiwcRp0lxd8voWfvqGet monthly bonus episodes of All Time Top Ten by joining us on Patreon for as little as $2 a month. Find out more here:https://www.patreon.com/alltimetopten

Sintonía: "Beautiful Land" - Nina Simone "California Soul", "Go Away, Little Boy", "Liberation Conversation", "Woman Of The Ghetto", "Call It Stormy Monday" y "I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel To Be Free)" - Marlena Shaw; "I Put A Spell On You", "Tomorrow Is My Turn", "Marriage Is For Old Folks" y "Feeling Good" - Nina Simone; "Paradiddle Joe", "Strange Medowlark" y "Briar Bush (aka Southern Scene)" - The Dave Brubeck Quartet with Carmen McRae; "Use Me" - Liza Minnelli; "Carcará" - Nancy Ames. Escuchar audio

Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Avec lui, le cri était élevé au rang d'art, dans toutes ses nuances et dans toutes les tonalités. C'était son fond de commerce, car oui, il était payé pour ça ! Ovni du blues et du rock'n'roll, cet hurluberlu moins fou qu'il en avait l'air, aimait entrer sur scène planqué dans un cercueil, avant d'entonner son grand succès : I Put A Spell On You.

Brian goes looking for the originator of shock rock and ends up on a wild ride of half-truths and full paternity. Guest co-host: Phil Medley This episode is brought to you by Modern Empire Records celebrating the release of DUE SOUTH, the new album from Foxbat, available everywhere on April 22, 2022. https://www.modernempiremusic.com/ https://linktr.ee/Foxbat SHOW NOTES The book “I Put a Spell On You” - https://www.amazon.com/Put-Spell-You-Bizarre-Screamin/dp/1627310754/ref=sr_1_1?crid=25PO46QAHWTFB&keywords=screamin+jay+hawkins+book&qid=1650076864&sprefix=screamin+jay+hawkins+book%2Caps%2C89&sr=8-1 I Put a Spell on Me – the documentary -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMK6txCcPck Background on the doc: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/i_put_a_spell_on_me_terrific_documentary_on_screamin_jay_hawkins https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/WolfFiles/story?id=94216&page=1&singlePage=true https://www.salon.com/2000/09/07/screamin/ https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/screamin-jay-hawkins-are-you-one-of-jays-kids-album-review/#:~:text=It%20was%20most%20assuredly%20a,record%20label%20proudly%20called%20Bizarre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Put_a_Spell_on_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamin%27_Jay_Hawkins Armpit #6 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqDOjAAxrxY https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-02-16-0102160008-story.html Hanif Abdurraqib NPR piece: https://www.klcc.org/npr-music/2020-04-25/because-youre-mine-searching-for-the-children-of-screamin-jay-hawkins

 What it's All About:Two weeks ago, I looked at Rituals. Today, I'm going to talk about creating your own spells. I'm aware that not all pagans do spells, but some of us do. So, I will discuss how you can create rituals and spells to suit a variety of needs, from healing to prosperity, to business. I will discuss the history of spell work and why we require ingredients for it. The spirit guide of the week is Circe and the dream symbols are knitting, pan, and paper.Songs Featured:1. Love Spell (Re-Loved) by Inkubus Sukkubus2. Blue Spell by Three Weird Sisters3. I Put A Spell On You by Bjornemyr4. Circe by Wendy Rule5. Banishment Spell by Unto Ashes6. Pan the Fallen by Castalia7. Cast Away by Arthur Hinds  Links Mentioned:- A sweeping history of magic - from witchcraft to shamanism - www.historyextra.com/period/ancient…aft-shamanism/- Ten Strange Things You Didn't Know About the History of Magic - artsandculture.google.com/story/ten-st…LSqk8PhNZ6KA- A Guide to Ancient Magic - www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gu…ic-180960129/- Peace Ritual - druidnetwork.org/what-is-druidry/…/peace/dnifmpir/- A Secularist Perspective On Peace & Pagan Peace Ritual - www.patheos.com/blogs/pagantama/2…gan-peace-ritual/- A Beginner's Guide to Casting Your Own Spells at Home - www.allure.com/story/how-to-cast-spells- Spellcrafting: Strengthen the Power of Your Craft by Creating and Casting Your Own Unique Spells - bookendswinchester.indielite.org/book/978…07212646- Creating Your Own Spells (Practical Magick #8) - www.bookpassage.com/book/9781948834070- How to Write Your Own Spells - www.youtube.com/watch?v=H76vRSIU-Yg- The Dark Daughter of the Norse King - sites.pitt.edu/~dash/witch.html#darkdaughter 

Eind jaren 50 richten de broers Fogerty de band : Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets op. Ze worden regionaal bekend en krijgen een contract aangeboden bij een platenlabel. Na een naamswijziging en wat uitgebrachte singles kreeg de band niet het succes waar ze op hadden gehoopt. Reden genoeg om in 1967 nog eens van naam te veranderen die voor altijd in het collectieve geheugen zal blijven zitten : Creedence Clearwater Revival of vaak ook afgekort tot CCR. Een cover van "I Put A Spell On You" van Screamin' Jay Hawkins levert ze een notering in de Amerikaanse hitparade op. En met de hitsingle "Proud Mary" breken ze helemaal door. De band levert in de tijd daarna hit na hit als "Bad Moon Rising" en "Fortunate Son". In 1972 valt het doek voor de band, maar de hits zullen voor altijd meegaan. Deze relatief korte periode met de grootste successen licht Maarten graag toe in deze aflevering. • Volg ons op sociale media! : - Instagram : www.instagram.com/muziekuitdegroef - Twitter : www.twitter.com/uitdegroef • Of bezoek onze website : www.muziekuitdegroef.nl

Diese Band kam wie aus dem Nichts und war auf einmal unglaublich populär: Mit ihren bodenständigen, eingängigen Bluesrock-Songs begeisterten Creedence Clearwater Revival Ende der 60er/Anfang der 70er Millionen Hörer auf der ganzen Welt. Über das Geheimnis ihres Erfolgs, die Rolle von Bandleader John Fogerty und warum die Band trotz ihrer vielen Plattenverkäufe enorm über den Tisch gezogen wurde, unterhalten wir uns in dieser Folge! ++++++++++Song-Tipps zur Folge++++++++++ „Suzie Q“, „Proud Mary“, „Down On The Corner“, „Poorboy Shuffle“, „Lookin‘ Out My Back Door“, „Who'll Stop The Rain“, „Up Around The Bend“, „Fortunate Son“, „I Put A Spell On You“, „I Heard It Through The Grapevine“, Born On The Bayou“

Estomper les barrières stylistiques entre le baroque et le jazz, voilà un exercice peut-être périlleux aux yeux de certains mais ô combien réussi par la soprano Ellen Giacone et l'ensemble qu'elle a fondé en 2018. (Body & Soul Consort). Je vous invite ici à rencontrer cette artiste aux talents multiples et aboutis. Nous parlerons ainsi de de son parcours et de son disque, I put a spell on you, pensé autour du thème de l'amour ensorceleur et ravageur.  Entre jazz et baroque, voici la talentueuse et polymathe Ellen Giacone.  Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Good evening runners, Are you ready for a kick-ass fun run!  Well, let's get moving as I Put A Spell On You with more great running music.   Let's Power […]

Hello and welcome to bedtime stories. Today's episode I will be reading I Put A Spell On You.

Gavin Creel is an actor, singer and songwriter who received a Tony Award for his performance as Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly!, starring Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce. He made his Broadway debut originating the role of Jimmy Smith in Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which he received his first Tony Award nomination, and has additional Broadway credits that include La Cage aux Follies, She Loves Me, Mary Poppins, Waitress, and Hair, which earned him his second Tony Award nomination. Gavin originated the role of Elder Price in the West End production of Book of Mormon (earning an Olivier Award), and reprised the role on Broadway and the US National Tour. On television he co-starred alongside Julie Andrews in ABC's Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime, and stars in Ryan Murphy's new spin off American Horror Stories. Next up Gavin can be seen as part of the upcoming Halloween special “I Put A Spell On You: The Sanderson Variant”, which streams on Thursday, October 28th, with all proceeds going to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. From conservative Ohio, to the lights of Broadway, Gavin is a proud member of the theatre community, but also talks candidly about the mental, physical and emotional toll of a life on the stage. He reflects on the last few years through the pandemic, how he went “inward” in a way he never has before, and opens up about the ways in which therapy - “unconditional acceptance” and support - have helped him. Gavin talks about using his voice to support activists/activism, and shares the story of his involvement in getting the green light for the Broadway's Hair to miss a show and join the National Equality March in Washington, D.C in 2009. He also chats about the history of Broadway Bares, and the magic of “I Put A Spell On You: The Sanderson Variant”.  In this episode, we talk about:  His friendship with Jay Armstrong Jones  The format for this years I Put A Spell On You event  Learning to set boundaries for your mental health  Activism through theatre and the arts  The new show he is writing through MetLiveArts Connect with Gavin: More info about "I Put A Spell On You: The Sanderson Variant" Get tix to his MetLiveArts event On the web: gavincreel.com Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast Twitter & Instagram: @theatre_podcast Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast TheTheatrePodcast.com Alan's personal Instagram: @alanseales Email me at feedback@thetheatrepodcast.com. I want to know what you think. Thank you to our friends Jukebox The Ghost for our intro and outro music. You can find them on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @jukeboxtheghost or via the web via jukeboxtheghost.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Halloween folks!  We continue our Halloween tradition this year by listening to Screamin' Jay Hawkins' song 'I Put A Spell On You'.  Originally meant to be a Blues style ballad a night of heavy drinking made this song into one of the earliest examples of what we now know as Shock Rock. We discuss covers of this song by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Annie Lennox, Nina Simone and Bette Midler as well and discuss the similarities, differences and which versions we like best.  Thanks for listening!Intro/Outro Music:Upbeat Forever by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5011-upbeat-foreverLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Singer/Songwriter/Pianist Nina Simone released “I Put A Spell On You” in 1965. Although she didn't write any of the songs on this particular album, she is known for her songwriting abilities and piano skills in the classical and jazz realms, as well as her expressive vocal delivery. NPR placed the album as number 3 on the "150 Greatest Albums Made by Women" list.Subscribe on Patreon for Bonus Episodes and to join our private GroupMe where we've been discussing upcoming festivals, new releases, and music in general: https://patreon.com/postampPRO TIP: We encourage you to listen to the album in full, either before or after its related episode. (Or before AND after!)Click here for our Spotify playlists for this and past episodes: https://open.spotify.com/user/kd8l2yvse4sbkeka389htt4o1?si=d169a6785b8c4ec9Visit the website to leave us a message: https://www.chwstudios.com/post-amp-podcast

(Comedian) Welcome to my nightmare! It's Halloween season, and with All Hallow's Eve just around the corner, Rory Patrick returned to talk about some of our favorite spooky season songs. Everything from classics like "I Put A Spell On You" to modern takes on classic horror films like Ice Nine Kills, James and Rory get scary. a lughole podcast. Rory's Playlist: Screamin' Jay Hawkins – I Put a Spell On You Warren Zevon – Werewolves of London Benji Hughes – The Mummy Bow Wow Wow – I Want Candy Ray Parker Jr. – Ghostbusters James' Playlist: Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit – Be Afraid My Chemical Romance – Vampires Will Never Hurt You The Who – Boris the Spider Ice Nine Kills – IT is the End (feat. Less Than Jake, Fenix TX, JR Wailerski, Buddy Schaub and Will Salazar) Follow Rory on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rorypatrickcomix/ Follow James on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamespcrowley Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamespcrowley68 https://jamespcrowley.com/ Follow James Crowley's Infinite Playlist on Instagram! Music: https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music

The 1995 Remix EP From The Shock Rocker Himself Has Some Appeal But Can Cut Down To A Smaller Track Listing. RATE: 6.5/10 Favorites: Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), I Put A Spell On You, Scabs Guns & Peanut Butter, SCGB, Dance Of The Dope Hats Least Favorites: Diary Of A Dope Fiend Keep On Craving My Lil Junkies

Ken Kessler from the Sounds of Christmas talks about "I Put A Spell On You" and other Halloween music his station is playing this month!

Mattiel "Looking down the Barrel of a Gun"Will Johnson "Cornelius"Patti Smith "Dancing Barefoot"Valerie June "Heart On a String"Bonnie Raitt "Love Me Like A Man"Paul Westerberg "Knockin On Mine"Langhorne Slim "Rebel Side of Heaven"Nicole Atkins "Darkness Falls So Quiet"Sarah Jarosz "Grandma's Hands"Doc Oliver "Couldn't Wait"Lucero "Hello My Name is Izzy"John Moreland "Cataclysm Blues No. 4"Lightnin' Hopkins "Hello Central (Give Me 209)"Willie Nelson "Phases and Stages (Theme) / Washing the Dishes"Willie Nelson "Phases and Stages (Theme) / Walkin'"Alejandro Escovedo "Always A Friend"Durand Jones & The Indications "More Than Ever"Yola "Break The Bough"The Crazy World of Arthur Brown "I Put A Spell On You"The Rolling Stones "Tumbling Dice"The Marvelettes "Too Many Fish In The Sea"Morgan Wade "Wilder Days"Tom Petty "Harry Green"R.E.M. "Near Wild Heaven"Bob Dylan "Duquesne Whistle"Two Cow Garage "Geri"Son Volt "Diamonds and Cigarettes"Two Cow Garage "Shaking an Accent"Nancy Sinatra "Get While The Gettin's Good"The Box Tops "I Met Her In Church"Lillie Mae "You've Got Other Girls for That"Eilen Jewell "Rain Roll In"Big Star "September Gurls"Phoebe Bridgers "Halloween"Fiona Apple "I Want You To Love Me"Alex Chilton "Underclass"Julien Baker "Hardline"Alex Chilton/Hi Rhythm Section "Maybelline (Live)"Old 97's/Waylon Jennings "The Other Shoe"Drive-By Truckers "Kinky Hypocrite"Drag the River "A Way With Women"Vic Chesnutt "Doris Days"Shovels & Rope "Johnny 99"The Hold Steady "The Bear And the Maiden Fair"Blue Mountain "The Day They Tore Down The Hippie Hotel"The Black Crowes "Willin'"

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Troy Redfern  | Waiting For Your Love  | The Fire Cosmic | Lightnin' Guy & The Houserockers  | Freddie's Blues  | Plays Hound Dog Taylor | Eric Bibb  | Dear America  | Dear America | Phill Raymond  | Deceitful Eyes  | The Last Pie Van | Ajay Srivastav  | The Line  | Powerless | Starlite Campbell Band  | Language of Curiosity| Language of Curiosity | Professor Longhair  | Tell Me Pretty Baby  |  | Debbie Bond  | Winds Of Change  | Blues Without Borders | Bean Picker's Union  | Strange  | Greatest Picks | Rien De Faire  | I Put A Spell On You  | Blue Haze | Bessie Jones & with the Georgia Sea Island Singers  | Go Wash In the Beautiful Stream  | Get In Union  | Alan Lomax Archives/Association For Cultural Equity | Sensational Whirlwinds  | (Make Old) Satan Leave Me Alone  | This May Be My Last Time (CD1); Raw African-American Gospel on 45rpm | Billy F Gibbons  | Vagabond Man  | Hardware | Bridget Kelly Band  | Things About to Change  | Dark Spaces | Paul Orta & Steve Coleridge & the Short Fuse Swamp Blues Band  | I'm Gonna Keep What I Got  | Slim Harpo Project | Walter Parks and the Unlawful Assembly  | Shoulder It  | Unlawful Assembly | Elvis Presley  | Good Rockin' Tonight  | Les Pionniers Du Rock | Bill Justis  | Raunchy  | 50s Juke Box Hits | Little Richard  | Lucille  | Les Pionniers Du Rock | Brent Carter and Friends V2  | Work To Do  | SONGS OF ISOLATION 3 | Donna Herula  | Got What I Deserve  | Bang At The Door | Ale Ponti  | Got The Blues About My Car  | Dead Railroad Line Chronicles | Gabe Stillman  | Just Say The Word  | Gabe  |  | Polly O'Keary and The Rhythm Method  | American Highways  | 50  |  | Starlite Campbell Band  | Bad Sign  | Language of Curiosity | Queen Esther  | Take It to the Limit  | Gild The Black LIlly | Lindsay Beaver & Brad Stivers  | I Know What To Do ft. Joe Murphy  | Lindsay & Brad

-Depeche Mode ‎– Remixes 81··04 : “Pain Killer” (Kill The Pain DJ Shadow Vs. Depeche Mode) “Useless” (The Kruder + Dorfmeister Session ™) “In Your Room” (The Jeep Rock Mix) “Dream On” (Dave Clarke Acoustic Version) “It's No Good” (Speedy J Mix) “Master And Servant” (An ON-USound Science Fiction Dance Hall Classic) “Enjoy The Silence” (Timo Maas Extended Mix) -N.Y. Lounge – Vol. 3 - Vertical New Yorkers Cubik And Origami “The Real Estate” Moca “Latein” Dublex Inc. “Queeek” South-Froggies “Basin Street Blues” (Colonel Nico Remix) Minus 8 “Soverato” Praful “Let The Chips Fall” Gabin “Doo Uap, Doo Uap, Doo Uap” Nina Simone “I Put A Spell On You” OP* & Ticklah Feat. Nathalie Sanchez “Rudy” Portorock Blades* Feat. Don D'Mingo “Boricua De Cora” 2hoch4 “International” Lenny Mac Dowell Feat. Wolfman “Heaven” Buttaball “Somethin' About Cha” Zuell “Beyond My Soul” Moca “Post It” Escuchar audio

After realizing he “didn't just want to get up there and do a kick ball change, and sing a high C”, but also wanted his art to make change in the world, this Broadway veteran decided social justice would become a theme in his career.  Jay Armstrong Johnson is no stranger to the stage, or screen for that matter, having six Broadway productions on his resume, as well as a recurring role on the ABC series Quantico. His Broadway credits include Phantom of the Opera (Raoul), On The Town, Hands on a Hardbody, Catch Me If You Can, and Hair (Broadway debut). Jay originated the role of Banko in Roundabout Theatre Company's world premiere of Scotland, PA, for which he received a 2020 Outer Critics Circle Award Honor. He is the driving force, and a star of, the Hocus Pocus themed concert event “I Put A Spell On You”, which raised over a quarter of a million dollars for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS last year. Coming up next, Jay will be celebrating his birthday with all who tune in to his live streamed show from 54 Below on September 1st.  Jay grew up a “queer kid” in Texas, and when he joined a community theater group at 12 years old, he realized he had found his place and his people. Jay shares his deep love for the movie Hocus Pocus with us, and how it later inspired him to create the now yearly and widely successful “I Put A Spell On You” show/fundraiser. He opens up about how his Broadway debut in Hair was a “life changing experience”, one where they played the part of 60's hippies on stage, and also walked the walk offstage going to rallies and marches for marriage equality as a cast. Jay also speaks candidly about the “reckoning” of the last year within the theater industry, and the need for representation both on and off stage. In this episode, we talk about:  Being bullied at school as a child  Growing up as a “scholarship kid” How he almost ended up a swimmer  How his parents divorce provided some “relief” Connecting with Bette Midler Connect with Jay: IG: @jay_a_johnson Twitter: @jay_a_johnson On the Web Get Tickets to his 54/Below Birthday concert Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast Twitter & Instagram: @theatre_podcast Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast TheTheatrePodcast.com Alan's personal Instagram: @alanseales Email me at feedback@thetheatrepodcast.com. I want to know what you think. Thank you to our friends Jukebox The Ghost for our intro and outro music. You can find them on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @jukeboxtheghost or via the web via jukeboxtheghost.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Week…. #EveryPlaylistTellsAStory We cover Memorial Day recap, Indy 500, this week in Witch History that leads into the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “I Put A Spell On You”, Amusement Parks, including a local one featured in the new Fozzy single “Sane”, Roller Coasters, which of us doesn't enjoy rides, and Andrew “Dice” Clay. Songs on our Spotify Playlist at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3UTJ2QXx9h9UWYQYWRoUtI?si=PJUZYrQHS0KjPPgUUHzmmg Youtube: Creedence Clearwater Revival “I Put A Spell On You” https://youtu.be/KWxDGQm2hKk Fozzy “Sane” https://youtu.be/dusPBwR8MWM #Indy500 #SalemWitches #CreedenceClearwaterRevival #IPutASpellOnYou #TheCrucible #AmusementParks #Fozzy #Sane #TheVoyage #HolidayWorld #SantaClausLand #AndrewDiceClay Facebook @EveryPlaylistTellsAStoryPodcast Twitter @EPTAStory Instagram @EveryPlaylistTellsAStory EveryPlaylistTellsAStory@gmail.com

What was Screamin' Jay Hawkins' real name? Why did he write I Put A Spell On You? How many hits did he have? Why did Fats Domino fire him? Join Stevie Nix as he answers all of these questions and more on this episode that finds some bewitching covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' only hit.WARNING: This episode contains traces of Diamanda Galas.Featured artists [in alphabetical order]:CS ArmstrongJimmy BarnesCaterina CaselliCreedence Clearwater Revival Screamin' Jay HawkinsMojo JujuThe KillsMarilyn MansonNotorious BIGShe & HimNina SimoneAlice SmithSoniqueGizmo Varillas Voctave Join Stevie on Spotify and Instagramwww.songsungnew.com20 Songs That Are A Bit Bewitching

Book Club!!! We read Nina Simone's autobiography: I Put A Spell On You, and are coming at you with one queer ass book report! How many times can we say "Singular?" Well, take a listen and find out as we etch our new knowledge onto the Mount Rushmore of Divas. We travel from North Carolina to Barbados, from New York to Paris and Liberia to learn about the life and legacy of this complex, beautiful, century shifting virtuoso. We let her own words and story re-contextualize how we listen to her music. So come hear about her days with Lorraine Hansberry, her nights with Odetta, her improvs with Al Shackman and her protests with James Baldwin as we pay tribute to the genius, Nina, who put a spell on us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Broomy takes hold of this episode with the story of Screamin' Jay Hawkins! Known for his song "I Put A Spell On You", not as known for his boxing career, being a prisoner of war, complex controversies, incredible performances, or his vast influence on music. We recorded such a powerful episode we had to split it into 2 with Mystic's topic coming at you in the next one!!!

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Memphis" by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands' surname as Land. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn't actually their complete recordings -- for that you'd also need to buy the Decca recordings -- but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan's first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we're going to look at a song that, more than any other song we've looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at "House of the Rising Sun", and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities -- Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it's another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie" -- a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we're talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn't be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon's tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that's often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is "Roll 'Em Pete", the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Roll 'em Pete"] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn't like Price either as a person or for his taste in music -- both Burdon and Steel regarded Price's tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn't that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel's tastes intersected -- musicians they've cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn't turn up to a gig -- he'd been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats -- not the same band who backed Marty Wilde -- and had even recorded an album with them, though I've been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities -- Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, "Pretty Thing"] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn't* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner's band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn't make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Wade in the Water"] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he'd heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they'd been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones' old venues. A trade was agreed -- the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo's normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds'. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek's footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, "Whole Lotta Woman"] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he'd had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, "Johnny B Goode"] He'd returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group's blues purism and Most's pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded "Don't Tear My Clothes": [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, "Don't Tear My Clothes"] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as "Mama Let Me Lay It On You" in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, "Mama Let Me Lay it On You"] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Baby, Let Me Lay It On You"] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He'd heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land's version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands' track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns' other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan's version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it's quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals' version, and that they'd just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands' version. They cut out Lands' intro, and restored a lot of Dylan's lyric, but musically it's Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different -- compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending -- Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let me Hold Your Hand"] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] So whatever Valentine's later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it's still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals' second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan's first album. "House of the Rising Sun" has been argued by some, though I think it's a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard"] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it's that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name "Rising Sun Blues", by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, "Rising Sun Blues"] The song has been described as about several things -- about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling -- depending on the precise version. It's often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women's Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk's version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, "Rising Sun Blues"] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner's in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, "House of the Rising Sun"] Van Ronk took Wood's version of Turner's version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is "a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers". It's actually something you'd get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that's used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward -- everything from "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks to "Go Now" by the Moody Blues to "Forever" by the Beach Boys -- but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, "House of the Rising Sun"] "House of the Rising Sun" soon became the highlight of van Ronk's live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk's arrangement, but he wasn't as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk's bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It's simpler, but it's all from van Ronk's arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk's version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun"] As van Ronk later told the story (though I'm going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): "One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea." van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan's performance "it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby." van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to "play that Dylan song". The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out -- and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan's rearrangement of van Ronk's rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord -- the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song "Talking 'Bout You", to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o'clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night's show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not "Talking 'Bout You", should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn't ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn't last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn't play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger -- which when you're recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group's manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had "explained" to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun (US edit)"] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals' version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan's new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of "House of the Rising Sun" from the sessions from Dylan's first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)"] That wasn't released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we'll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he'd stolen it from the Animals. The Animals' next single, "I'm Crying", was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards -- they just didn't like each other by this point. The record after that, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] The Animals' version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone's original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don't think it does. It's a great record, and it's deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone's version, it's lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals' recording, which they didn't understand given that she hadn't written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel's version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren't "so bad for a bunch of white boys", but that doesn't sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn't... "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke's "Bring it on Home to Me", which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn't in the flat, and Chandler wouldn't see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price's first royalty cheque for arranging "House of the Rising Sun" had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn't going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of "I Put A Spell On You", in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put A Spell On You"] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals' first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they'd decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann's piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann's was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever -- though one suspects that's partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband's single -- but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing "Oh girl, now you're young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you'll just grow old before your time" to "Now my girl, you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you'll be dead before your time is due", and making subtler changes like changing "if it's the last thing that we do" to "if it's the last thing we ever do", improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept -- and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge -- Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley's low voice and Bobby Hatfield's high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song's momentum -- it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] The Animals' version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It's one of the few times I've wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] From a creators' rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn't have messed with her song. But from a listener's point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" was followed by another lesser but listenable single, "It's My Life", which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company -- the group were getting sick of Most's attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan's sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, "Inside -- Looking Out", a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn't even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, "All Night Long"] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off -- there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We'll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you'll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as "The Animals and Friends", with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I've seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show -- though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, "That's not Eric Clapton!", before starting to sing along happily... And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon's Animals after quitting Steel's, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands’ surname as Land. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn’t actually their complete recordings — for that you’d also need to buy the Decca recordings — but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan’s first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we’re going to look at a song that, more than any other song we’ve looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We’re going to look at “House of the Rising Sun”, and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you’re not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it’s a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there’s a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it’s another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain’s culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you’re in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on “Louie, Louie” — a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we’re talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn’t be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon’s tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that’s often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is “Roll ‘Em Pete”, the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Roll ’em Pete”] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn’t like Price either as a person or for his taste in music — both Burdon and Steel regarded Price’s tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn’t that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel’s tastes intersected — musicians they’ve cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn’t turn up to a gig — he’d been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats — not the same band who backed Marty Wilde — and had even recorded an album with them, though I’ve been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities — Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, “Pretty Thing”] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn’t* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner’s band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn’t make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, “Wade in the Water”] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he’d heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they’d been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones’ old venues. A trade was agreed — the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo’s normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds’. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek’s footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, “Whole Lotta Woman”] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he’d had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, “Johnny B Goode”] He’d returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group’s blues purism and Most’s pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded “Don’t Tear My Clothes”: [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, “Don’t Tear My Clothes”] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay it On You”] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He’d heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land’s version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands’ track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns’ other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan’s version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it’s quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals’ version, and that they’d just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands’ version. They cut out Lands’ intro, and restored a lot of Dylan’s lyric, but musically it’s Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different — compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending — Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let me Hold Your Hand”] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] So whatever Valentine’s later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it’s still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals’ second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan’s first album. “House of the Rising Sun” has been argued by some, though I think it’s a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it’s that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name “Rising Sun Blues”, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, “Rising Sun Blues”] The song has been described as about several things — about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling — depending on the precise version. It’s often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women’s Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk’s version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, “Rising Sun Blues”] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner’s in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, “House of the Rising Sun”] Van Ronk took Wood’s version of Turner’s version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is “a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers”. It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks to “Go Now” by the Moody Blues to “Forever” by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, “House of the Rising Sun”] “House of the Rising Sun” soon became the highlight of van Ronk’s live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk’s arrangement, but he wasn’t as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk’s bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It’s simpler, but it’s all from van Ronk’s arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk’s version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun”] As van Ronk later told the story (though I’m going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): “One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea.” van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan’s performance “it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby.” van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to “play that Dylan song”. The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out — and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan’s rearrangement of van Ronk’s rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord — the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song “Talking ‘Bout You”, to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o’clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night’s show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not “Talking ‘Bout You”, should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn’t ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn’t last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn’t play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger — which when you’re recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group’s manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had “explained” to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun (US edit)”] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals’ version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan’s new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of “House of the Rising Sun” from the sessions from Dylan’s first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)”] That wasn’t released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we’ll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he’d stolen it from the Animals. The Animals’ next single, “I’m Crying”, was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — they just didn’t like each other by this point. The record after that, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] The Animals’ version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone’s original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don’t think it does. It’s a great record, and it’s deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone’s version, it’s lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals’ recording, which they didn’t understand given that she hadn’t written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel’s version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren’t “so bad for a bunch of white boys”, but that doesn’t sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn’t… “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me”, which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn’t in the flat, and Chandler wouldn’t see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price’s first royalty cheque for arranging “House of the Rising Sun” had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn’t going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of “I Put A Spell On You”, in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put A Spell On You”] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals’ first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they’d decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann’s piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann’s was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever — though one suspects that’s partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband’s single — but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing “Oh girl, now you’re young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you’ll just grow old before your time” to “Now my girl, you’re so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you’ll be dead before your time is due”, and making subtler changes like changing “if it’s the last thing that we do” to “if it’s the last thing we ever do”, improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept — and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge — Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley’s low voice and Bobby Hatfield’s high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song’s momentum — it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] The Animals’ version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It’s one of the few times I’ve wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] From a creators’ rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn’t have messed with her song. But from a listener’s point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” was followed by another lesser but listenable single, “It’s My Life”, which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company — the group were getting sick of Most’s attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan’s sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, “Inside — Looking Out”, a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn’t even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, “All Night Long”] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off — there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We’ll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you’ll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as “The Animals and Friends”, with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I’ve seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show — though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, “That’s not Eric Clapton!”, before starting to sing along happily… And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon’s Animals after quitting Steel’s, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

This year's 8 From '84 series - the sequel to last year's 9 From '99 - gave Adam and Josh a chance to revisit some nostalgic favorites ("Ghostbusters," "This is Spinal Tap," "Beverly Hills Cop"), fill in some blind spots (Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America," Coppola's "The Cotton Club") and complete a director's filmography (David Lynch's "Dune," check). This week, they wrap up the series with the film that launched the career of indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, and share their picks for the best performances, scenes and surprises from the 13-film series. Josh also recommends the latest from Cartoon Saloon and director Tomm Moore, WOLFWALKERS. 0:00 - Billboard 1:20 - 8 From '84: "Stranger Than Paradise" Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You" 29:34 - Josh recommends "Wolfwalkers" 32:50 - Next Week/Notes 44:05 - Massacre Theatre 51:09 - 8 From '84 Awards 1:36:24 - Outro  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The SpaceTimeMusic theme music is a sample of the Ana-Tole x Jonah Christian Remix of Ready or Not by the Fugees.LINKS:A Sample, A Cover playlistFacebookEmail: spacetimemusicpodcast@gmail.comSONG CREDITS:In order of appearanceI Put a Spell on YouAt Home With Screamin’ Jay HawkinsScreamin’ Jay Hawkins1956I Put a Spell on YouNina Simone1965NostalgiaAnnie Lennox2014Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina SimoneAlice Smith 2015Just a Touch of LoveJust a Touch of LoveSlave 1979Wait a Minute (Just a Touch)ShineEstelle2008

Welcome to the Lovecraft Country Companion podcast! This week we break down Lovecraft Country episode eight, “Jig-A-Bobo.” Timestamps + Quotables: 1:29 “Cruel Summer” 13:59 “I Can’t Breath” 23:46 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 31:42 “I Put A Spell On You” 36:24 “Ex vs Next” 49:22 “Truth Swap” 79:44 “Listener Feedback” Got comments or questions? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop by and leave a voice message or send an email. Website: https://anchor.fm/lovecraftcountrycompanion Email: lovecraftcountrycompanion@gmail.com Theme Music: The Paladin's Underworld by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com Learn more about Naomi Wadler’s powerful “March For Our Lives” speech at the link below: https://time.com/5214363/naomi-wadler-march-for-our-lives-speech-black-women/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lovecraftcountrycompanion/message

Jalacy J. Hawkins, better known as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, was one of a kind. His voice? Have you ever heard a volcano sing in the middle of a tsunami, while frogs were raining down from the sky? That’s close to the strange, powerful and goddamn charming beauty of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and that magic voice of his. He’d pop out of a coffin, sing a song about not being able to poop, strutting about the stage with a skull on a stick smoking a cigarette. If you think that last sentence was strange, wait until you hear the story of how “I Put A Spell On You” was recorded! That story is included in this episode, by the way. A brief history of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins from birth to death, the stories behind a couple of his more well known songs and more! The music of the bands in this episode bring something special - a shock-rock connection via Alice Cooper covers, that’s Sloppy Seconds and BL’AST. Then we have Rocket From The Crypt, because ROCK N ROLL, that’s why. The originator of “Shock-Rock” would be proud.

  Episode 5. Gail Ann Dorsey Song Chronicles is proud to present its fifth episode, a conversation with singer-songwriter, bass player extraordinaire, and dear friend Gail Ann Dorsey.  "I think... since I was a little kid... I wanted to get out of Philadelphia. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to do these things. Honestly, the odds were not in my favor, from my background, of me achieving what I've achieved, regardless of... talent and things. But. I think I've always [had] a good daydreaming, uh, imagination thing, you know, a law of attraction thing. You think you see it, you see it, you see it, and then... it comes."    I first met Gail in the early '90s in London. I reached out to her to see if she wanted to write some songs and perhaps start a duo project. The band name was going to be South of Venus. She came over and we started a song called "Femme Fatale" and then ended up demoing some other songs together in the English countryside (with recording engineer Andrew Jackson, who I'd met recording at Astoria Studio, David Gilmour's houseboat on the Thames). We were hoping to write more songs and play some gigs when she got a call from Bryan Ferry. He wanted her to go on a European promotional tour for television. I was happy for her and thought our plans would simply be delayed; but soon after, Roland Orzabal, who I'd occasionally see in the coffee shop around the corner from me, wanted her to play with Tears For Fears, so it looked like our duo plans had bitten the dust. The next thing I knew, she'd put my name in the hat to play guitar on the Bryan Ferry TV tour and I got the gig. This was the beginning of a long and cherished friendship.   Happy times with David Bowie       Louise & Gail recording for "South of Venus" in London While traveling in Europe, we had dinner with filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and actors Rossy de Palma and Beverly D'Angelo in Madrid and went to Copenhagen, Paris, and other major cities. We made a dark Berlinesque video for Bryan of his cover of "I Put A Spell On You" and then back in London, I focused on songwriting and played some shows with an expanded line up and called it South of Venus. My hair was short then anyway, but then I dyed it blonde for a minute. Somewhere in that period of time Gail and I were called into the studio to sing backgrounds together on a Gang of Four album called Mall. I was already friends with Andy Gill. He was a beloved friend and he loved to cook and also knew all the best East End markets and wine bars. He produced some songs for me too that were never released. That was a snapshot in time, of changing busy lives going off into different directions. I was in London only another eighteen months before getting a gig opening for Swing Out Sister and decided at the end of it to stay in LA, ending my ten-year chapter as a Londoner and eventually ending up back on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon. Gail, meanwhile, had done two tours with Tears For Fears, played on their records, and Roland Orzabal was mentoring her on her own solo record when she got the call from David Bowie.  Over the years, we'd find time to meet up in LA, Woodstock & Nashville, and always we'd get right back into our groove. Gail was always fascinated with Hollywood and filmmaking, and in fact, had won a scholarship to Cal Arts and had attended film school well before her career as a signed recording artist (first for CBS and then Island) and her star side-woman singer-bassist-performer extraordinaire status with icons — none more famous than David Bowie, with whom she shared a lengthy residency from 1995 to Bowie's death in 2016.   with David Bowie  Gail sang lead vocals on live versions of "Under Pressure" and dueted with Bowie on other songs, including "The London Boys," "Aladdin Sane," "I Dig Everything," and a cover of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman."         Behind the Scenes at the video shoot for Bryan Ferry's "I Put A Spell On You": Gail Ann Dorsey, Rossy de Palma and Louise Goffin     

... and other pop parlour games.In which we get Alexa to play Stack Waddy, Carly Simon meets James Bond, we wonder if girls make passes at rock stars in glasses, and remember Millie, Dave Greenfield, Florian Schneider and the first edition of the Face.Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Kitchen Disco …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpr0kvlQpx0 John Fogerty's back garden …https://www.loudersound.com/news/marshmallows-a-golden-retriever-and-a-view-john-fogerty-raises-the-bar-on-lockdown-videos Doobie Brothers in lockdown …https://www.ktlo.com/2020/05/04/watch-doobie-brothers-members-virtually-perform-black-water-with-fans-while-in-lockdown/ Bugger Off by Stack Waddyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbBxhbAOdPY The Stranglers' version of Walk On By with stunning Dave Greenfield keyboard solo …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqfqVDHNW6c Meryl Streep (aged 16) at Shea Stadium …https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6aNSHLg18Y Creedence Clearwater playing I Put A Spell On You …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXqtzusIU0 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

... and other pop parlour games. In which we get Alexa to play Stack Waddy, Carly Simon meets James Bond, we wonder if girls make passes at rock stars in glasses, and remember Millie, Dave Greenfield, Florian Schneider and the first edition of the Face. Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpr0kvlQpx0 John Fogerty’s back garden … https://www.loudersound.com/news/marshmallows-a-golden-retriever-and-a-view-john-fogerty-raises-the-bar-on-lockdown-videos Doobie Brothers in lockdown … https://www.ktlo.com/2020/05/04/watch-doobie-brothers-members-virtually-perform-black-water-with-fans-while-in-lockdown/ Bugger Off by Stack Waddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbBxhbAOdPY The Stranglers’ version of Walk On By with stunning Dave Greenfield keyboard solo … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqfqVDHNW6c Meryl Streep (aged 16) at Shea Stadium … https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6aNSHLg18Y Creedence Clearwater playing I Put A Spell On You … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXqtzusIU0

... and other pop parlour games.In which we get Alexa to play Stack Waddy, Carly Simon meets James Bond, we wonder if girls make passes at rock stars in glasses, and remember Millie, Dave Greenfield, Florian Schneider and the first edition of the Face.Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Kitchen Disco …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpr0kvlQpx0 John Fogerty's back garden …https://www.loudersound.com/news/marshmallows-a-golden-retriever-and-a-view-john-fogerty-raises-the-bar-on-lockdown-videos Doobie Brothers in lockdown …https://www.ktlo.com/2020/05/04/watch-doobie-brothers-members-virtually-perform-black-water-with-fans-while-in-lockdown/ Bugger Off by Stack Waddyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbBxhbAOdPY The Stranglers' version of Walk On By with stunning Dave Greenfield keyboard solo …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqfqVDHNW6c Meryl Streep (aged 16) at Shea Stadium …https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6aNSHLg18Y Creedence Clearwater playing I Put A Spell On You …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXqtzusIU0 Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU ! *No track-listing available

Après l'excellent film Rush dont nous avions parlé en 2013, 24FPS, le podcast ciné avec ou sans spoiler, revient sur une autre grande rivalité de l'histoire de la course automobile, à savoir la compétition entre Ford et Ferrari au 24 Heures Du Mans dans les années 60 grâce au film Le Mans 66 de James Mangold. Dans la première partie de l'émission, Julien et Jérôme donnent leur avis sans spoiler sur le film, puis lorsque le signal sonore retentit au bout de 0:29:25 ils reviennent sur tous les principaux passages, et notamment ceux qui ne respectent pas la réalité. Bonne écoute, et n'hésitez pas à nous partager la vitesse maximum de votre voiture ! Crédits musicaux : Polk Salad Annie de James Burton, issu de l'album The Guitar Sounds Of James Burton (1971), et I Put A Spell On You de Nina Simone, issu de l'album I Put A Spell On You (1965)

Boo! Welcome to NAYK’s 31st Episode. It's the Halloween Spooktacular 2019! I’ve got songs for your spooky playlist and movies for your Halloween horror viewing. Also join me and special guest Dr. Jens Foell for a Halloween edition of Somebody Had To Ask where we talk about zombie apocalypse weapons, tombstones, vampires, Halloween costumes, and of course, Disney World (scary, eh?). Music for Your Spooky Playlist starts at 00:01:41 - music includes versions of Season of the Witch, Don't Fear The Reaper, I Put A Spell On You, Pet Sematary, Stand By Me, Somebody's Watching Me, Stabbing in the Dark, Monster Mash, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and Dragula. Movie reviews start at 00:27:27 - I am covering Zombieland: Doubletap, Cooties, Little Monsters, There Comes A Knocking, Rattlesnake, and The Lighthouse. SHTA with Dr. Jens Foell starts at 00:59:54 Songs for Your Spooky Playlist on Spotify The Leftover Army Podcast

Hosts: Emrys and KatieJoin us for a bonus HALLOWEEN SPECIAL.This HALLOWEEN at The Curators of Horror we want to help find you a perfect Halloween horror movie. So we've curated you three different movies to meet your spooky seasonal viewing needs. We discuss a rubbish psychiatrist, how Katie fell in love with a cat, and the movies Halloween, Hocus Pocus and Trick 'r Treat.No major spoilers for these ones, so you can listen and then watch. MoviesHalloween (1978)Director: John CarpenterWriter: John CarpenterCast: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee CurtisHocus Pocus (1993)Director: Kenny OrtegaWriter: Mick GarrisCast: Bette Middler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Thora BirchTrick 'r Treat (2007)Director: Michael DoughertyWriter: Michael DoughertyCast: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan BakerInstagram: @curatorsofhorrorTwitter: @curatorofhorrorEmail: curatorsofhorror@gmail.comProduced and Edited by: EmrysOpening Music by: Tiffany HernMusic: Halloween Theme by John Carpenter. I Put A Spell On You by Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins performed by Bette Middler, Trick 'r Treat Theme by Douglas Pipes.

Suck out a kid’s life force then perform a vampy rendition of “I Put A Spell On You” cause we’re talking about Hocus Pocus! Kat and Jocelyn discuss WILD tonal shifts, amazing comedic performances, and how Kat realized a particular storytelling dream, only to discover it WASN’T what she thought it would be... This episode brought to you in part by SIMPLE Mobile. SIMPLE Mobile offers affordable no-contract plans and the hottest smartphones with lightning fast nationwide coverage. Starting at $25 a month, SIMPLE Mobile has 30-day plans offering unlimited talk & text, plus generous amounts of high-speed data on a lightning-fast 4G LTE† network. Check out how you can stay connected with the latest smartphones and no-contract plans at SIMPLEMobile.com See Terms and Conditions of Service at SIMPLEMobile.com †Actual availability, coverage and speed may vary. This episode is sponsored in part by Thrive Causemetics. Thrive Causemetics is a beauty brand and philosophy that creates high-performance, vegan, 100% cruelty-free formulas without the use of parabens or sulfates. Their amazing products highlight your best features and are created for long-lasting wear. And for every product you purchase, they donate to help women thrive. Start thriving and help women in need today by going to www.thrivecausemetics.com/LOVE and enter code LOVE for 15% off your first purchase! This episode is brought to you by Away, first class luggage at a coach price. Away makes luggage with power, their Carry-Ons include a built in battery that can charge all cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and anything else that’s powered by a USB cord. For $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com/love and use promo code LOVE during checkout! Edited by Andrew Ivimey and produced for the From Superheroes network. Visit www.FromSuperheroes.com for more podcasts, YouTube series, web comics, and more. IHIBILI Logo by Cubbyhole Studio www.cubbyhole.studio

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Put a Spell on You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Since I Met You Baby" by Ivory Joe Hunter ----more----   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn't realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud's terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren't on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins' work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay's kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I've relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I'm relying on most is Steve Bergsman's book "I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins". That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman's book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there's a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] It's hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin' Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true -- not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he'd loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn't get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children -- telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the "first rock and roll record", this one a 1946 song called "Tiny's Boogie": [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, "Tiny's Boogie"] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond" [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes "Loch Lomond"] As a result of that, he'd started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny "Mac" Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball -- a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for -- thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold -- that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn't get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he'd got back to Cleveland, he'd heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he'd gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed's show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician -- Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes' valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes' band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown's hit "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean". [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him "This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me". That doesn't sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as "Screamin' Jay Hawkins" -- a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn't sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it's best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he's not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become -- instead he sounds like he's imitating Clyde McPhatter's singing on "The Bells" by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Why Did You Waste My Time?"] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, "The Bells"] You can hear the resemblance there, I'm sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes' band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins' attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of "Screamin' Blues", which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary -- Hawkins' most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes' band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino's opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role -- depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins' great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, "Baptize Me in Wine"] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin' Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Take Me Back"] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it's not even certain that it was released until a year or so later -- reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins' life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn't realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said "so you think she'll come back to you, do you?" and he replied "yes, I'll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her -- that's it! I'll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she'll realise how much I love her and come back!" Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back -- not because of "I Put A Spell On You", but because she loved the B-side, a song called "Little Demon". As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn't wanted her back because he loved her, he'd wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded "I Put A Spell on You" some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn't be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)"] It's a decent record, but there's something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as "Jay Hawkins". By this time, he'd found a regular team of people to work with -- Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam "the Man" Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)", a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who'd cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins' later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, "(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)"] That was Hawkins' first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label -- but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of "I Put a Spell on You". But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn't sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn't *remember* what it was they'd been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them "this isn't a recording session, it's a party. Have fun." When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put A Spell On You"] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he'd had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn't remember what it was he'd been doing. In truth, though, it's not that different from a record like "(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)", and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins' exaggeration. The record didn't chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more -- wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he'd had a great idea for the show -- he'd got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus -- which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn't close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins' career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as "the black Vincent Price" for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins' stage shows -- and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called "Constipation Blues", which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up "I Put a Spell on You". That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh's trade ads contained the line "DJs be brave -- if you get fired, we'll get you a job!" however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn't get him a job -- and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as "orgiastic" and "cannibalistic", but it didn't make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way -- a cover version of the old standard "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do it)": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)"] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it -- Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with "Blueberry Hill", another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins' record, but still... The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called "Frenzy", and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called "Alligator Wine": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Alligator Wine"] But neither of those was a success either -- partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed's film "Mister Rock and Roll" to promote "Frenzy", but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield -- his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who've seen the footage suggest it wasn't quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a "native". Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn't particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins' section from the film. Hawkins' attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called "At Home With Screamin' Jay Hawkins", had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called "Hong Kong" which is mostly just Hawkins making racist "ching chong" sounds) and... versions of "I Love Paris in the Springtime", "Ol' Man River", and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like "Armpit #6": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "Armpit #6"] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he'd married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn't know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins' career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of "I Put a Spell on You", which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You"] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles -- to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin' Jay Hawkins records they'd been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin' Lord Sutch and the Savages, "Jack the Ripper"] Screamin' Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch's death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don "Sugarcane" Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he'd recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn't a commercial success, but it built Hawkins' reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record "I Put a Spell on You". Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put a Spell on You"] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins' self-destructive -- and other-people-destructive -- tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern -- Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin' Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there's no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins' ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to "I Put a Spell on You" shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn't made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did -- she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn't get her dollar -- it went to her cousin, who didn't pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman's biography. "My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin' Jay Hawkins didn't treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn't treat people right."

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter —-more—-   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words “legitimate” and “illegitimate” to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn’t realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud’s terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren’t on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins’ work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay’s kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I’ve relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I’m relying on most is Steve Bergsman’s book “I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”. That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman’s book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there’s a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] It’s hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true — not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he’d loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn’t get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children — telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the “first rock and roll record”, this one a 1946 song called “Tiny’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, “Tiny’s Boogie”] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond” [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes “Loch Lomond”] As a result of that, he’d started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny “Mac” Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball — a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for — thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold — that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn’t get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he’d got back to Cleveland, he’d heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he’d gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed’s show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician — Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes’ valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes’ band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown’s hit “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”. [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him “This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me”. That doesn’t sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins” — a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn’t sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it’s best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he’s not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become — instead he sounds like he’s imitating Clyde McPhatter’s singing on “The Bells” by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Why Did You Waste My Time?”] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, “The Bells”] You can hear the resemblance there, I’m sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes’ band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins’ attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of “Screamin’ Blues”, which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary — Hawkins’ most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes’ band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino’s opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role — depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins’ great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, “Baptize Me in Wine”] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Take Me Back”] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it’s not even certain that it was released until a year or so later — reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins’ life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn’t realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said “so you think she’ll come back to you, do you?” and he replied “yes, I’ll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her — that’s it! I’ll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she’ll realise how much I love her and come back!” Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back — not because of “I Put A Spell On You”, but because she loved the B-side, a song called “Little Demon”. As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn’t wanted her back because he loved her, he’d wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded “I Put A Spell on You” some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn’t be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)”] It’s a decent record, but there’s something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as “Jay Hawkins”. By this time, he’d found a regular team of people to work with — Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam “the Man” Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”, a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who’d cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins’ later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”] That was Hawkins’ first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label — but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of “I Put a Spell on You”. But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn’t sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn’t *remember* what it was they’d been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them “this isn’t a recording session, it’s a party. Have fun.” When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he’d had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn’t remember what it was he’d been doing. In truth, though, it’s not that different from a record like “(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)”, and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins’ exaggeration. The record didn’t chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more — wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he’d had a great idea for the show — he’d got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus — which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn’t close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins’ career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as “the black Vincent Price” for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins’ stage shows — and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called “Constipation Blues”, which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up “I Put a Spell on You”. That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh’s trade ads contained the line “DJs be brave — if you get fired, we’ll get you a job!” however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn’t get him a job — and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as “orgiastic” and “cannibalistic”, but it didn’t make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way — a cover version of the old standard “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do it)”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)”] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it — Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with “Blueberry Hill”, another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins’ record, but still… The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called “Frenzy”, and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called “Alligator Wine”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Alligator Wine”] But neither of those was a success either — partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed’s film “Mister Rock and Roll” to promote “Frenzy”, but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield — his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who’ve seen the footage suggest it wasn’t quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a “native”. Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn’t particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins’ section from the film. Hawkins’ attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called “At Home With Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”, had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called “Hong Kong” which is mostly just Hawkins making racist “ching chong” sounds) and… versions of “I Love Paris in the Springtime”, “Ol’ Man River”, and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like “Armpit #6”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Armpit #6”] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he’d married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn’t know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins’ career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of “I Put a Spell on You”, which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “I Put a Spell on You”] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles — to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records they’d been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Jack the Ripper”] Screamin’ Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch’s death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don “Sugarcane” Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he’d recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn’t a commercial success, but it built Hawkins’ reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record “I Put a Spell on You”. Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put a Spell on You”] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins’ self-destructive — and other-people-destructive — tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern — Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there’s no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins’ ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to “I Put a Spell on You” shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn’t made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did — she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn’t get her dollar — it went to her cousin, who didn’t pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman’s biography. “My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins didn’t treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn’t treat people right.”

Episode fifty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and the career of a man who had more than fifty more children than hit records. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Since I Met You Baby” by Ivory Joe Hunter —-more—-   Erratum I only noticed while doing the final edit for this episode that I used the words “legitimate” and “illegitimate” to describe children, and that this usage could quite possibly be considered offensive, something I hadn’t realised when writing or recording it. I apologise if anyone does take offence. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as the episode is so heavy on Hawkins that it would violate Mixcloud’s terms and conditions. I tried to put together a Spotify playlist instead, but a few of the recordings I use here aren’t on Spotify. As I mention in the episode, I leaned very heavily on one book here, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins by Steve Bergsman. There are many compilations of Hawkins’ work. This double-CD set containing all his work up to 1962 is as good as any and ridiculously cheap. Finally, you should also listen to this short audio documentary on the search for Jay’s kids, as it features interviews with a couple of them. They deserve to have their voices heard.    Patreon   This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, an acknowledgment. I like to acknowledge in the podcast when I’ve relied heavily on one source, and in this case the source I’m relying on most is Steve Bergsman’s book “I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”. That book only came out this year, so it deserves the acknowledgment even more than normal. If you like this episode, you might well want to buy Mr. Bergsman’s book, which has a lot more information. There are a lot of one-hit wonders in the history of rock and roll. And most of those one-hit wonders might as well have had no hits for all the impact they actually made on the genre. Of the thousands of people who have hits, many of them drop off the mental radar as soon as their chart success ends. For every Beatles or Elvis there’s a Sam And The Womp or Simon Park Orchestra. But some one-hit wonders are different. Some one-hit wonders manage to get an entire career out of that one hit. And in the case of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not only did he do that, but he created a stage show that would inspire every shock-rocker ever to wear makeup, and indirectly inspire a minor British political party. The one hit he recorded, meanwhile, was covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Marilyn Manson. [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] It’s hard to separate truth from myth when it comes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, not least because he was an inveterate liar. He always claimed, for example, that in his time in the army he had been captured by the Japanese and tortured for eighteen months. According to Army records, he joined the army in December 1945 and was honourably discharged in 1952. Given that World War II ended in September 1945, that would tend to suggest that his story about having been a Japanese prisoner of war was, perhaps, not one hundred percent truthful. And the same thing goes for almost everything he ever said. So anything you hear here is provisional. What we do know is that he seems to have grown up extremely resentful of women, particularly his mother. He was, depending on which version of the story you believe, the youngest of four or seven children, all from different fathers, and he, unlike his older siblings, was fostered from an early age. He resented his mother because of this, but does not seem to have been particularly bothered by the fact that his own prodigious fathering of children by multiple women, all of whom he abandoned, will have put those children in the same position. He variously claimed to have between fifty-seven and seventy-five children. Thirty-three have been traced, so this seems to be one of those rare occasions where he was telling the truth. So this is another of the all too many episodes where I have to warn listeners that we are dealing with someone who behaved appallingly towards women. I am not going to go into too many details here, but suffice to say that Hawkins was not an admirable man. Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. This is, you will be shocked to hear, not true — not least because there was not, in fact, an Ohio Conservatory of Music for him to train at. Instead, he learned his trade as a musician in the armed forces, where he was not, in fact, sent into Japan in a combat role aged fourteen. Instead, he joined the Special Services, the people who put on shows for the rest of the military, and learned the saxophone. As well as his stories about being a prisoner of war, he also used to claim on a regular basis that the reason he’d loved being in the military so much was because you were allowed to kill people and wouldn’t get punished for it. History does not record exactly how many people his saxophone playing killed. After his discharge from the military in 1952, he abandoned his first wife and children — telling them he was popping to the shop and then not seeing them again for two years. Around this time he hooked up with Tiny Grimes, who is yet another person who often gets credited as the creator of the “first rock and roll record”, this one a 1946 song called “Tiny’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes, “Tiny’s Boogie”] Tiny Grimes was a strange figure who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B, and who had played with great jazz figures like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum as an instrumentalist, but who as a singer was firmly in the rock and roll world. He had seen his greatest success with a rock and roll version of the old Scottish folk song “Loch Lomond” [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes “Loch Lomond”] As a result of that, he’d started performing in a kilt, and calling himself Tiny “Mac” Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders. Grimes first met Hawkins backstage at the Moondog Coronation Ball — a legendary gig put on by Alan Freed in 1952, which was the first big sign to Freed of just how successful rock and roll was going to become. At that show, so many more people tried to get in than the venue had capacity for — thanks, largely, to forged tickets being sold — that the show became dangerously overcrowded, and had to be cancelled after a single song from the first artist on the bill. So Grimes didn’t get to play that day, but Jalacey Hawkins, as he was still then known, managed to get himself backstage and meet Grimes. Hawkins did this through Freed, who Hawkins had got to know shortly after his discharge from the military. When he’d got back to Cleveland, he’d heard Freed on the radio and been amazed that they let a black man have his own show, so he’d gone down to the radio station to meet him, and been even more amazed to find out that the man who sounded black, and was playing black music, was in fact white. For decades afterwards, Hawkins would describe Freed as one of the very few white people in the world who actually cared about black people and black music. The two had struck up a friendship, and Hawkins had managed to get backstage at Freed’s show. When he did, he just went up to Grimes and asked for a job. Grimes gave him a job as a combination road manager and musician — Hawkins would play piano and saxophone, sing occasionally, and was also (according to Hawkins) Grimes’ valet and dog walker. Working with Grimes is where Hawkins first started performing outrageously on stage. Grimes’ band already dressed in Scottish clothing, and put on quite a bit of a show, but Hawkins pushed things a little further. He would, for example, come out on stage in his kilt and with tins of Carnation evaporated milk hanging on his chest as if they were breasts. He would then sing Ruth Brown’s hit “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”. [Excerpt: Ruth Brown, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” According to Hawkins, Ruth Brown came to see the show at one point, and said of him “This is the only bitch who can sing my song better than me”. That doesn’t sound especially like Brown, it has to be said. Hawkins started recording with Grimes, and started to be billed as “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins” — a stage name which, again, he gave varying origins for. The most likely seems to be the one he gave in a documentary, in which he said that he couldn’t sing, but had to take lead vocals, so he decided to just scream everything, because at least that would be different. Quite how that tallies with his ability to sing better than Ruth Brown, it’s best not to wonder. Either way, his early recordings show him trying to fit into the standard R&B vocal styles of the time, rather than screaming. On his first record, with Grimes, he’s not the blues shouter that he had a reputation of being, and nor is he the screamer he would later become — instead he sounds like he’s imitating Clyde McPhatter’s singing on “The Bells” by Billy Ward and His Dominoes, but in a bass register somewhat reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Compare Hawkins here: [Excerpt: Tiny Grimes with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Why Did You Waste My Time?”] With McPhatter on the Billy Ward record: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and His Dominoes, “The Bells”] You can hear the resemblance there, I’m sure. At this point Hawkins had a certain amount of potential, but was just one of a million smooth blues singers, who relied more on stage gimmicks than on singing ability. But those stage gimmicks were making him a breakout star in Grimes’ band, and so at a recording session for Grimes, it was agreed that Hawkins could record a single of his own at the end of the session, if there was time. Hawkins’ attitude quickly caused problems for him, though. During the recording of “Screamin’ Blues”, which would have been his first single, he got into an argument with Ahmet Ertegun, who kept telling him to sing the song more smoothly, like Fats Domino. Accounts of what happened next vary — Hawkins’ most frequent version was that he ended up punching Ertegun, though other people just say that the two got into a screaming row. Either way, the session was abandoned, and Hawkins soon ended up out of Grimes’ band. He worked with a few different bands, before getting a big break as Fats Domino’s opening act. He only lasted a few weeks in that role — depending on who you asked, Domino either fired Hawkins for being vulgar on stage and screaming, as Domino claimed, or because he was jealous of Hawkins’ great leopardskin suit, as Hawkins would sometimes claim. Wynonie Harris saw something in Hawkins, and helped him get his first solo shows in New York, and on the back of these he made his first records as a solo artist, for the tiny label Timely Records, under his birth name, Jalacey Hawkins, and featuring Mickey Baker, who would play on most of his fifties sessions, on guitar: [Excerpt: Jalacey Hawkins, “Baptize Me in Wine”] But unfortunately, after two of these singles, Timely Records folded, and Hawkins had to find another label. He moved on to Grand Records, and started recording as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. By this time, he had started using some of the gimmicks he would use in his stage show, though for the most part his act was still fairly tame by modern standards. He was also still, at least in the recording studio, making fairly standard jump blues records, like this one, the first he recorded as a solo artist under his stage name: [Excerpt, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Take Me Back”] That was the only single that saw release from his time with Grand Records, and it’s not even certain that it was released until a year or so later — reports seem to vary about this. But it was while he was recording for Grand Records that he wrote the song that would bring him worldwide fame. It came about, as so much of Hawkins’ life did, from his mistreatment of a woman. He was playing a residency in Atlantic City, and he had a live-in girlfriend from Philadelphia. But, as was always the case with Hawkins, he was cheating on her with multiple other women. Eventually she figured this out, and walked into the bar in the middle of one of his sets, threw his keys onto the stage, and walked out, blowing him a kiss. He didn’t realise what had happened until he was talking to the barmaid later, and she explained to him that no, that meant his girlfriend was definitely leaving. He brooded over this for a day, and then had another conversation with the barmaid, and told her he was planning to go to Philadelphia to get the girl back. She said “so you think she’ll come back to you, do you?” and he replied “yes, I’ll get her back, even if I have to put a spell on her — that’s it! I’ll write a song about putting a spell on her, and she’ll realise how much I love her and come back!” Hawkins would later claim that when, two years later, the song was finally released, she did come back — not because of “I Put A Spell On You”, but because she loved the B-side, a song called “Little Demon”. As Hawkins told the story, she came back to him, they stayed together for four months, and then he dumped her. He hadn’t wanted her back because he loved her, he’d wanted her back so that he could be the one to do the dumping, not her. Whatever the truth of that last part, he recorded “I Put A Spell on You” some time around late 1954, but that version wouldn’t be released until decades later: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell on You (unreleased version)”] It’s a decent record, but there’s something missing, and for whatever reason, it never came out. Instead, he signed to yet another label, Mercury, which was at the time somewhere between a large independent label and a small major, and started putting out singles just as “Jay Hawkins”. By this time, he’d found a regular team of people to work with — Leroy Kirkland was the arranger, and Mickey Baker would play guitar, Sam “the Man” Taylor and Al Sears were on saxophone, and Panama Francis was on drums. That core team would work on everything he did for the next couple of years. It was while he was at Mercury that he hit on the style he would use from that point on, with a B-side called “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”, a song about voodoo and threatening to murder a woman who’d cast a spell on him that, in retrospect, has all the elements of Hawkins’ later hit in place, just with the wrong song: [Excerpt: Jay Hawkins, “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”] That was Hawkins’ first truly great record, but it was hidden away on a B-side and did nothing. After a couple more singles, Hawkins was once again dropped by his label — but once again, he moved on to a slightly bigger label, this time to OKeh, which was a subsidiary of Columbia, one of the biggest labels in the country. And in September 1956, he went into the studio to record his first single for them, which was to be a new version of “I Put a Spell on You”. But Arnold Maxim, the producer at the session, wanted something a bit different from Hawkins. He thought that everyone sounded a little too staid, a little too uptight, and he asked why they couldn’t sound in the studio like they did when they were having fun on stage and really cutting loose. Hawkins replied that when they were on stage everyone was usually so drunk they couldn’t *remember* what it was they’d been doing. So Maxim decided to order in some crates of beer and fried chicken, and told them “this isn’t a recording session, it’s a party. Have fun.” When they were drunk enough, he started recording, and the result was this: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put A Spell On You”] Now, in later years, Hawkins would try to claim that he had been tricked into that performance, and that he’d had to relearn the song from the record after the fact, because he couldn’t remember what it was he’d been doing. In truth, though, it’s not that different from a record like “(She Put the) Wamee (On Me)”, and it seems more than likely that this is yet more of Hawkins’ exaggeration. The record didn’t chart, because many radio stations refused to play it, but it nonetheless became a classic and reportedly sold over a million copies. This was in part due to the efforts of Alan Freed. Hawkins was already starting to play up his stage persona even more — wearing capes and bones through his nose, and trying to portray a voodoo image. But when he was booked as the headline act on a Christmas show Freed put together in 1956, Freed surprised him by telling him he’d had a great idea for the show — he’d got hold of a coffin, and Hawkins could start his performance by rising out of the coffin like a vampire or zombie. Hawkins was horrified. He told Freed that there was only one time a black man was ever getting into a coffin, and that was when he was never getting out again. Freed insisted, and eventually ended up paying Hawkins a large bonus — which Hawkins would later claim was multiple thousands of dollars, but which actually seems to have been about three hundred dollars, itself a lot of money in 1956. Hawkins eventually agreed, though he kept a finger between the coffin and the lid, so it couldn’t close completely on him. This was the start of Hawkins’ career as a shock-rocker, and he became known as “the black Vincent Price” for his stage shows which would include not only the coffin but also a skull on a stick with smoke coming out of it (the skull was named Henry) and a giant rubber snake. Many horror-themed rock acts of the future, such as Alice Cooper or the Cramps, would later use elements of Hawkins’ stage shows — and he would increasingly make music to match the show, so that he later recorded a song called “Constipation Blues”, which he would perform while sitting on a toilet on stage. But in 1957, neither he nor the record label seemed quite sure what they should do to follow up “I Put a Spell on You”. That record had traded heavily on its shock value, to the extent that OKeh’s trade ads contained the line “DJs be brave — if you get fired, we’ll get you a job!” however, only one DJ did get fired for playing it, one Bob Friesen. He contacted OKeh, but they didn’t get him a job — and eventually someone working for the company told Billboard this, Billboard publicised the story, and another station hired Friesen for the publicity that would get them. OKeh actually edited the single shortly after release, to get rid of some of the grunts at the end, which people variously described as “orgiastic” and “cannibalistic”, but it didn’t make the record any more palatable to the professionally outraged. But the next record went completely the other way — a cover version of the old standard “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do it)”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)”] I can see why they thought that was a good idea before recording it — Fats Domino had just had a massive hit with “Blueberry Hill”, another old standard done in a similar arrangement to the one on Hawkins’ record, but still… The next couple of records were more in the style one might expect from Hawkins, a track called “Frenzy”, and a great Leiber and Stoller swamp-rocker called “Alligator Wine”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Alligator Wine”] But neither of those was a success either — partly because Hawkins went too far in the other direction. He had the opportunity to appear in Alan Freed’s film “Mister Rock and Roll” to promote “Frenzy”, but while every other act in the film performed in suits or were similarly well-dressed, Hawkins insisted on performing naked apart from a loincloth, with his hair sticking up, white face-paint, and carrying a spear and a shield — his idea of what a Mau Mau rebel in Kenya looked like (the Mau Mau fighters did not look like this). Or at least that was his later description of what he was wearing. Others who’ve seen the footage suggest it wasn’t quite that extreme, but still involved him being half-naked and looking like a “native”. Hawkins had already been getting a certain amount of criticism from the NAACP and other civil rights groups because they believed that he was making black people look bad by associating them with voodoo and cannibalism. Paramount Pictures decided that they didn’t particularly want to have their film picketed, and so removed Hawkins’ section from the film. Hawkins’ attitude to the NAACP was that as far as he was concerned the only thing they were doing for black people was trying to stop him earning a living, and he wanted nothing to do with them. (This was not a common attitude among black people at the time, as you might imagine.) And so, once again, things went to the other extreme. Hawkins put out his first album. It was called “At Home With Screamin’ Jay Hawkins”, had a cheery photo of Hawkins in a Santa hat on the cover, and mixed in his recent singles, a couple of new originals (including one called “Hong Kong” which is mostly just Hawkins making racist “ching chong” sounds) and… versions of “I Love Paris in the Springtime”, “Ol’ Man River”, and other extremely non-voodoo-shock-rock songs. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a success. He was dropped by OKeh and moved to a tiny label, where he started recording more idiosyncratic material like “Armpit #6”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Armpit #6”] But any chance of a comeback was pretty much destroyed when he was arrested in 1958 for possession of cannabis and statutory rape, after having had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. After he got out of prison, he moved to Hawaii for a while, and became a performer again, although there was a temporary hiccup in his career when his girlfriend and singing partner stabbed him after she found out he’d married someone else without telling her. She presumably also didn’t know that he was still married to his first wife at the time. Hawkins’ career remained in the doldrums until 1965, when two things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that Nina Simone recorded a cover version of “I Put a Spell on You”, which made the top thirty in the US charts: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “I Put a Spell on You”] The second was that Hawkins got rediscovered in the UK, in quite a big way. There was a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, which was legendary in soul and R&B circles — to the extent that when I saw P.P. Arnold in its successor venue Night People two weeks ago, she kept referring to it as the Twisted Wheel, even though the original club closed down in 1971, because she had such strong memories of the original venue. And among the regular attendees of that club were a group of people who loved the few Screamin’ Jay Hawkins records they’d been able to get hold of. Hawkins had been popular enough that a British act, Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, had stolen his act wholesale, cape, coffin, and all: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Lord Sutch and the Savages, “Jack the Ripper”] Screamin’ Lord Sutch would later go on to form the Monster Raving Loony Party, a political party intended as a joke that still continues to field candidates at every election twenty years after Sutch’s death. But while people like Sutch had admired him, Hawkins was mostly a legend in British blues circles, someone about whom almost nothing was known. But then some of the Twisted Wheel people went to see Little Richard at the Oasis club, another famous Manchester venue, and got chatting to Don “Sugarcane” Harris, from the support act Don and Dewey. He mentioned that he’d recently seen Hawkins, and he was still doing the same show, and so the British blues and soul fans tracked him down and persuaded the promoter Don Arden to put on a tour of the UK, with Hawkins using the Twisted Wheel as his base. The tour wasn’t a commercial success, but it built Hawkins’ reputation in Britain to the point that it seemed like *every* beat group wanted to record “I Put a Spell on You”. Between 1965 and 1968, it was recorded by Manfred Mann, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Animals, Them (featuring Van Morrison) and Alan Price, who made the top ten in the UK with his version: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put a Spell on You”] Hawkins even got to record a second album, finally, in Abbey Road studios, and he started to tour Europe successfully and build up a major fanbase. But Hawkins’ self-destructive — and other-people-destructive — tendencies kicked in. The next few decades would follow a recurring pattern — Hawkins would get some big break, like opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, or recording an album with Keith Richards guesting, or finally getting to appear in a film. Every time, he would let his addictions to alcohol or codeine overtake him, or he would rip a friend off for a trifling sum of money, or he would just get married bigamously again. Much of the time, he was living in one-room apartments, sometimes with no electricity. He married six times in total, and was abusive towards at least some of his wives. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins died in 2000 after emergency surgery for an aneurysm. His fifth wife, one of the two who seem to have been actually important to him in some way, has dropped strong hints that he was killed by his sixth wife, who he had been claiming was poisoning him, though there’s no evidence for that other than that she was strongly disliked by many of the people around Hawkins. When he died, he was seventy, and his current wife was thirty-one. Many people claimed that they had visitations from Hawkins’ ghost in the days after his death, but the thing that seems to sum him up in the afterlife the most is his legacy to his family. He sold the rights to “I Put a Spell on You” shortly before his death, for twenty-five thousand dollars, which means his estate gets no songwriting royalties from his one big hit. He hadn’t made a will since the 1970s, and that will left most of his money to his second wife, Ginny, who most people seem to agree deserved it if anyone did — she was with him for sixteen years, and tolerated the worst of his behaviour. He also left an amount to a niece of his. As for his kids? Well, none of the seventy or however many illegitimate children he had saw a penny from his will. His three legitimate children, he left a dollar each. At least one of them, his daughter Sookie, didn’t get her dollar — it went to her cousin, who didn’t pass it on to her. And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman’s biography. “My father thought he was all that, but not to me. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins didn’t treat people right. He was a performer, but he didn’t treat people right.”