Monday, November 03, 2008

Got you Covered: I put a spell on you....



There are a few musicians around who have not recorded this song, and loads and loads who have. Why? Because this Screamin' Jay Hawkins R&B Classic is just that good. I put a Spell on You was written in 1957. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:
Hawkins had originally intended to record "I Put a Spell on You" as a refined love song, a blues ballad. He reported, however, that the producer "brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version. I don't even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.

Mr. Hawkins took to adding props to his shows. He would emerge from a coffin wearing a long cape, wore tusks in his nose, added snakes and fireworks, and a cigarette-smoking skull named Henry. Yes, Screamin' Jay Hawkins may well have been the first shock rocker.

Here is the master at work. Let's now put Hawkin's performance back-to-back with Marilyn Manson. Not bad, but underlying Screamin Jay's antics was an amazing R&B voice. Manson does have a good time with the theatrics though and I think the version is credible.

I really like this next version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Very respectful, harder, but still with plenty of theatre. Let's pair Nick Cave's version up with Nina Simone. What do you think?

I'm going to change it up on you a little bit now, with a version by Natacha Atlas. This one leaves me at a loss for words, so I'm going to move right into one last take on this classic. Here's Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I had one other version in mind. Perhaps you know it....if not, your homework is to listen to Van Morrison's early band Them perform the tune.

4 comments:

mister anchovy said...

testing...I switched back to this comment mode as people were having problems commenting....

Candy Minx said...

These are super cool. We watched "Mystery Train" about a month ago. It was a lot of fun to re-visit and I still liked it a lot. I like the Nick Cave and Manson covers because they are examples of what a lot of people didn't and still don't realize about the goth scene is it is a natural extension of the blues. Bands like those two and The Birthday Party and The Cure followed in the same "beat" and melancholy tradion of storytelling with ballads. The goth scene kept the ballad strong into this century ina way that many other popular forms of popular music did not focus on in their story telling and composition.

Candy Minx said...

p.s. I was having a terrible time mkaing comments...I missed a lot of posts because it jsut froze up on me. I actually really liked the new or other comment mode because it had some good features. Is it perhaps still working out kinks?

A said...

That's fantastic. I love discovering how celebrity "personalities" evolved, especially when it's a happy accident like this. When you have deliberate, calculated projections like John Wayne and Marilyn Manson, it's just not as fun, although they are outrageously famous for those anyway.