Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits

March 28, 2016
Binelli’s (Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!) second novel is a loose retelling of the life of R&B and shock-rock singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. In no particular order and from various points of view, the author recounts the many episodes in Hawkins’s life, from which myths were eventually made. We hear of Hawkins’s childhood with foster parents, whom Hawkins later reimagines as a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, and of his school days and brief obsession with opera. The musician does a stint in the military (he may have been as young as 14), becomes a boxer in Alaska, and does time in prison (for murder, or was it possession of narcotics and statutory rape?). Hawkins talks with a ghost and claims to have sired 75 illegitimate children, who gather for a family reunion after his death. He confesses to an uncanny fear he developed of his renowned gag: arriving on stage in a closed coffin, which he did so many times that he began to believe it was an omen. We never know for sure whether was really so drunk he couldn’t remember recording the song for which he is most famous, “I Put a Spell on You.” Thematically, this strange book might be best summed up in a line from Hawkins: “It’s not that you want to write songs that last forever. It’s about wanting to make yourself so special, so alien a presence in the square world, you won’t have to live or die by its rules.”

March 15, 2016
The sometimes-murky details behind a rhythm-and-blues legend are transformed by dark magic and even darker comedy into an eccentric melange of imaginative speculation and cultural criticism. The artist known for much of his adult life as Screamin' Jay Hawkins (1929-2000) is pre-eminent among one-hit wonders for his hyperbolic 1956 R&B classic, "I Put A Spell On You," whose shrieking and yowling vocal effects were enhanced in live performances by gaudy horror-movie theatrics--e.g. a real coffin from which he would emerge. Because that sui generis blend of novelty tune and blues shout has been both the first and last thing most people think about when thinking about Hawkins, outsized legends about his life have superseded known facts. But that doesn't bother Binelli, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone best known for his bluesy, impassioned 2012 travelogue of urban decline, Detroit City Is the Place to Be. Binelli uses the mythology Hawkins helped create about himself as a means of getting at the essence of his lasting appeal. He also debunks some myths; notably the oft-repeated--and, in Binelli's words, "almost certainly untrue"--tale of how Hawkins' greatest hit was the result of him and his session musicians getting "blind drunk" recording what was supposed to be a straight ballad. Binelli steeps other, more furtive elements of Hawkins' life story in impressionistic scenes from Jalacy Hawkins' Ohio upbringing, followed by even more impressionistic vignettes, including speculative reconstructions of dialogue Hawkins had with such myriad figures as guitarist Tiny Grimes; legendary, ill-fated rock DJ Alan Freed; the ghost of Jimmy Gilchrist, Fats Domino's dead-from-overdose opening act; and Elvis Presley, who (so Hawkins says) pressed him for information about Haitian voodoo. There's even a what-if reimagining of Presley's 1957 movie, Jailhouse Rock, with Hawkins in the lead. None of which, in this novel's loose and baggy form, would work without Binelli's shrewd takes on pop culture, racial identity, and 20th-century American mores. This dreamlike album of real and imagined scenes from a complex artist's memory bank is as flamboyant a display of light and shadow as one of Hawkins' stage shows.

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May 1, 2016
The success of I Put a Spell on You sent Screamin' Jay Hawkins on a tour promoted by the infamous Cleveland DJ, Alan Freed. At Freed's suggestion, Hawkins made his entrance in a coffin, spawning a flamboyant stage persona, complete with a savage's bone through his nose, a mystic's turban atop his head, a boar's tusk on a chain around his neck, and a skull on a stick, setting him on a trajectory counter to his plan for singing opera in the vein of Paul Robeson. Binelli's (Detroit City Is the Place to Be, 2012) fictionalized account of the R&B singer offers vignettes portraying Hawkins as he is adopted by Blackfoot Indians, studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, enlists in the U.S. Army during WWII, and becomes a boxer in Alaska, before transforming himself into an outrageous, now legendary showman. After serving time, Hawkins ends up as a has-been performing at a strip joint in Hawaii. Charismatic and enigmatic, alcoholic and bitter, a perennial outsider and lost soul who converses with ghosts, Hawkins is unforgettable in Binelli's imaginative and haunting novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)