I Put a Spell on You
Screamin' Jay Hawkins meant to record a polite ballad. A producer got the whole band drunk instead, and Hawkins screamed, grunted, and blacked out his way into one of the most covered songs in American music -- then had to relearn it from his own record.
By Song Reviews · October 29, 2026
Greatest of All Time!Screamin' Jay Hawkins meant to record a polite ballad. A producer got the whole band drunk instead, and Hawkins screamed, grunted, and blacked out his way into one of the most covered songs in American music -- then had to relearn it from his own record.
Jalacy “Screamin’ Jay” Hawkins originally conceived “I Put a Spell on You” as a straightforward, fairly refined torch ballad – a jilted-lover’s lament, sung the way jilted-lover’s laments were usually sung in 1956. That is not the record that exists. Producer Arnold Maxin, unsatisfied with the polite version Hawkins and his band kept delivering, got the entire session drunk during a take at Beltone Studios on September 12, 1956, and the performance that resulted bears almost no resemblance to the song as written: Hawkins screams, grunts, and gurgles through the lyric with what one account calls “utter drunken abandon,” abandoning melody for something closer to a guttural incantation.
Hawkins was reportedly drunk enough that he didn’t remember making the recording at all, and had to relearn his own vocal performance from the finished record before he could perform it live. Okeh Records released it that fall, and radio responded by banning it in most markets for what was characterized at the time as its “cannibalistic,” overtly sexual delivery – a ban that kept it off the pop charts almost entirely despite the song becoming, within a few years, one of the most recognized and covered recordings in American music, reinterpreted by artists from Nina Simone to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Annie Lennox.
What makes the record genuinely remarkable is that the accident is the achievement – the song as Hawkins originally intended it would almost certainly not have survived seven decades, let alone spawned a horror-tinged stage persona built entirely around the recording’s unhinged energy, complete with a coffin and a skull-topped cane named Henry. Few records in popular music owe their entire legacy to a producer’s decision to get everyone drunk on purpose; fewer still turned that accident into a performance their own creator couldn’t initially recognize as his.
Greatest of All Time. A ballad that became one of the most covered songs in American music only because its singer was too drunk to sing it as written.
Hero image: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins at The Edge, Toronto, 1979, by Jean-Luc Ourlin, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.