Freed suggested a gimmick to capitalize on the "demented" sound of "I Put a Spell on You": Hawkins wore a long cape, and appeared onstage by rising out of a coffin in the midst of smoke and fog. She plays the tape on a roadtrip in her cousin's car; he is unimpressed, but his friend cheerily proclaims it "Driving Music. 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.

Rick from San Juan, United StatesThe 1978 film "American Hot Wax" features an interesting live performance of "I Put A Spell On You" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins (coffin included), as well as performances by Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis.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. The accompaniment uses an exotic musical scale but if you listen closely you can recognize a modified 12-bar blues progression. Famous disk jockey Alan “Moondog” Freed, an early promoter of Rock ‘n’ Roll, suggested the coffin idea.

However, that version was not released at the time (it has since been reissued on Hawkins’ UK compilation The Whamee 1953–55).Jalacey Hawkins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and would often claim that he had musical training at the Ohio Conservatory of Music. Jean-françois from Montreal, QcScreamin' Jay Hawkins song is sampled on "Wait A Minute (Just A Touch)" by Estelle. 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.

But Arnold Maxin, the producer in the studio that night, also brought a little something with him: booze and lots of it.And I think that means I should give Sookie the final word here, in a quote from the end of Steve Bergsman’s biography. Hawkins’ version of “I Put a Spell on You” has been named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.