Halloween Music History: “I Put a Spell on You”

This post is part one of a three-part series and extension of “A Brief History of Halloween Music” in the 2026 fall issue of Spooky Little Halloween—The Magazine.

I've already given you a roundup of my favorite covers of "I Put a Spell on You" — there are dozens of them, from Nina Simone to Annie Lennox to a 9-year-old named Angelina Jordan.

But none of those covers exist without one very strange night in a New York recording studio in 1956, when a blues singer who wanted to make a tender love song accidentally invented something else entirely.

This is the story of how that happened, and why it matters more than it looks like it should.

The setup

Jalacy "Jay" Hawkins was born in Cleveland in 1929 and, depending on which version of his own life story you believe — and Hawkins told many versions — placed in an orphanage as an infant and later adopted.

He was a genuine musical prodigy, teaching himself piano as a toddler and reading music by age six. His real dream wasn't blues or rock and roll. He wanted to be an opera singer, idolizing the great Black bass-baritone Paul Robeson, and he studied classical voice before financial circumstances pushed him out of music school and into Cleveland's blues clubs instead.

He also boxed, winning a Golden Gloves title as a teenager and later, he claimed, the middleweight championship of Alaska while in the Army. By the early 1950s he was working professionally as pianist and vocalist for guitarist Tiny Grimes, whose band performed in kilts under the name Tiny Grimes and His Rocking Highlanders.

It was a strange enough scene already. Hawkins was about to make it stranger.

The making

Hawkins wrote "I Put a Spell on You" as what he called "a refined love song, a blues ballad" — a sincere, fairly conventional piece about longing for someone who'd left. He first recorded it in 1954 for Grand Records in that straightforward style. (That version is in the video above.)

It went nowhere and wasn't released.

Two years later, he re-recorded it for Columbia's Okeh Records with producer Arnold Maxin, who felt the band sounded too stiff and polished. So Maxin made a decision that changed rock history almost by accident: he brought beer, ribs, and fried chicken into the studio, got Hawkins and the whole band thoroughly drunk, and told them, "This isn't a recording session, it's a party. Have fun."

What came out was nothing like a refined ballad. Hawkins shrieked, growled, and moaned his way through the song with a band that included guitarist Mickey Baker and saxophonist Sam "The Man" Taylor.

Hawkins later insisted — and given his well-documented love of embellishing his own story, it's hard to know how much to believe — that he didn't remember recording it at all, and had to relearn the song from the released single.

The reception

"I Put a Spell on You" sold over a million copies. It also got banned from most American radio stations almost immediately, for what programmers described as its "outrageous" and even "cannibalistic" sound — listeners genuinely heard the grunts and screams near the end of the track as evoking a man eating another person.

It's worth sitting with how much of that reaction had to do with the specific shrieks and growls on the record, and how much had to do with the fact that a Black man was making them. Hawkins wasn't doing anything wildly different, sonically, from what was about to happen across rock and roll within a few years — but the moral panic landed on him first, and landed hard.

Cleveland DJ Alan Freed — the same Freed who'd spent years pushing Black R&B artists onto white radio stations rather than waiting for safer cover versions — heard the record's power immediately and started playing it in heavy rotation.

Freed is also the one who pushed Hawkins toward the stage persona that would define the rest of his career: capes, a coffin he'd rise out of in a cloud of fog, a flaming skull on a stick named Henry, rubber snakes, and bone props evoking voodoo and cannibalism. Hawkins initially refused. By his own account, his first response was something to the effect of "no Black man gets in a coffin alive, they don't expect to get out." Eventually, he relented after Freed offered him a $300 bonus.

The act made Hawkins famous, and he resented almost every part of it for the rest of his life.

He believed, with real justification, that the gimmick undermined people's ability to take him seriously as a vocalist. The NAACP itself raised concerns at the time that his voodoo-and-cannibalism stage act reinforced ugly, decades-old stereotypes of Black primitivism, the same stereotypes the broader civil rights movement was actively fighting to dismantle.

"Why can't people take me as a regular singer without making a bogeyman out of me?" he asked, decades later, still sounding frustrated by the question. He also pointed out, more than once, that James Brown screamed plenty on his own records and never got saddled with the nickname "Screamin'."

The legacy

The song's most important second life came in 1965, when Nina Simone recorded her own version for the title track of her seventh studio album. Simone arrived at the song from nearly the opposite direction — a classically trained pianist who'd dreamed of becoming the first major Black concert pianist in America, and who'd been rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music in circumstances she always believed were racially motivated.

By 1965 she'd already released "Mississippi Goddam" in the wake of Medgar Evers' assassination and the Birmingham church bombing, and she recorded this album the same year as the Selma marches and the Voting Rights Act.

I Put a Spell On You wasn't an overt protest record the way "Mississippi Goddam" was, but it landed in that same charged moment, sung by an artist whose voice carried that history regardless.

Simone's version reframed the song entirely: less shock, more aching control. It's the version most people now associate with the title, and it gave the song a critical respectability that Hawkins' original — banned, mocked, and racially caricatured on its way to the charts — had never been allowed to have.

From there, the song became one of the most covered recordings in American music. Creedence Clearwater Revival played it at Woodstock; The Animals, Joe Cocker, Bryan Ferry, Annie Lennox (live version above), Marilyn Manson, and Jeff Beck have all taken their own pass at it.

Hawkins' original was eventually selected as one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll" and landed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs ever recorded — recognition that arrived only after Hawkins spent most of his career treated as a novelty act rather than the originator of something genuinely important.

Hawkins kept performing the song, and the persona built around it, for the rest of his life, touring through the 1990s and dying in France in 2000 at age 70. He never escaped the "Screamin' Jay" nickname he resented, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, somewhat conspicuously, still hasn't inducted him — even as artists from Tom Waits to the Cramps to Black Sabbath to Marilyn Manson have openly cited him as the template for everything they later built.

What started as one drunken, accidental recording session in 1956 turned out to invent an entire mode of performance — shock rock, theatrical horror-as-spectacle, the macabre as entertainment — that Halloween culture still runs on. It's a stranger and more complicated origin story than "Monster Mash" or "Thriller" can claim, and it deserves to be told as more than a footnote before the covers roundup.