Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits by Mark Binelli

Published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books on May 3, 2016

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits is a biography in novel form. The subject is Jalacy Hawkins (1929-2000), a singer/musician whose use of macabre/occult imagery and a “shock rock” style was (he later claimed) either the inspiration for, or ripped off by, performers as diverse as Kiss, Little Richard, Melvin Van Peebles, and the horror film Blackula. “I Put a Spell on You” is his best known song, although many listeners are more familiar with the covers than Hawkins’ original.

Hawkins’ mother left him on an orphanage doorstep in 1929. The priests decided to offer the “colored” child to a Native American couple who wanted to adopt. Growing up in Cleveland, Hawkins attended a music conservatory before enlisting as an underage soldier in 1943. Hawkins reenlisted in the Air Force, did some boxing, drifted to Atlantic City where he worked as a chauffeur for a jazz musician, played the role of Blackula in a jazz band, and had his way with women. Lots of women, including a lady wrestler and a girl who was barely in her teens (he went to prison for that one, unlike Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis). Hawkins had scores of extramarital offspring, making for an interesting family reunion of complete strangers. (News coverage of the reunion is available online.)

All of this and a whole lot more takes place in a short novel that is rich with detail. The last chapter, wrapping up the bulk of Hawkins’ life, reads like a magazine article. How much of the novel is fiction and how much fact I cannot say, but this is a novel so it doesn’t need to be factual. Still, the book might have been better as nonfiction, given the difficulty of discerning which bits are invented and which are straightforward biography.

Mark Binelli depicts racial tension as an integral part of Hawkins’ life, and I suspect that is closer to fact than fiction. Hawkins is portrayed as abrasive and petulant, which he may have had a right to be. Tellingly, in his middle-aged years, Hawkins is quoted as saying “I wish I could be who I was before I became me.”

If there is a difference between Hawkins’ persona and his deeper essence, the novel does not explore it. In that regard, the novel might be criticized as shallow, but it does convey a good sense of the artist’s tumultuous life, if not of the artist himself. I enjoyed reading it, which is about all I ask of any novel, but it left me wanting more.

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