They put a spell on us: Black musicians and spooky tunes for Halloween

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As folks across the nation and their kids celebrate Halloween with trick or treating, costumes, candy, and spooky tales, let’s get into the mood this Black Music Sunday with an appropriate soundtrack to accompany your day’s activities.

Whether it’s jazz, blues, R&B, pop, or funk, Black musicians have been weaving spells, invoking hoodoo, superstitions, and witchcraft into tunes that may not scare you, but could raise the dead and make skeletons dance.

Boo! Get on up and shake those bones!

No Halloween would be complete without Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was both an album and a song. Released on Nov. 30, 1982 and produced by Quincy Jones, Thriller is still the bestselling album worldwide.

As Jackson’s official YouTube channel notes, “Thriller” absolutely and permanently changed the world of music videos.

Michael Jackson’s 14-minute short film “Thriller” revolutionized the music video genre forever. Hailed as the greatest music video of all time by MTV, VH1, Rolling Stone and others, “Thriller,” directed by John Landis, is also the only music video selected to be included in the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry.

Tingles still go up my spine whenever I hear Vincent Price’s monologue … and that haunting laugh!

Price’s full monologue:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’all’s neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell

The demons squeal in sheer delight
It’s you they spy, so plump, so right
For although the groove is hard to beat
It’s still you stand with frozen feet
You try to run, you try to scream
But no more sun you’ll ever see
For evil reaches from the crypt
To crush you in its icy grip

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the Thriller

Can you dig it?

In 2017, Daily Kos Staff member True Blue Majority wrote about the 35th anniversary of the release of Thriller the album—reminding us how times have changed since the “Thriller” video premiered on MTV in December 1983.

Surprisingly, “Thriller” was never officially released as a single, although it got a lot of airplay anyway, and of course is a Halloween staple now. It was brilliant to have Vincent Price do his pseudo-rap at the end.

I’ll let someone else write about how the MJ videos are so closely associated with the songs—I’ve always been more auditory than visual and when I finally saw the [14] minute epic Thriller video I was upset that it was arranged differently than the album version I had grown to love.  Plus I was never into the zombie thing anyway. I do like the remix version where the video was edited to fit the arrangement of the song as it appears on the album.

There was a period when the Thriller video was so popular they played it every hour. A [14] minute video played once an hour was one quarter of MTV’s daily programming! VCRs were relatively rare and expensive in 1983, although the price was starting to come down, and music videos weren’t available on videotape anyway, so the only way the vast majority of people could see this music video/movie musical short was when someone called and told you it was coming on. Or by watching MTV all day hoping it would come on, which was the point of putting hot videos in heavy rotation. And this was before “everyone” had cable.  Sometimes late at night local commercial TV stations would show a half hour of the week’s top videos. That’s how I finally saw it.

There were plenty other spooky tunes before “Thriller,” of course. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins springs to mind.

Back in February, William J. Wright wrote about Hawkins for GRUNGE, diving into the myths that Hawkins himself created around his “shock rocker” stage persona.

Born Jalacy J. Hawkins in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18, 1929, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had a lifelong penchant for the grandiose and never shied from a little personal mythmaking. Consequently, much of Hawkins’ life prior to fame is shrouded in mystery. A cursory look at available sources reveals much contradictory information, often stemming from Hawkins himself.

…

A true original even before he began incorporating the horror elements that would make him famous into his show, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was determined to be his own man. An iconoclast with little regard for trends, Hawkins frequently clashed with producers and other musicians. In 1954, Hawkins joined Fats Domino’s band. The pairing proved disastrous. Domino’s characteristically laid-back approach just didn’t mesh with Hawkins’ big, bold, bluesy shout. Nevertheless, it was Hawkins’ sartorial choices that led to his ouster from Domino’s band. According to Contemporary Black Biography, the “Blueberry Hill” singer fired Hawkins after he showed up for a performance in a leopard-skin suit.

…

In 1955, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recorded his signature song, “I Put a Spell on You.” Originally conceived and produced as a straightforward blues ballad, this version of Hawkins’ dark ode to unrequited love went largely unnoticed. His second attempt at the song in 1956, however, would make him a star and the song a rock ‘n’ roll standard.

Here’s Hawkins putting a spell on The Arsenio Hall Show audience back in 1989.

For a fun read, check out Steve Bergsman’s Hawkins biography, I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 

Central to Hawkins’ performance was the coffin he would rise from on stage. In the 1970s, I was working as a bartender in a Manhattan theater district bar called Charlie’s. It was a hangout for show biz folks and Times Square denizens, and one of the regular customers was Hawkins.

Weirdly, Hawkins had gotten permission from the owner to store his stage coffin in the back room of Charlie’s, and quite a few customers got pictures taken while lying in it. It was comical to watch guys accuse each other of being scared to do it, and then bravely climbing in and stretching out, sweating a bit as they worried that doing so would bring them bad luck, or an early death.

There are a number of wild tales about the coffin.

Back in the 1980s, Hawkins discussed being trapped in the coffin by the Drifters in 1955 on DJ Johnny Otis’ radio show.

Back to the music: Hawkins also did a spooky cover of Tom Waits’ “Whistling Past the Graveyard.”

Lyrics: 

Well I come in on a night train

With an arm full of box cars

On the wings of a magpie

Cross a hooligan night

And I busted up a chifforobe

Way out by the Cocomo

Cooked up a mess a mulligan

And got into a fight

Chorus:

Whistlin’ past the graveyard

Steppin’ on a crack

I’m a mean motherhubbard

Papa one eyed jack

You probably seen me sleepin’

Out by the railroad tracks

Go on and ask the prince of darkness

What about all that smoke

Come from the stack

Sometimes I kill myself a jacket

Suck out all the blood

Steal myself a station wagon

Drivin’ through the mud

Hawkins certainly bewitched a long string of artists to cover “I Put a Spell on You.” The last person on Earth who I thought would do so was Nina Simone, which she released on an album of the same name in 1965. It’s also the title of her autobiography.

Simone, whose activism I’ve featured here in the past, had the ability to make almost any tune her own with her inimitable style. NPR placed I Put A Spell On You near the top (No. 3) of their 2017 list of the 150 greatest albums made by women, noting, “The song, originally released in 1956 by Jay Hawkins, cemented his ‘Screamin’ moniker. But in Simone’s hands, it became something more, a kind of simmering sorcery.”

Watch Simone perform it live in the Netherlands in October 1965.

While I’ll close with those resounding chords from Simone, trust that I’ve got lots more Halloween music to share, from Stevie Wonder to Ray Parker Jr., Cab Calloway to Bessie Smith, and so much more. So grab some candy and join me in the comments below.

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts ;).