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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
Screamin' Jay Hawkins left the world asking only that his children meet -- all 57 of them.
Sep 7, 2000 | When Screamin' Jay Hawkins performed onstage, he'd emerge from a coffin, toss around fake tarantulas and rubber snakes and wear a bone clipped to his nose. This was in the 1950s -- and it wasn't uncommon for audiences to leave bewildered.
Kooky as his stage presence could be, nothing was as odd as his personal life. When Hawkins died at 70 in February after an aneurysm, he left with a dying wish: He wanted all of his children to meet.
But here's the problem: There are at least 57 of them.
"We believe he had at least 57 children, but it's probably more," said Maral Nigolian, his biographer. "We have a videotape with him saying he had 75 kids."
Nigolian, an investment banker by day, has put the biography on hold to become the official Hawkins uniter. She says she has tracked down and verified 33 of the performer's children and hopes to find the remaining ones by Nov. 3, when the kids are to meet at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Hawkins' native Cleveland.
Nigolian typically confirms the children using birth certificates. In some cases, they couldn't produce the certificates, so she used verbal and anecdotal evidence. It's not exactly scientific, but neither was Hawkins.
The verification process is slow going: Nigolian uses a Web site to ask potential Hawkins children to submit information about themselves. She has received more than 1,200 submissions.
"About half of them are obvious jokes," Nigolian said. "How I look at it is that Screamin' Jay had a big sense of humor, so it's OK."
Nigolian was drawn to Hawkins in the same way as many of his fans were. She heard his most famous song, "I Put a Spell on You" from 1956, and became enthralled with his odd ways. The song was written as a ballad, but after a night of drinking, Hawkins added screams, yells and groans. While the song was strangely appealing to some, several radio stations banned it because, they said, it sounded cannibalistic.
Saying that Hawkins' music was different is an understatement. He was known for nutty, demented antics. He often burned himself onstage with exploding fuse boxes. His backup musicians changed frequently, though he had a mainstay named Henry -- a cigarette-smoking, flaming skull.
Hawkins never sold a lot of records, but his stage show received rave reviews. In more recent years, he moved into film and had parts in "Mystery Train" and "A Rage in Harlem."
"He was the person that started the macabre genre," Nigolian said. "In a time when guys in suits would do things like shift to the left and shift to the right, he wore capes and plucked the extremes. Half of the audience didn't know if he was screaming in terror or screaming in joy."
Hawkins, whose full first name was Jalacy, was the precursor to somber, dark artists like Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop. Yet Hawkins often is overlooked.
Apparently, strangeness follows Hawkins, even after his death. From all over the globe, his kids have been surfacing. But among all his numerous offspring, none attended his funeral in Paris.
Some of his children sound as eccentric as he. The three oldest children -- Leann, Irene and Jalacy Hawkins Jr. -- are 49, 48 and 47 and live in the Cleveland area. Leann is a mail carrier and a cabaret singer. Irene drives an ambulance during the graveyard shift and is a puppeteer. Jalacy spent 30 years in the Army.
