Like any performance art, there are some blues acts that work hard to capture people’s attention with shows that are very different to what else is out there.
For example, in 1923 (or 24), the singer Ma Rainey devised show – a tent show, to give an idea of the planning – where a giant prop Victrola phonograph player was wheeled onto the stage. Then a chorus girl would take a giant prop record and place it on the phonograph. From inside the pho
“Villain am I none, but I am welcome in their parlour”
nograph a song would be heard, so to the audience it looked like a giant phonograph playing a song. At a climactic moment in the song, the machine doors would open and Ma Rainey would emerge, coming out of the mock phonograph machine into the live space of the stage, and the audience just went wild for this.
And it was in 1956 that a 26 year old Jalacy J. “Screamin’ Jay” Hawkins, cut a record that set his career into a path very different to what audiences typically saw at the time, and since. “I Put a Spell on You” became his greatest commercial success and reportedly surpassed a million copies in sales. Radio disc jockey Alan Freed offered Hawkins $300 to emerge from a coffin onstage and soon created an outlandish stage persona in which performances began with the coffin and included “gold and leopard-skin costumes and notable voodoo stage props, such as his smoking skull on a stick – named Henry – and rubber snakes. Hawkins’ later releases included “Constipation Blues” (which included a spoken introduction by Hawkins in which he states he wrote the song because no one had written a blues song before about “real pain”). In Paris in 1999 and at the Taste of Chicago festival, he actually performed “Constipation Blues” with a toilet onstage.
So …
