One Song in the Style of A Nutter

I’ve been longing to play some Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and here’s my chance. (It may also enable me to sashay stylishly into a series of posts entitled “R U Bonkers??”, a sideways look at the world of insanity, which I’m thinking of doing.) Screamin’ Jay was possessed of a terrific voice and a total lack of any sense of boundaries. He should have been more celebrated than he was. His most famous song is the typically voodoo-themed I Put A Spell On You, made famous – in surely one of the best cover versions of anything ever - by Nina Simone*. But here's Jay himself - in what appears to be the USA version of Jazz Club (nice!) - doing a cover of that white-man’s homage to the African-American, Ol’ Man River. He seems to be playing in the style of Les Dawson at the beginning - I'd like to think he's cocking a snook at the overly po-faced host, who introduced us to him earlier with the line "he jumped out of a coffin and into our hearts" - but wait until 1:42 minutes in before he really starts to nutter up:



* Unfortunately there seems to be no video available with the studio version of this song, but this live clip maybe indicates how the incomparable Nina made it her own.

Les Dawson: A Prophet Unhonoured

Recent scribblings on this blog and others have touched upon Les Dawson - though not in a “bad” way - and made me realise how much I miss the man. If you don’t know, Les was a very fat comedian from the North of England. Lugubrious (a word which may almost mean “very fat and from the North”) was a common description of him. When they could get him sober enough he stood on a stage and told jokes. (Though he also wrote novels, apparently, and was a fine connoisseur of language). He wasn’t considered exactly a modern comedian but I had a secret regard for him, based mainly on the fact that the worse his jokes were – and oh they could be bad – the funnier he was. I thought: anyone who can make me laugh by standing still on a stage telling crap jokes must be a genius. I think it was something to do with the pauses. But, and here’s the important issue now, I paid scant attention to the content of his humour, the staple of which was The Mother-In-Law Joke. Examples:

I wouldn’t say my mother-in-law was fat, but when she got run over the driver said although he had enough time to drive around her he didn't know if he had enough petrol.
I took my mother-in-law to Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, and one of the attendants said, “Keep her moving sir, we're stock-taking”.
My mother-in-law said “When you die I’m going to dance on your grave!”. “Good”, I said, “I’m being buried at sea!”

Is it coming back to you?? It’s relevant as I’ve had a bit of friction with my own mother-in-law, a fine woman with whom I usually get along famously. It’s all my fault. After all, she survived and kept a family clothed and fed through 30 years of Nicolae “The Genius of the Carpathians” Ceauşescu & co. And I’m just a ponce. I may technically be in the right - “blah..blah..blah” - but in all other respects... I’m still (comparatively) a ponce. I pledged not to wash my dirty laundry in public, but maybe I’d have been better prepared if I’d listened to Les. When I peered at him on the TV screen back in the 70s from under my Brian Connolly fringe his wisdom was wasted on me. In fact, I was the teenager that mothers of girlfriends warm to: nervous, vulnerable, but, crucially, giving off the slight suggestion that in another life I’d have found them as attractive as their spotty, specky daughters. The naivety of youth - I must have thought I could handle women. My mother-in-law and I have more than made up now, and our bond is all the stronger. As it turns out, Les was as inaccurate about my mother-in-law as he was, apparently, about his own. But in his stumbling way he felt burdened with a truth that he knew must be told - may his name be honoured!