‘I Put A Spell On You’: Nina Simone’s greatest vocal performance
Let me make one thing perfectly clear, picking your favourite Nina Simone vocal performance is a little like picking your favourite million dollars. They’re all basically as good as each other, and they’re all life-changing, spectacular and rare to the point that it’s a miracle you share the same century. Yet here we are. If I may make another thing perfectly clear, it’s that if you have a different answer to the question posed above, yours is pretty much just as correct as mine.
‘The Doctor’, as she was affectionately known, didn’t become the greatest voice in the history of jazz by committing any vocals to wax that weren’t basically perfect. However, for my money, I’ve got to go with a fairly obvious choice, but one that’s obvious for a reason. Her 1963 cover of ‘I Put A Spell On You’. Trust Simone to take one of the most iconic blues rock tracks of all time, which basically invented the genre of shock-rock and made an international superstar out of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and steal it right out from under him. Interestingly, one of the ways she does this is actually by connecting the song back to its roots.
The song was originally meant to be more of a ballad. However, Hawkins talks about how that changed in an interview with Julia Rubiner for her book Contemporary Musicians: Profiles of the People in Music. He says the record’s producer, Arnold Maxin, “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version … I don’t even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.”
This arguably made the song a hit and, most importantly, gave Jay Hawkins one hell of a nickname. However, what Simone does is remove the theatrics and uncover the sizzling, sultry blues ballad underneath. The ‘spell’ she puts you under doesn’t have to be a curse or charm or anything supernatural. It’s all in the sheer control of her singing. Almost muttering the first half of those iconic opening lines, before leaving just the right amount of antici…pation to jump the octave and remind us that we’re hers. As if we’ve forgotten.
It would take one hell of a vocal performance to stand out over the arrangement. Hal Mooney deploys the orchestra with a sophistication and suaveness that any Bond theme would kill for. However, it’s almost like Simone welcomes a battle like this, matching the sophistry of her backing (especially that incredible, tinkling piano) with every pained, regal syllable. Not for nothing is it one of the vanishingly few cases of scatting that I can stand.
I realize that I may be part of the problem. In a career like Simone’s, where so much of her work was vital, excoriating protest music in support of the civil rights movement, to pick one of her pop successes feels trite. However, the orchestra drops out, and she vamps on the song’s final lines. She releases the hounds that she’s held back for the whole song, bringing the song to a showstopping finale and I just can’t remember any vocal phrase of any song making me feel quite the same way.
By taking away the original’s camp, gothic horror, Simone leaves us with the real magic. Her deathless, awe-inspiring vocal performance.
