Ronnie Hawkins

Also known as "Rompin' Ronnie", "Mr. Dynamo" or "The Hawk", he was one of the key players in the 1960s rock scene in Toronto. He performed all across North America and recorded more than 25 albums. His hit songs include covers of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" (retitled "Forty Days") and Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", a song about a gold digger.^[3] Other well-known recordings are a cover of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love?" (without the question mark), "Hey! Bo Diddley", and "Susie Q", which was written by his cousin, rockabilly artist Dale Hawkins.


Hawkins was a talent scout and mentor of the musicians he recruited for his band, The Hawks. Roy Buchanan was an early Hawks guitarist on the song "Who Do You Love". The most successful of his students were those who left to form The Band. Robbie Lane and the Disciples made their name opening for Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks at the Yonge Street bars in Toronto,^[4] and eventually became his backing band.^[5] Others he had recruited later formed Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band, Crowbar, Bearfoot, and Skylark.^[6] Hawkins was still playing 150 engagements a year in his 60s.^[7]

Early life[edit]

Hawkins was born on January 10, 1935, in Huntsville, Arkansas,^[8] the son of Flora (née Cornett), a schoolteacher, and Jasper Hawkins, a barber. In 1945, the family, which included Hawkins's older sister Winifred, moved to Fayetteville, where Hawkins was educated in the city's public schools, graduating from Fayetteville High School in 1952.^[9] Musicianship ran in Hawkins's family; Hawkins's father, uncles, and cousins had toured the honky-tonk circuit in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the 1930s and 1940s. His uncle Delmar "Skipper" Hawkins, a road musician, had moved to California about 1940 and joined cowboy singing star Roy Rogers's band, the Sons of the Pioneers.^[10] Hawkins' cousin, Dale Hawkins, the earliest white performer to sing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Regal Theater in Chicago, recorded the rhythm and blues song "Suzie Q" in 1957. Beginning at age eleven, Ronnie Hawkins sang at local fairs and before he was a teenager shared a stage with Hank Williams. He recalled that Williams was too drunk to perform, and his band, the Drifting Cowboys, invited members of the audience to get on the stage and sing. Hawkins accepted the invitation and sang some Burl Ives songs he knew.^[11]


As a teenager, Hawkins ran bootleg liquor from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma in his modified Ford Model A, sometimes making three hundred dollars a day.^[12] He claimed in later years that he continued the activity until he was nineteen or twenty, and that it was how he made the money to buy into nightclubs. He had already formed his first band, the Hawks, when he graduated from high school in 1952, following which he studied physical education at the University of Arkansas, where in 1956 he dropped out just a few credits short of graduation.^[11][13]


Hawkins then enlisted in the United States Army, but he was required to serve only six months, having already completed ROTC training. Soon after his arrival at Fort Sill in Oklahoma for Army Basic Combat Training, he was having a drink at the Amvets club when an African American quartet began to play their music. Hearing the first notes so stirred him that he jumped onto the stage and started singing. "It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly ... me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier."^[11] The experience caused Hawkins to realize what kind of music he really wanted to play, and he joined the four black musicians, who renamed themselves the Blackhawks.^[11]


The group had been performing a sort of jazz/blues something like Cab Calloway's music of the 1940s, and Hawkins sought to introduce contemporary influences to their repertoire. With another new member, blues saxophonist A.C. Reed, they created some of the South's most dynamic music sounds. "[I]nstead of doing a kind of rockabilly that was closer to country music, I was doing rockabilly that was closer to soul music, which was exactly what I liked." The band encountered prejudice,^[14] as many white people in the American South of the 1950s could not accept an integrated band and considered rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues the devil's music.^[11]


The Blackhawks disbanded when his enlistment ended. Hawkins went back to Fayetteville, and two days later he got a call from Sun Records, who wanted him to front the house session band. By the time he got to Memphis, though, the group had already broken up. Nevertheless, he took advantage of the opportunity to cut two demos, Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and Hank Williams's "A Mansion on the Hill", but the recordings attracted no attention. The demo session guitarist, Jimmy Ray "Luke" Paulman, suggested that Hawkins join him at his home in Helena, Arkansas, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta region, a hotbed of blues, rhythm and blues, and country music, an offer which he eagerly accepted.^[11]


Immediately upon arriving in Helena, Hawkins and Paulman found Paulman's brother George (standup bass) and their cousin Willard "Pop" Jones (piano) and formed a band they named The Hawks. Drummer Levon Helm, who had grown up in nearby Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, first played with the group at the Delta Supper Club in early 1957 when George Paulman invited him to sit in them for their closing set. Helm reminisced years later that Hawkins, accompanied by Luke Paulman, drove his Model A out to the Helm's cotton farm, arriving in a cloud of dust to talk to Helm's parents. Helm remembered him as "a big ol' boy in tight pants, sharp shoes and a pompadour hanging down his forehead." Helm listened to Hawkins negotiate an agreement with his parents, who insisted that he graduate from high school before he could join The Hawks and go to Canada. Helm practiced diligently on a makeshift drum kit to improve his skills, and when he graduated in May, he was good enough to play drums in the band.^[11]


Hawkins's live act included back flips and a "camel walk" that preceded Michael Jackson's similar moonwalk by three decades. His stage persona gained him the monikers "Rompin' Ronnie" and "Mr. Dynamo".^[9] Hawkins also owned and operated the Rockwood Club in Fayetteville, where some of rock and roll's earliest pioneers came to play, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty.^[15]


With Helm's graduation from high school, he joined the Hawks and they went to Canada, where the group met success. On April 13, 1959, they auditioned for Morris Levy, owner of Roulette Records in New York. Only four hours later, they entered the studio and recorded their first record tracks. Their first single, "Forty Days", was a barely disguised knockoff of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" with the song "Mary Lou" by Young Jessie on the B-side; it reached number 26 on the US pop charts, becoming Hawkins's biggest hit.^[11]


After spending nearly three months in Canada, the band returned to the South, with their base in Hawkins' home town of Fayetteville. The band's gigs in the southern states were mostly one-nighters or short run performances in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Helm loved to drive, and would drive the band two or three hundred miles to the next show in Hawkins' old Chevy, which Hawkins eventually replaced with a Cadillac towing a trailer containing their equipment.^[16]