Ronald Cornett Hawkins (January 10, 1935 – May 29, 2022) was an American rock and roll singer, long based in Canada, whose career spanned 66 years. His career began in Arkansas, United States, where he was born and raised. He found success in Ontario, Canada, and lived there for most of his life. Hawkins was an institution of the Ontario music scene for over 40 years. He was influential in the evolution of rock music in Canada.
Also known as "Rockin' Ronnie", "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. 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, and eventually became his backing band. Others he had recruited later formed Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band, Crowbar, Bearfoot, and Skylark. Hawkins was still playing 150 engagements a year in his 60s.
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Early life
Hawkins was born on January 10, 1935, in Huntsville, Arkansas, 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. 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 around 1940 and joined cowboy singing star Roy Rogers's band, the Sons of the Pioneers. 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 11, 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.
As a teenager, Hawkins ran bootleg liquor from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma in his modified Ford Model A, sometimes making $300 a day. He claimed in later years that he continued the activity until he was 19 or 20, 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.
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." 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.
The group had been performing jazz/blues music similar to 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, 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.
Career
Hawkins and the group had begun touring Canada in 1958 as the Ron Hawkins Quartet on the recommendation of Conway Twitty, who told him Canadian audiences wanted to hear rockabilly. Their bassist George Paulman was abusing liquor and pills, so Hawkins left him behind, and the band played without a bass on their first tour of Ontario. Their first gig was at the Golden Rail Tavern in Hamilton, Ontario, where according to booking agent Harold Kudlets all the bartenders quit when they heard the band's sound and saw Hawkins's stunts on stage. In 1959, he performed a number of live shows in the country and signed a five-year contract with Roulette Records. Working out of Toronto, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks recorded the LP Ronnie Hawkins in 1959, and with Fred Carter, Jr. taking Jimmy Ray "Luke" Paulman's place on lead guitar, they cut another LP, Mr. Dynamo, the next year, both of them recorded on the Roulette label.
Hawkins subsequently moved to Canada, becoming a permanent resident in 1964. When he first came to Ontario, Hawkins performed at places like the Grange Tavern in Hamilton, where Conway Twitty got his start, and made it his home base. In Toronto, where the Hawks dominated the local scene, Hawkins opened his own night club, the Hawk's Nest, on the second floor of Le Coq d'Or Tavern on Yonge street, playing there for months at a time. After the move to Canada, the Hawks, with the exception of drummer Levon Helm, dropped out of Hawkins's band. Their vacancies were filled by Southwest Ontarians Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson.
David Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian and future lead vocalist of the American group Blood, Sweat & Tears, said he heard the Hawks when he got out of prison in 1962: "We young musicians would sit there by the bar at Le Coq d'Or and just hang on every note." This version of the Hawks, wearing mohair suits and razor-cut hair, were the top group among those who played Le Coq d'Or, a rowdy establishment at the center of the action on the Yonge Street strip in Toronto. They were able to stay out of most of the bar fights that broke out there almost every night.
Robbie Robertson wrote in his 2016 memoir Testimony about how his band the Suedes and he had opened for the Hawks at the Dixie Arena in the west end of Toronto when he was 15. He described Hawkins spinning, flipping, and camel walking when Jimmy Ray "Luke" Paulman launched into a solo on his lead guitar, then tumbling and landing at Paulman's feet. He said of the show, "It was the most violent, dynamic, primitive rock 'n' roll I had ever witnessed, and it was addictive." It was also the first time he saw Levon Helm, whom he described as a "young beam of light on drums" at the center of it all.
Later life
In 2002, Hawkins was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which went into remission, which he attributed in a documentary to a miracle by the 'Big Rocker' and Adam 'Dreamhealer' McLeod, a 16 year old healer from Vancouver. His remission was featured in the 2012 film Ronnie Hawkins: Still Alive and Kicking. In 2017, he moved from Stoney Lake Manor in Douro-Dummer, where he had resided since 1970, to Peterborough, Ontario.
Death
Hawkins died in the early morning of May 29, 2022, at the age of 87. His family said he had been quite ill but gave no specific cause. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Wanda, their two sons, Ronnie Hawkins Jr. and singer-songwriter Robin Hawkins, who had served as his guitarist since the 1980s and wrote the hit song "Can't Stop Rockin'", and daughter Leah Hawkins, a singer-songwriter who had been his backup singer, and his grandchildren, Robin's four children, Tara, Troy, Jacob and Zack.
Discography
Awards
In 2002, October 4 was declared "Ronnie Hawkins Day" by the city of Toronto as he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, in recognition of his lifetime contribution to music and his generous support of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario and other charitable organizations. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame at the Canadian Music Industry Awards on March 4, 2004. His pioneering contribution to the genre was also recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
In 2005, Hawkins was awarded an honorary degree from Laurentian University.
On May 2, 2013, Hawkins was named an Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada. His investiture was held on May 7, 2014. The citation reads:For his contributions to the development of the music industry in Canada, as a rock and roll musician, and for his support of charitable causes. For more than 50 years, musician Ronnie Hawkins has demonstrated a strong devotion to Canada's music industry. Often referred to as the "father of Canadian rock n' roll", he was a key player in the 1960s rock scene, with his band The Hawks serving as a launching pad for a host of Canadian musicians. In addition to producing scores of singles and albums, he has performed in support of many charitable causes, notably the Peterborough Flood Relief and the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario.
Other awards include a Juno Award for Making it Again in 1984, the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, presented at the Juno Awards of 1996 and a Special Achievement Award from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers (SOCAN) in 2007.
