Rock’n’roll star who was crucial in breaking down the musical colour barrier and proved enormously influential
By Michael Gray
26 October 2017
Out in his own uncategorisable stratosphere, the vocalist and pianist Fats Domino, who has died aged 89, sold astonishing quantities of records from the start of the 1950s until the early 60s. Domino was an original, one of the creators of rock’n’roll, and by far the biggest selling rhythm and blues artist of that time.
He was crucial in breaking down the musical colour barrier, but too mainstream and popular to retain credibility as a blues singer. He brought a new, heavy back-beat to white ears, yet trailed old-fashioned, jazz-band habits behind him.
His famous records were many, stretching across a decade from the early 50s: Valley of Tears, I’m Walkin’, The Big Beat, I’m in Love Again, I Want to Walk You Home, Be My Guest, Country Boy, Walking to New Orleans, Three Nights a Week, My Girl Josephine, It Keeps Rainin’, What a Party, and, in 1963, when he finally left Imperial Records for ABC-Paramount, Red Sails in the Sunset.
His chart placings were oddly modest. His only British Top 10 success was Blueberry Hill in 1956. In the US he never topped the mainstream charts and by 1962 had no Top 20 entries. Yet in the mid-70s it was still true that, with record sales of 60 or 70m, no one had outsold him except Elvis and the Beatles.
He behaved like a star. When he toured he took 200 pairs of shoes and 30 suits on the road, and wore big diamond rings. Thus he asserted himself on the era’s extraordinary multiple bills. On the first, in 1956, Domino was with BB King, Hank Ballard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown and Duane Eddy. A 1957 tour put him in among the Drifters, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, LaVern Baker, the Everlys, Paul Anka and Buddy Holly.
His performing style was simple, like his songs – he’d sit at the piano sideways on to the crowd, showing his solid right profile and turning his splendid head to grin and beam as he sang and played, but he would add a touch of flamboyance at the end by pushing the piano off stage with his stomach. (That head of his was a perfect cube, thanks to his flat-top haircut. This would became fashionable 30 years after he pioneered it.)
Domino was offered a record deal by the Imperial boss Lew Chudd, and cut his first sides on 10 December 1949, with the trumpeter/arranger Dave Bartholomew’s band. This would remain much the same on Domino’s huge hits of a decade later, and the band would tour behind him for more decades still. The tenor saxist Herb Hardesty would support Domino for half a century.
Domino and Chudd soon fell out with Bartholomew, the man held to have given Domino his musical credibility. Domino recorded without him, using his own musicians, including his brother-in-law Harrison Verrett. The rift was healed in 1952, after Bartholomew persuaded Domino to play piano on Lloyd Price’s Lawdy Miss Clawdy. It is one of the great contributions to embryonic rock’n’roll.
Domino’s early singles had mixed success, but he re-signed to Imperial and packed out live shows, clinching his stardom at Alan Freed’s Cleveland Arena show in 1953 and thrilling the new white audience for black music at Freed’s New York rock’n’roll Jubilee Ball in January 1955. Then came Ain’t It a Shame (AKA Ain’t That a Shame). Though Pat Boone’s cover topped the pop charts, Domino’s original chased it, the blackest sound that had ever hit the hot 100, and the No 1 R&B side for 11 weeks.
Domino rarely took sole composer-credit for songs. Most were written with Bartholomew, some by Bartholomew alone, including Blue Monday, a hit from the 1956 Frank Tashlin film The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield and Tom Ewell, in which Domino appeared, as he did (this time with top billing) in Jamboree (1957).
His career dipped in the 1960s when a new black consciousness rejected the pre-soul stars, and white consciousness shied away from hit-singles artists and the suddenly embarrassing, unhip simplicities of 50s music.
Creatively, the 60s and beyond was one long period of decline. The songwriting ended; a 1961 album showed a painting of nonchalant, cigarette-smoking Domino as if he were Dean Martin; another was called Twistin’ the Stomp. He sounded equally perplexed on Ah Left Mah Hot in San Francisco and the Beatles’ Lady Madonna and Lovely Rita, but he understood country material perfectly, as with Hank Williams’s Jambalaya and You Win Again.
Domino was reduced to night clubs and Las Vegas. It demonstrates his limitations and artistry that he could play his hour’s worth with such enthusiasm so many hundreds of times. But his vice was gambling, and trying to work off his debts by touring only kept him in the Vegas trap.
Worry thinned him. Even yellow crimplene suits couldn’t disguise his being disappointingly less than massive, yet he still pushed the piano off stage with his stomach at the end of his high-energy show. He was still at it in London at the Royal Festival Hall in 1985, and the Royal Albert Hall in 1990, his mike still placed so that he took up a supplicating pose, crouched down, head twisted round and upwards, radiant smile fixed on the punters in the circle.
Illness overtook him in 1995, on a UK tour with Little Richard and Chuck Berry. His performance ended when he tried the piano stomach-push in Sheffield, and was taken to hospital with breathing problems. He would not tour again, restricting his live appearances to his home city of New Orleans. He refused to travel to Cleveland, Ohio, for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and even declined a White House invitation from Bill Clinton to receive a National Medal of Arts in 1998.
He was at home when his house was one of those ruined by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Domino had always lived in the badly hit Lower Ninth Ward – he’d built his mansion there – and though he and his wife, Rosemary, whom he had married in 1948, were rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter from their roof, he was thought to be missing for several days afterwards. His daughter Karen, living in New Jersey, recognised him in a newspaper photograph of survivors at a shelter in Baton Rouge. It was months before Domino could revisit his home and reportedly only three of his many gold discs were retrieved.
Moved by the widespread concern for his welfare, Domino responded with a new album, Alive and Kickin’, donating proceeds to the Tipitina’s Foundation, dedicated to preserving and restoring New Orleans’ musical culture. The album’s title track opens with as simple a lyric as any of Domino’s classics: “All over the country, people wanna know / Whatever happened to Fats Domino? / I’m alive and kickin’.”
Alive and kickin’ maybe, and living back in New Orleans, but in poor health. Domino was to have been the closing act at the city’s first post-Katrina jazz festival in May 2006, but he was admitted to hospital shortly beforehand. A year later, at the 2007 festival, he gave what would be his last performance, of just five songs. A tribute album, Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, by artists including Dr John, Norah Jones, BB King, Willie Nelson, Toots and the Maytals and Neil Young, was released later that year.
Other artists continued to record and perform Domino’s repertoire, and always will. He was one of the few true giants of postwar American popular music: no one sounded like him, yet ask who he influenced, and the answer is everyone.
He and Rosemary had 13 children. She died in 2008.
• Fats (Antoine) Domino, musician, born 26 February 1928; died 24 October 2017
Thanks so much for posting this. I’d wanted to post something about Fats, but found it hard to know where to begin. I’m only somewhat conversant with his music, yet it has been a fixture of life here in New Orleans since around the time I was born – something just there, like the sun or the wind or the rain. Though Fats was by way of being a friend of at least one friend of mine, our paths failed to ever cross in person. Still, he was someone to whom I felt close, with whom I had a strong sense of kinship, whom I will miss.
Anyway, here are three recommendations for those who’d like to read and hear more:
For an in-depth appreciation of Fats Domino and his music, see this excellent Op-Ed from the New York Times by Jon Batiste – himself a fine New Orleans pianist,though young enough to be Fats’s grandson:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/jon-batiste-fats-domino.html
For even more coverage, see this, from New Orleans music journalist Gwen Thompkins:
http://musicinsideout.wwno.org/fats-domino/
(Sadly, it seems that Thompkins’s hour-long show on Fats, aired originally last year, has yet to be made available on line, but what is up now is still highly informative, and lots of fun…)
Finally, for a beautifully told, but also very detailed, account of Fats’s early career, and his importance in the development of American (and therefore World) music, see Rick Coleman’s book, “Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll:
https://www.amazon.com/s/147-2200694-0430661?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Fats%20Domino%20and%20the%20Lost%20Dawn%20of%20Rock%20and%20Roll&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20
And yes, the concern just after Katrina, throughout the New Orleans Diaspora, for Fats’s welfare was a real thing. Once it became clear that he’d ridden out the storm in his home, it was as if a great cry went out: “Where’s Fats?” I remember being worried about him for days, maybe as long as a week, until it became clear that he’d been rescued and was safe.
A minor detail about that rescue, but worth mentioning at least: According to Coleman, Fats was picked up by a boat from the second floor balcony of his home – the first floor of which was under water – rather than from his roof by a Coast Guard Helicopter.
Finally, though I’m having trouble finding the exact quote, Elvis Presley once said that Fats Domino was the true King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and that he (Elvis) was merely a prince…
Long as it is, I’ve had the sense that my previous comment somehow falls short, because of its near total dearth of musical examples – there being only one! The problem with providing such examples when it comes to Fats is that he produced so much music, and that each song is very short. So, if one only listens to one or two, it’s hard to get an idea of the totality his scope.
On the other hand, picking a few songs to recommend out of such a huge body of work can get to be extremely difficult for the aspiring recommender – there is so much to choose from that picking out a few good examples can start to feel like a mug’s game, especially for one such as I, who is hardly a specialist in Fats’s oeuvre. Is it better to recommend just diving in, listening to whatever? Or might there be a way to pick out the best, or at least some of the most characteristic pieces?
Fortunately, John Pareles at the New York Times has done just that, also providing some pretty good, though very brief, “liner notes” :
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/arts/music/fats-domino-best-songs.html
Note that all the songs on Pareles’s list clock in at between two and three minutes, so it’s probably best to think of them as vignettes – miniatures, even. Though it must also be noted that each song tells quite a story in its brief time span, so maybe the term “masterpieces of compression” is more applicable here. One might even speculate along the lines of “the Zen of Fats”…