SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JULIUS HEMPHILL
June 18-24
ARTHUR BLYTHE
June 25-July 1
OSCAR BROWN, JR.
July 2-July 8
DONNY HATHAWAY
July 9-July 15
EUGENE McDANIELS
July 16-July 22
ROBERTA FLACK
July 23-July 29
WOODY SHAW
July 30-August 5
FATS DOMINO
August 6-August 12
CLIFFORD BROWN
August 13-August 19
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
August 20-August 26
RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK
August 27-September 2
CHARLES BROWN
September 3-September 9
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/fats-domino-mn0000137494/biography
Antoine “Fats” Domino
(b. February 26, 1928)
Artist Biography by Richie Unterberger
ANTOINE "FATS" DOMINO
(b. February 26, 1928)
The most popular exponent of the classic New Orleans R&B sound, Fats Domino
sold more records than any other black rock & roll star of the
1950s. His relaxed, lolling boogie-woogie piano style and easygoing,
warm vocals anchored a long series of national hits from the mid-'50s to
the early '60s. Through it all, his basic approach rarely changed. He
may not have been one of early rock's most charismatic, innovative, or
threatening figures, but he was certainly one of its most consistent.
Domino's first single, "The Fat Man" (1949), is one of the dozens of tracks that have been consistently singled out as a candidate for the first rock & roll record. As far as Fats was concerned, he was just playing what he'd already been doing in New Orleans for years, and would continue to play and sing in pretty much the same fashion even after his music was dubbed "rock & roll."
The record made number two on the R&B charts, and sold a million copies. Just as important, it established a vital partnership between Fats and Imperial A&R man Dave Bartholomew. Bartholomew, himself a trumpeter, would produce Domino's big hits, co-writing many of them with Fats. He would also usually employ New Orleans session greats like Alvin Tyler on sax and Earl Palmer on drums -- musicians who were vital in establishing New Orleans R&B as a distinct entity, playing on many other local recordings as well (including hits made in New Orleans by Georgia native Little Richard).
Domino didn't cross over into the pop charts in a big way until 1955, when "Ain't That a Shame" made the Top Ten. Pat Boone's cover of the song stole some of Fats' thunder, going all the way to number one (Boone was also bowdlerizing Little Richard's early singles for pop hits during this time). Domino's long-range prospects weren't damaged, however; between 1955 and 1963, he racked up an astonishing 35 Top 40 singles. "Blueberry Hill" (1956) was probably his best (and best-remembered) single; "Walking to New Orleans," "Whole Lotta Loving," "I'm Walking," "Blue Monday," and "I'm in Love Again" were also huge successes.
After Fats left Imperial for ABC-Paramount in 1963, he would only enter the Top 40 one more time. The surprise was not that Fats fell out of fashion, but that he'd maintained his popularity so long while the essentials of his style remained unchanged. This was during an era, remember, when most of rock's biggest stars had their careers derailed by death or scandal, or were made to soften up their sound for mainstream consumption. Although an active performer in the ensuing decades, his career as an important artist was essentially over in the mid-'60s. He did stir up a bit of attention in 1968 when he covered the Beatles' "Lady Madonna" single, which had been an obvious homage to Fats' style.
https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/fats-domino
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME
ANTOINE “FATS” DOMINO
(b. February 26, 1928); inducted in 1986
Fats Domino may not have been the most flamboyant rock and roller of the Fifties, but he was certainly the figure most rooted in the worlds of blues, rhythm & blues and the various strains of jazz that gave rise to rock and roll.
With his boogie-woogie piano playing and drawling, Creole-inflected vocals, Antoine "Fats" Domino Jr. help put his native New Orleans on the map during the early rock and roll era. He was, in fact, a key figure in the transition from rhythm & blues to rock and roll – a transition so subtle, especially in his case, that the line between these two nominally different forms of music blurred to insignificance.
Born in the Big Easy in 1928, pianist, singer and songwriter Fats Domino ultimately sold more records (65 million) than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley. Between 1950 and 1963, he made Billboard’s pop chart 63 times and its R&B chart 59 times. Incredible as it may seem, Fats Domino scored more hit records than Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly put together. His best-known songs include "Ain't That a Shame," "Blueberry Hill" and "I'm Walkin'."
Fats Domino was born into a large and musical family. He received encouragement and tutoring from his brother-in-law, a trumpet player named Harrison Verret, who introduced Domino to the New Orleans music scene. Following in the footsteps of piano greats as Professor Longhair, Domino began performing for small change in local honky-tonks while working odd jobs (like hauling ice) to make ends meet. Domino’s musical likes and influences included pianists Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Amos Milburn and Charles Brown; vocalists Roy Milton and Joe Turner; and bandleaders Louis Jordan and Count Basie.
In 1946, he began playing piano in Billy Diamond’s band at the Hideaway Club. It was Diamond who gave him the nickname “Fats.” (Domino weighed 220 pounds while standing only five feet, five inches tall.) By 1949, Domino had become a fixture at the Hideaway in his own right, and he was drawing crowds and solid notices for his musical abilities, which were notable even by New Orleans standards. That same year, he met Dave Bartholomew, who became his producer, bandleader and collaborator, and Lew Chudd, who signed Domino to his Imperial Records label. Scouting for talent, Bartholomew and Chudd checked out Domino’s act at the Hideaway Club, and the rest is history. The run of records Domino made with Bartholomew at Imperial, beginning in 1949 and ending only when Chudd sold the label in 1963, is one of rock and roll’s greatest.
Domino’s nickname became the basis of his first single, "The Fat Man," a huge R&B hit – it went to Number Two nationally – and reported million-seller. Some music historians consider “The Fat Man” to be the first rock and roll record; at the very least, it is a milestone rhythm and blues performance heralding a new age in popular music. Based on an old blues number (“Junker’s Blues,” about heroin) for which Domino wrote a more upbeat, autobiographical set of lyrics, “The Fat Man” features a memorably amusing vocal solo in which Domino mimics a horn. The song was cut at engineer Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studios, at Rampart and Dumaine Streets in New Orleans. Most of Domino's great Imperial sides were recorded at J&M, with Bartholomew producing and a crack house band that included drummer Earl Palmer and saxophonists Alvin "Red" Tyler and Herbert Hardesty backing him up.
A string of R&B hits followed “The Fat Man,” including such powerfully bluesy sides as “Goin’ Home” (Number One), “Going to the River” (Number Two) and “Please Don’t Leave Me (Number Three). Still, Domino’s success remained confined to the R&B charts – that is, until 1952, when "Goin' Home" got to Number 30. The following year, "Goin' To The River" reached Number 24, but his major crossover hit came in 1955 with “Ain’t It A Shame.” The song was retitled “Ain’t That a Shame” by Pat Boone, whose cover version actually did better on the pop charts (it was Number One for two weeks) than Domino’s original (which reached Number 10). The Four Seasons would also have a hit with “Ain’t That a Shame” in 1963, when their remake went to Number 22.
Domino experienced extraordinary success in the burgeoning rock and roll market, especially in the latter half of the Fifties. “Ain’t It a Shame” became the first in a string of 37 crossover hits for Domino over the next eight years. His biggest hit came in late 1956 with “Blueberry Hill,” a song that had previously been cut by Glenn Miller, Gene Autry andLouis Armstrong. Domino’s version reached Number Two, kept from the top by Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues.” (Despite his hit-filled career, Domino would never top the pop chart. Might that have to do with the fact he recorded for an independent label?)
After “Blueberry Hill” firmly established him as a star, the hits came fast and furious. Some of Domino’s most memorable singles from the late Fifties include “Blue Monday” (Number Five), “I’m Walkin’” (Number Four), “It’s You I Love” (Number Six), Valley of Tears (Number Eight), “The Big Beat” (Number 26), “Whole Lotta Loving” (Number Six), “I’m Ready” (Number 16), “I Want to Walk You Home” (Number Eight), “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” (Number 17), “Be My Guest” (Number Eight) and “Walking to New Orleans” (Number Six).
The secret behind the appeal of Domino’s music’s was, unsurprisingly, rhythm. "You got to keep a good beat," Domino said in a 1956 interview in Downbeat magazine. "The rhythm we play is from Dixieland — New Orleans." He elaborated on that point in the liner notes for his 1991 box set, They Call Me the Fat Man...: The Legendary Imperial Recordings: “Everybody started callin' my music rock and roll,” noted Domino, “but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playin' down in New Orleans." Perhaps the definitive statement on the matter was Domino’s song “The Big Beat,” whose lyrics included these lines: The big beat keep you rockin’ in your seat/The big beat keep you rockin’ in your sleep/Clap your hands, stomp your feet/You got to move when you hear the beat.
Domino became highly visible in the late Fifties, appearing in several rock and roll movies (including Shake, Rattle and Rock) and joining many of the big "caravan" tours of the day. While he was admittedly less charismatic than his extroverted contemporaries, the easygoing Domino got by on the irresistible rhythms and solid foundation of his music. Likable and down-to-earth, Fats Domino was the least affected superstar of rock and roll’s first decade. His genial temperament and immense talent assured his success.
The arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion in 1964 proved devastating to the careers of first-generation rock and roll and rhythm & blues artists like Domino, whose hit streak came to an end that very year. He made the Hot 100 just one more time – ironically, with his cover of the Beatles' “Lady Madonna,” a song Paul McCartney had specifically written with Domino’s big-beat boogie style in mind. Domino continued to find work as a live performer, especially when a rock and roll revival took root in the early Seventies. In 1975, John Lennon included “Ain’t That a Shame” on Rock and Roll, his album of early rock covers. Rockers Cheap Trick revived the song again, including it on 1979’s Cheap Trick at Budokan. Released as a single, their cover of “Ain’t That a Shame” made the song a hit for the fourth time when it reached Number 35.
Revered as a rock and roll pioneer, Domino was in the original class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, joining such fellow icons as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Ray Charles and the Everly Brothers. During his induction speech on Domino’s behalf, Billy Joelcredited Fats Domino for proving “the piano was a rock and roll instrument.” Joel, Elton John and Paul McCartney are only a handful of musicians who have derived influence and inspiration from Domino.
One of the most long-lived of Fifties rockers, Fats Domino made headlines for non-musical reasons in August 2005. Speculation ran rampant that he’d perished when his home in the Ninth Ward was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but he survived and was rescued by boat. In 2007, some of the greatest figures in rock and roll contributed tracks to a charity album, Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. Funds from its sale were used to help rebuild Domino’s home in his beloved New Orleans.
Fats Domino (piano, vocals; born February 26, 1928)
Domino's first single, "The Fat Man" (1949), is one of the dozens of tracks that have been consistently singled out as a candidate for the first rock & roll record. As far as Fats was concerned, he was just playing what he'd already been doing in New Orleans for years, and would continue to play and sing in pretty much the same fashion even after his music was dubbed "rock & roll."
The record made number two on the R&B charts, and sold a million copies. Just as important, it established a vital partnership between Fats and Imperial A&R man Dave Bartholomew. Bartholomew, himself a trumpeter, would produce Domino's big hits, co-writing many of them with Fats. He would also usually employ New Orleans session greats like Alvin Tyler on sax and Earl Palmer on drums -- musicians who were vital in establishing New Orleans R&B as a distinct entity, playing on many other local recordings as well (including hits made in New Orleans by Georgia native Little Richard).
Domino didn't cross over into the pop charts in a big way until 1955, when "Ain't That a Shame" made the Top Ten. Pat Boone's cover of the song stole some of Fats' thunder, going all the way to number one (Boone was also bowdlerizing Little Richard's early singles for pop hits during this time). Domino's long-range prospects weren't damaged, however; between 1955 and 1963, he racked up an astonishing 35 Top 40 singles. "Blueberry Hill" (1956) was probably his best (and best-remembered) single; "Walking to New Orleans," "Whole Lotta Loving," "I'm Walking," "Blue Monday," and "I'm in Love Again" were also huge successes.
After Fats left Imperial for ABC-Paramount in 1963, he would only enter the Top 40 one more time. The surprise was not that Fats fell out of fashion, but that he'd maintained his popularity so long while the essentials of his style remained unchanged. This was during an era, remember, when most of rock's biggest stars had their careers derailed by death or scandal, or were made to soften up their sound for mainstream consumption. Although an active performer in the ensuing decades, his career as an important artist was essentially over in the mid-'60s. He did stir up a bit of attention in 1968 when he covered the Beatles' "Lady Madonna" single, which had been an obvious homage to Fats' style.
https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/fats-domino
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME
ANTOINE “FATS” DOMINO
(b. February 26, 1928); inducted in 1986
Photo: Janet Macoska
Fats Domino may not have been the most flamboyant rock and roller of the Fifties, but he was certainly the figure most rooted in the worlds of blues, rhythm & blues and the various strains of jazz that gave rise to rock and roll.
With his boogie-woogie piano playing and drawling, Creole-inflected vocals, Antoine "Fats" Domino Jr. help put his native New Orleans on the map during the early rock and roll era. He was, in fact, a key figure in the transition from rhythm & blues to rock and roll – a transition so subtle, especially in his case, that the line between these two nominally different forms of music blurred to insignificance.
Born in the Big Easy in 1928, pianist, singer and songwriter Fats Domino ultimately sold more records (65 million) than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley. Between 1950 and 1963, he made Billboard’s pop chart 63 times and its R&B chart 59 times. Incredible as it may seem, Fats Domino scored more hit records than Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly put together. His best-known songs include "Ain't That a Shame," "Blueberry Hill" and "I'm Walkin'."
Fats Domino was born into a large and musical family. He received encouragement and tutoring from his brother-in-law, a trumpet player named Harrison Verret, who introduced Domino to the New Orleans music scene. Following in the footsteps of piano greats as Professor Longhair, Domino began performing for small change in local honky-tonks while working odd jobs (like hauling ice) to make ends meet. Domino’s musical likes and influences included pianists Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Amos Milburn and Charles Brown; vocalists Roy Milton and Joe Turner; and bandleaders Louis Jordan and Count Basie.
In 1946, he began playing piano in Billy Diamond’s band at the Hideaway Club. It was Diamond who gave him the nickname “Fats.” (Domino weighed 220 pounds while standing only five feet, five inches tall.) By 1949, Domino had become a fixture at the Hideaway in his own right, and he was drawing crowds and solid notices for his musical abilities, which were notable even by New Orleans standards. That same year, he met Dave Bartholomew, who became his producer, bandleader and collaborator, and Lew Chudd, who signed Domino to his Imperial Records label. Scouting for talent, Bartholomew and Chudd checked out Domino’s act at the Hideaway Club, and the rest is history. The run of records Domino made with Bartholomew at Imperial, beginning in 1949 and ending only when Chudd sold the label in 1963, is one of rock and roll’s greatest.
Domino’s nickname became the basis of his first single, "The Fat Man," a huge R&B hit – it went to Number Two nationally – and reported million-seller. Some music historians consider “The Fat Man” to be the first rock and roll record; at the very least, it is a milestone rhythm and blues performance heralding a new age in popular music. Based on an old blues number (“Junker’s Blues,” about heroin) for which Domino wrote a more upbeat, autobiographical set of lyrics, “The Fat Man” features a memorably amusing vocal solo in which Domino mimics a horn. The song was cut at engineer Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studios, at Rampart and Dumaine Streets in New Orleans. Most of Domino's great Imperial sides were recorded at J&M, with Bartholomew producing and a crack house band that included drummer Earl Palmer and saxophonists Alvin "Red" Tyler and Herbert Hardesty backing him up.
A string of R&B hits followed “The Fat Man,” including such powerfully bluesy sides as “Goin’ Home” (Number One), “Going to the River” (Number Two) and “Please Don’t Leave Me (Number Three). Still, Domino’s success remained confined to the R&B charts – that is, until 1952, when "Goin' Home" got to Number 30. The following year, "Goin' To The River" reached Number 24, but his major crossover hit came in 1955 with “Ain’t It A Shame.” The song was retitled “Ain’t That a Shame” by Pat Boone, whose cover version actually did better on the pop charts (it was Number One for two weeks) than Domino’s original (which reached Number 10). The Four Seasons would also have a hit with “Ain’t That a Shame” in 1963, when their remake went to Number 22.
Domino experienced extraordinary success in the burgeoning rock and roll market, especially in the latter half of the Fifties. “Ain’t It a Shame” became the first in a string of 37 crossover hits for Domino over the next eight years. His biggest hit came in late 1956 with “Blueberry Hill,” a song that had previously been cut by Glenn Miller, Gene Autry andLouis Armstrong. Domino’s version reached Number Two, kept from the top by Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues.” (Despite his hit-filled career, Domino would never top the pop chart. Might that have to do with the fact he recorded for an independent label?)
After “Blueberry Hill” firmly established him as a star, the hits came fast and furious. Some of Domino’s most memorable singles from the late Fifties include “Blue Monday” (Number Five), “I’m Walkin’” (Number Four), “It’s You I Love” (Number Six), Valley of Tears (Number Eight), “The Big Beat” (Number 26), “Whole Lotta Loving” (Number Six), “I’m Ready” (Number 16), “I Want to Walk You Home” (Number Eight), “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” (Number 17), “Be My Guest” (Number Eight) and “Walking to New Orleans” (Number Six).
The secret behind the appeal of Domino’s music’s was, unsurprisingly, rhythm. "You got to keep a good beat," Domino said in a 1956 interview in Downbeat magazine. "The rhythm we play is from Dixieland — New Orleans." He elaborated on that point in the liner notes for his 1991 box set, They Call Me the Fat Man...: The Legendary Imperial Recordings: “Everybody started callin' my music rock and roll,” noted Domino, “but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playin' down in New Orleans." Perhaps the definitive statement on the matter was Domino’s song “The Big Beat,” whose lyrics included these lines: The big beat keep you rockin’ in your seat/The big beat keep you rockin’ in your sleep/Clap your hands, stomp your feet/You got to move when you hear the beat.
Domino became highly visible in the late Fifties, appearing in several rock and roll movies (including Shake, Rattle and Rock) and joining many of the big "caravan" tours of the day. While he was admittedly less charismatic than his extroverted contemporaries, the easygoing Domino got by on the irresistible rhythms and solid foundation of his music. Likable and down-to-earth, Fats Domino was the least affected superstar of rock and roll’s first decade. His genial temperament and immense talent assured his success.
The arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion in 1964 proved devastating to the careers of first-generation rock and roll and rhythm & blues artists like Domino, whose hit streak came to an end that very year. He made the Hot 100 just one more time – ironically, with his cover of the Beatles' “Lady Madonna,” a song Paul McCartney had specifically written with Domino’s big-beat boogie style in mind. Domino continued to find work as a live performer, especially when a rock and roll revival took root in the early Seventies. In 1975, John Lennon included “Ain’t That a Shame” on Rock and Roll, his album of early rock covers. Rockers Cheap Trick revived the song again, including it on 1979’s Cheap Trick at Budokan. Released as a single, their cover of “Ain’t That a Shame” made the song a hit for the fourth time when it reached Number 35.
Revered as a rock and roll pioneer, Domino was in the original class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, joining such fellow icons as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Ray Charles and the Everly Brothers. During his induction speech on Domino’s behalf, Billy Joelcredited Fats Domino for proving “the piano was a rock and roll instrument.” Joel, Elton John and Paul McCartney are only a handful of musicians who have derived influence and inspiration from Domino.
One of the most long-lived of Fifties rockers, Fats Domino made headlines for non-musical reasons in August 2005. Speculation ran rampant that he’d perished when his home in the Ninth Ward was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but he survived and was rescued by boat. In 2007, some of the greatest figures in rock and roll contributed tracks to a charity album, Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. Funds from its sale were used to help rebuild Domino’s home in his beloved New Orleans.
Fats Domino (piano, vocals; born February 26, 1928)
http://www.biography.com/people/fats-domino-9276748
Fats Domino
Biography
Pianist, singer
(b. 1928)
Singer and pianist Fats Domino is an American rhythm-and-blues artist whose innovative music would help lay the foundation for what would become rock and roll in the 1950s.
Synopsis
Fats Domino was born in 1928, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Introduced to music early in life, he began performing in clubs in his teens and in 1949 was discovered by Dave Bartholomew, who became Domino's exclusive arranger. His first recording, “The Fat Man” (1949), was one of a series of rhythm-and-blues hits that sold 500,000 to 1,000,000 copies. He found success in mainstream America with his 1955 song "Ain't It A Shame.” The next year, his cover of “Blueberry Hill” became his highest charting hit. He solidified his popularity with teenagers when he appeared in two films, Shake, Rattle & Rock and The Girl Can't Help It. During his career, Domino endured the challenges of racial discrimination to become one of the defining pioneers of rock and roll music. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. A documentary about his life, Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, premiered on PBS in 2016.
Rise to Fame
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 26, 1928, singer and musician Antoine "Fats" Domino was one of nine siblings in a musical family. He spoke Creole before he spoke English. When he was seven, his brother-in-law Harrison Verret taught him to play the piano and introduced him to the vibrant New Orleans music scene; by age 10, Domino was already performing as a singer and pianist. At 14, he dropped out of high school to pursue his musical dreams, taking on odd jobs like factory work and hauling ice just to make ends meet. He was inspired by the likes of boogie-woogie piano players like Meade Lux Lewis and singers like Louis Jordan. In 1946, Domino started playing piano for the well-known New Orleans bass player and band leader Billy Diamond, who gave Domino the nickname "Fats." Domino's rare musical talents quickly made him a sensation, and by 1949 he was drawing substantial crowds on his own.
“I knew Fats from hanging out at a grocery store. He reminded me of Fats Waller and Fats Pichon. Those guys were big names and Antoine—that’s what everybody called him then—had just got married and gained weight. I started calling him ‘Fats’ and it stuck.” - Billy Diamond
In 1949, Fats Domino met collaborator Dave Bartholomew and signed to Imperial Records, where he would stay until 1963. Domino's first record was The Fat Man, based on his nickname, a song co-written with Bartholomew. It became the first rock and roll record ever to sell over a million copies, peaking at No. 2 on the R&B charts in 1950. Domino and Bartholomew continued to churn out R&B hits and Top 100 records for years. Domino's distinctive style of piano playing, accompanied by simple saxophone riffs, drum afterbeats, and his mellow baritone voice, made him stand out in the sea of 1950s R&B singers.
Fats Domino found mainstream success in 1955 with his song "Ain't It A Shame," which was covered by Pat Boone, who recorded it as "Ain't That A Shame"; Boone's version hit No. 1 on the pop charts, while Domino's original reached No. 10. The hit record increased Domino's visibility and record sales. (It also happened to be the very first song John Lennon ever learned to play on guitar.) In 1956, Domino had five Top 40 hits, including “My Blue Heaven” and his cover of Glenn Miller's "Blueberry Hill," which hit No. 2 on the pop charts, Domino's top charting record ever. He cemented this popularity with appearances in two 1956 films, Shake, Rattle & Rock and The Girl Can't Help It; his hit "The Big Beat" was featured on Dick Clark's television show American Bandstand in 1957. Still, despite his enormous popularity among both white and black fans, when touring the country in the 1950s, Domino and his band were often denied lodging and had to utilize segregated facilities, at times driving miles away from the venue. Riding high on his success during the end of the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Domino churned out even more rocking hits in 1959 like “Whole Lotta Loving,” “I’m Ready,” and “I Want to Walk You Home.”
Domino has described his songwriting process as taking inspiration from everyday events: "Something that happened to someone, that's how I write all my songs. I used to listen to people talk every day, things would happen in real life. I used to go around different places, hear people talk. Sometimes I wasn't expecting to hear nothin', and my mind was very much on my music. Next thing I'd hear, I would either write it down or remember it good." Domino believed the success of his music came from the rhythm: "You got to keep a good beat. The rhythm we play is from Dixieland — New Orleans."
After recording an impressive 37 different Top 40 hits for the label, Fats Domino left Imperial Records in 1963 — later claiming "I stuck with them until they sold out" — and joined ABC-Paramount Records, this time without his longtime sidekick Dave Bartholomew. Whether due to the change in sound or because of changing popular tastes, Domino found his music less commercially popular than before. By the time American pop music was revolutionized by the 1964 British Invasion, Domino's reign at the top of the charts had reached its end. He left ABC-Paramount in 1965 and returned to New Orleans to collaborate once again with Dave Bartholomew. The pair recorded steadily until 1970, but only charted with one more single: "Lady Madonna," a cover of a Beatles song that, ironically, had been inspired by Domino's own musical style. Still, Domino's songs and New Orleans sound would continue to influence a generation of rock and rollers as well as the growing ska music genre in Jamaica.
“There wouldn’t have been a Beatles without Fats Domino.” - John Lennon
Domino continued to tour for the next two decades, but after a health scare he experienced during tour dates in England in 1991, he rarely left New Orleans, preferring to live comfortably at home with his wife Rosemary and eight children off the royalties from his earlier recordings. A quiet and private man, he's occasionally performed at local concerts and at the famed New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival from time to time, but generally shunned publicity of all kinds. Domino was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, but refused to attend the ceremony; likewise, he turned down an invitation to perform at the White House, though he accepted the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1998.Four songs of Domino's have been named to the Grammy Hall of Fame for their significance in music history: “Blueberry Hill” in 1987, “Ain’t It A Shame” in 2002, “Walking to New Orleans in 2011, and “The Fat Man” in 2016. Domino was also presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.
Later Years
Despite being urged to leave New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina striking the city in 2005, Domino preferred to stay home with his wife Rosemary, who was in poor health at the time. When the hurricane hit, Domino's Lower Ninth Ward home was badly flooded and the legendary musician lost virtually all of his possessions. Many feared that he was dead, but the Coast Guard rescued Domino and his family on September 1, three days into the city's crisis. Domino quickly put the rumors of his demise to rest, releasing the album Alive and Kickin' in 2006. A portion of the record sales went to New Orleans' Tipitina's Foundation, which helps local musicians in need.
Katrina had also devastated Domino personally. To raise money for repairs to Domino's home, friends and rock stars alike recorded a charity tribute album, Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino. The likes of Paul McCartney, Robert Plant and Elton John lent their support to the early rock pioneer.
After Katrina, Fats Domino made some public appearances around his home city of New Orleans. One of his concerts was recorded for a PBS documentary, Fats Domino: Walkin' Back to New Orleans, which aired in 2007. A greatest hits album was also released in 2007, allowing a whole new generation to fall for Fats Domino all over again.
In recent years, however, Domino has largely stayed out of the spotlight and hasn't performed. His beloved wife died in 2008. The following year, he attended a benefit concert to watch such other musical legends as Little Richard and B.B. King perform, but he stayed off the stage. A documentary about his life, Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, premiered on PBS in 2016. Now in his eighties, Domino will always be remembered as one of rock's earliest and most enduring stars, as well as an influencer of Jamaican ska music. He and his music also helped break down color barriers, getting white stations to play his songs and playing to racially diverse audiences.
The Story Of Fats Domino's 'Ain't That A Shame'
May 1, 2000
Heard on All Things Considered
by Nick Spitzer
NPR
Legendary American jazz pianist and singer Fats Domino.
Express Newspapers/Getty Images
Sunday marked Fats Domino's 84th birthday. Hear the story — which aired on All Things Considered on May 1, 2000 — behind his breakthrough hit, "Ain't That A Shame." Since this story aired, Fats' home in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He and his family now live in Harvey, La.
Antoine Domino is the Louisiana French name for the man whose honey voice, Creole inflection, rock-steady piano triplets and basic boogie blues and love songs endeared him to the world in the 1950s, as New Orleans rhythm and blues flowed into and helped define the mainstream of American rock 'n' roll.
Born in 1928, Fats Domino was the youngest of eight children in a French Creole family. He grew up only a few blocks from where he lives now, downriver from the French Quarter in the Ninth Ward. Today it's a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood, but in Fats' youth, it was pretty much country with unpaved roads, no electricity and small farms. While Fats' father, Antoine Sr., played the fiddle, it was brother-in-law Harrison Verette, a jazz banjo player, who taught young Fats piano.
The quasi-biographical song, "The Fat Man," was made for Imperial Records in 1949. Like many of Domino's songs, it was co-written by the man who Fats came to count on as a producer and arranger, Dave Bartholomew. Bartholomew, now almost 80 years old, still lives and plays trumpet in New Orleans. He'd be the first to tell you that Fats is and always was extremely shy.
Domino, who's 72, lives in seclusion, as he has since the early '60s, in a sort of chieftain's compound that is oddly extravagant and modest at the same time. The main house is a classic New Orleans style shotgun double, yellow with black trim. Then there's the cream, green and pink building that's home to his childhood sweetheart and wife, Rosemary. Around the compound is an elaborate iron fence, trimmed in pink and green, ornamented by bas-relief grapevines. A neon sign under one eave proclaims, "Fats Domino Publishing." There are two grand pianos in this down-home graceland, one white, one black. Large dominoes are inlaid in the entryway tower. The centerpiece of the living room is a pink Cadillac tailfin couch. But the king on this throne rarely gives interviews, sticking instead to home cooking and unannounced outings to neighborhood bars in one of his Rolls-Royces.
In 1999, when awarded the presidential medal of the arts, Fats dispatched his daughter, Antoinette, to the White House.
At first, Fats reluctantly agreed to be interviewed for the radio. But he canceled time and again. "What about 'Ain't That a Shame'?" I asked. "Oh," Fats demurred, "I've been asked about that a thousand times."
A rare Fats Domino performance invariably brings out a cross-section of people. In standing-room-only clubs and in throngs at jazz fests, they sing and sway to the music of this inscrutable Buddha of New Orleans with his ring-encrusted hands and dapper colored suits. Fats' ability to both move people and bring them together goes back to at least 1955, the year he recorded, "Ain't That a Shame." It was the first of Domino's big hits not recorded in New Orleans. Instead, "Ain't That a Shame" was put onto tape in a Hollywood studio on March 15th when Fats was on tour in Los Angeles where he played the popular 5-4 Ballroom.
Like nearly all Domino recordings, Imperial Records tweaked the song a bit before issuing the 45. The sound was compressed to make it punchier and speeded up slightly to make Fats seem more youthful and less bluesy. New Orleans studio producer Cosimo Matassa, who worked on the Domino hit-producing sessions back home, speculates that speeding up the songs made it harder for other artists to copy. Fear of imitation was quite legitimate, as many R&B artists had their songs covered by white pop performers whose versions were often more palatable to the mainstream public.
A cover by country legend Pat Boone did not smother the success of Domino's original, which not only stayed at the top of the R&B charts for almost three months, but made history when it crossed over to the top of the dominantly white pop charts. Fats recalls that the president of Imperial Records, Lew Chudd, told him, "Your record's goin' pop. You got a big record." Indeed.
This enduring hit showcases Domino's powerful blues piano and stop-time, swamp-pop texture with an abundance of saxophones, plus that warm Creole-accented voice telling the simple but sincere story of romance found and lost. On "Ain't That a Shame," the sax players are Herb Hardesty on lead, with Samuel Lee and Buddy Hagens; Walter "Papoose" Nelson on guitar; Billy Diamond, bass; Cornelius Tenoo Coleman, drums; and Antoine "Fats" Domino on piano and vocals.
Related NPR Stories:
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December 19, 2007
September 9, 2005
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fats-DominoFats Domino
Fats Domino
American singer and pianist
Written by: The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Also known as
Antoine Domino, Jr.
born: February 26, 1928
New Orleans, Louisiana
Fats Domino (birth name Antoine Domino, Jr.) was born February 26, 1928, New Orleans, La. U.S. An American singer and pianist he was a rhythm-and-blues star who became one of the first rock-and-roll stars and who helped define the New Orleans sound. Altogether his relaxed, stylized recordings of the 1950s and ’60s sold some 65 million copies, making him one of the most popular performers of the early rock era.
From a musical family, Domino received early training from his brother-in-law, guitarist Harrison Verrett. He began performing in clubs in his teens and in 1949 was discovered by Dave Bartholomew—the bandleader, songwriter, and record producer who helped bring New Orleans’s J&M Studio to prominence and who became Domino’s exclusive arranger. Domino’s first recording, “The Fat Man” (1950), became the first of a series of rhythm-and-blues hits that sold 500,000 to 1,000,000 copies. His piano playing consisted of simple rhythmic figures, often only triad chords over a boogie pattern, forcefully played and joined by simple saxophone riffs and drum afterbeats (accents in a measure of music that follow the downbeat). These accompanied the smooth, gently swinging vocals he delivered in a small, middle baritone range, with even dynamics and a slight New Orleans accent, all of which made Domino one of the most distinctive rock-and-roll stylists.
With “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955) Domino became a favorite of white as well as black audiences. “Blueberry Hill” (1956), his most popular recording, was one of several rock-and-roll adaptations of standard songs. The piano-oriented Domino-Bartholomew style was modified somewhat in hits such as “I’m Walkin’” (1957) and “Walking to New Orleans” (1960). He appeared in the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It. One of his last hits was a version of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” (1968). Domino was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-rock-legend-fats-dominos-world-crawfish-cards-boogie-woogie-20160226
Inside Rock Legend Fats Domino's World: Crawfish, Cards, Boogie-Woogie
On his 88th birthday, the rock & roll architect's musical influence is honored in a new documentary
Fats Domino, now 88, is one of the pioneers of rock & roll, with a particular style of piano playing influenced by his hometown of New Orleans Clive Limpkin/Daily Express/Hulton Archive
by Patrick Doyle
February 26, 2016
Rolling Stone
When a friend of Fats Domino's invited filmmaker Joe Lauro to hang out at Domino's New Orleans house in the early 2000s, he knew he had to make a film about the rock & roll architect. More than a decade later, Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll will air tonight, on Domino's 88th birthday. The film captures how the New Orleans pianist cut what many believe is the first rock & roll record, 1949's The Fat Man, and went onto sell 65 million records, making the Billboard pop chart 63 times between 1950 and 1963, thanks in part to his songwriting partnership with bandleader/producer Dave Bartholomew. "Everybody started calling my music rock and roll," Domino said in 1991, "But it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playin' down in New Orleans."
But even as he sold more records than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley, Domino and his band dealt with discrimination and turmoil on the road. Lauro touches on the issues, but he mostly focuses on the music, using footage from a recently unearthed 1962 Paris concert that shows Domino at the top of his game. The film airs tonight on PBS at 10 p.m and is also available on DVD.
Of all the Fifties rock & roll pioneers, Fats is one of the most mysterious. Can you tell me about why you wanted to make a film about him?
I'd been going down to New Orleans working on other films just as a friend, visitor and lover for many years, and Fats in that town, to this day, is like a god. But for the rest of the world, he's relegated to some jolly old oldies act, and that really gnawed at me. When I got to know him a little, I realized that, unlike his contemporaries – like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry – there was no high drama. There was no great tragedy. But he sold more records than all of them combined, not counting Elvis. And he was just being forgotten because of his shyness and the fact that he lived a very private, un-crazy life.
The man was on the road for 40 years, but he's not flamboyant with lipstick and screaming, lighting the piano on fire. He's not marrying his cousin that's 13. So in a sense, we all gravitate to that sort of sensationalism. Of course his extreme shyness is the reason why he was forgotten. I said, "Man, we gotta try to change that." For my money, he was the most influential. He was recording before all those guys. His first million-selling hit was 1949. He never changed his music. The music just became rock & roll because it came out of the blues and that's what he played and it was always hard-edged anyway. He had an amazing talent as a songwriter with Dave Bartholomew. Before Lennon and McCartney, it was Fats and Dave. There was no other team that worked on each other's differences to work on amazing songs, and it was a story that was really never told.
If there was no high drama – like Little Richard going to the church or Chuck Berry going to jail – how did you approach making an interesting film about him?
I knew that Fats was private. And when I finally gained his trust – and that took several years – there was no way I was going to let him down. The man sold 60 million records before 1962. The music alone is all I needed to talk about. If anyone wants to read a tell-all on Fats Domino, they can go somewhere else – because this is about great American music. It's a hybrid of New Orleans, all these beats and rhythms that he just used naturally. People from Iowa didn't know that. They'd just heard great songs, but if you listen to the music, more than his other contemporaries, it's traceable to a local rootsy sound. I don't know if you could say that Elvis' sound was a Memphis sound. Fats Domino's sound is 100 percent New Orleans.
How did you gain his trust?
I made a film about Louis Prima a few years ago. [A couple of Fats' closest friends] came and we started chatting. They said, "We love your film. Wanna come over and meet Fats?" This was about 10 years ago. I went over into Fats' world. Talk about a parallel universe. He was still two blocks away from where he was born in the Lower Ninth Ward, in a double-shotgun shack. You'd walk through his bedroom to get to the kitchen. And there was this super modern house next door where he and his wife lived, with a little passageway. We hit it off. I'm sitting in his little room, and he's playing piano and we hit it off. What a sweet man.
I went over a couple of times, and of course I'm thinking I gotta make a film. All his buddies are around, cases of food coming in. They're playing cards, hanging out. That's his world. It was just Fats' world, all his old childhood friends because he's in the same neighborhood. He'd be hanging in his silk pajamas and his hair net. He didn't give a shit. Someone told me another filmmaker came out and started snapping pictures of Fats in his hair net and he got physically removed from the premises. So I knew that I needed to be a little softer in my approach, and it took a really long time. He wanted $10,000 in a bag, cash, like all those guys did. So it took a real long time to really get him online. We'd play pool a little bit, and he would always beat my ass. One time, I won, at that point he owed me a little money. He said, "Hey, Joe, you want me to sign that release? You still making that movie?" I said yeah. He didn't wanna pay me. I got the release.
It took a real long time to really get his trust and all that. He said, "I don't want to be documented by anybody." Then Katrina came, and everything changed a little bit for him. I was in production already. He had moved to be with his daughter, but even then, I was hesitant about whether I was gonna make the movie. Because the tragedy for rock & roll in America, there ware very few TV shows, very few places you could see the music where it was filmed in America. Maybe you'd get on Dick Clark or some horrible rock & roll movie, but there was no good performances because no one filmed them. I wanted to make something where you could see the music and the band. So I lost interest. And then a couple years later, we found a full-length concert that was in the French National Archives. The whole band in 1962. All the guys that played on every rock & roll record in New Orleans. And there they are. There's an attitude that Fats' piano playing is simplistic. He's going nuts on the keyboard! It shows him and the band for what they were, which is one of the most phenomenal groups out there on the road. So I said, "OK, now I can do it."
Joe Lauro with Fats Domino Haydee Ellis
One problem I have with documentaries is they only show a few seconds of a great performance and then cut to an interview. But you don't do that.
If I wanted to spend all my time talking about his private life, you wouldn't see all that great music. When I make films about musicians, we show the whole songs. There's even an extra where we go to his house and he's playing everything. That's one issue: He wasn't a very talkative fellow. How do I get Fats in the film? I tried to interview him but couldn't get too much. His biographer Rick Coleman had done some audio interviews 10 years earlier, which was very detailed about his childhood and everything. That way, we were able to get Fats in the film a little bit more. Whenever he was on The Steve Allen Show, they interviewed him, but it was nothing really of any substance. That, combined with the French Archive really helped, so I could make this film.
What are Fats' hobbies?
His name is Fats, and the man loves food. He would rather talk to you about the type of frying pan he uses. He would rather cook for you than do anything else. That's what it was all about. It was about cases of New England clam chowder arriving. Or crawfish he would cook on the stove and give you for breakfast. Even when he was a younger man, he would bring his own burner on the road and pack New Orleans food. He continued that love. If you would go to his house and knock on his door, if he was in the right mood, he would invite you in. His hobbies were always music and cooking.
The film doesn't shy away from how difficult it was to be a black musician in the South – they often had to drive 100 miles from a gig to find a hotel that would take them.
These guys are top of the charts, and they didn't have a place to stay. That man lived through it. And you know all of them were hesitant to talk about it. More than anything, I could tell they just wanted to forget about it. Dave Bartholomew particularly: "I don't wanna be talking about no civil rights thing, we just lived it."
I said to Fats, "Did you go see The Girl Can't Help It?" He said, "Yeah." "Where did you see it?" He said, "I went to the Saenger Theatre." He's the star of the film, and he had to sit upstairs! He had to go upstairs at the premiere. The New Orleans Times-Picayune never covered his career. Nothing about Fats.
Fats Domino at JM Studio in 1956 Photo Courtesy of Historic New Orleans Collection
What did Fats think of your film?
Fats just loved it. At the premiere, he kind of grabbed my hand. His daughter told me he watched the rough cut like four times. They even made some comments on a couple factual things we got wrong. It was a long, drawn out thing. It's a labor of love, these types of things. I choose not go to Keith Richards or big names – why talk to them when I could talk to Fats' friends from the Ninth Ward? When you do it that way, it's harder to get them made because you're not wheeling out the checkbook.
The thing that really broke the ice with him is that I knew he loved boogie-woogie. My company Historic Films is a huge archive of music on film, and we license it out to people. So I made him a tape of Meade Lux Lewis, Amos Milburn, Albert Ammons. All those guys he just cherished, I made a VHS. I put on this clip from the Forties called "Low Down Dog" with Meade Lux Lewis. I gave him the tape, and he just went nuts. They said he never took it out of the machine. He started calling me Video Joe. "Is this video Joe?" When Katrina happened and he lost everything, I made him another copy.
Domino was thought missing in the week after the Hurricane in 2005. What's his life like now?
Right after Katrina, they thought he was dead. They finally found him. The whole neighborhood was completely devastated. This is the Lower Ninth Ward. It's not a wealthy neighborhood. Most of the people either left, died or never came back. The Tipitina's Foundation rebuilt his house, but he never moved in. Why? Because everyone was gone. His whole way of life ended. It's a displacement that you don't hear a lot about as a result of that storm. You hear about people losing their houses or dying or whatever, but you get an old person used to having everyone around their whole life, well, it's gone. So he moved into a wonderful suburban house. His daughter takes care of him. But it's not the same. And it made him withdraw, in my opinion. When I was shooting him like five years ago, I couldn't get too much information from him, but man, I said, "Play the intro to 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy.' Play me a little bit of 'Swanee River Boogie.' There was nothing from his playing and singing he ever forgot.
Why did he stop performing?
I think what happened is he did it for 65 years, and it was just time to stop. I think it was just too much of an effort when you're getting that old. Fats wanted to have that sound unchanged. That's the thing about Fats that none of the other guys preserved. Fats made sure that those arrangements were played. He made sure Herb Hardesty was on the sax. He rehearsed. He did not take a pick-up band and play. When you saw Fats Domino, to the last show, you could close your eyes and it would be like being in a joint in 1955. It was ageless.
Do you ever see him doing another show, even an appearance at New Orleans Jazz Fest?
I don't know. Who knows. The man is still going. I think he pretty much made a conscious decision to not perform in public anymore. But if you happen to be lucky enough to be invited to his house and he's in the right mood, you'll hear some great stuff.
In the film, you talk about the myth of Fats as a harmless guy.
He was a little guy, kind of roly-poly, soft spoken, not outrageous. Everyone assumed he was this harmless sort of little black guy from the South. He wasn't threatening. That image is really unfair because he ran a tight ship with that band. He kept that band going. He played this great, wonderful music. But people react in strange ways on that level. He didn't give a damn but, then again, that goes back to one of the reasons why he's so misunderstood by so much of the world. They get it in New Orleans but nowhere else. And man, those records are kick-ass. They are some serious records.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/fats-domino-book-excerpt-blue-monday-fats-domino-lost-dawn-rock-n-roll/6599/
Fats Domino and The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll
Book Excerpt: Blue Monday. Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘N’ Roll, Da Capo Press, 2016
February 17, 2016
PBS
Fats (Antoine) Domino, Jr.
Singer and pianist
Born: Feb 26, 1928
KNOWN FOR His nickname Fats. Being one of the inventors of rock 'n' roll; his songs "Ain't That a Shame," "I'm Walking," "The Fat Man" and his version of "Blueberry Hill."
AMERICAN MASTERS FILM
Fats Domino and The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll
(Feb 2016)
Directed by Joe Lauro
Rick Coleman, Fats Domino’s biographer and author of Blue Monday: Fats Domino and The Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll, is among the interviewees in the film Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock N’ Roll. Coleman has been writing about New Orleans music for the past 35 years, with his work appearing appearing locally and in Rolling Stone and Billboard.
Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll won the ASCAP Deems Taylor-Timothy White award for outstanding musical biography of 2007. Coleman is working on an extensive history of New Orleans music.
An excerpt from Blue Monday’s chapter 10, below, describes Fats Domino’s work and recognition at the height of his fame, the recording session for “I’m Walkin’,” and his cross-over into Country & Western with “Blueberry Hill.”
Chapter 10: “I’m Walking” (early 1957)
“One time we used to set the pace for the world.” — Dave Bartholomew
Over the holidays there were lines at movie box offices across America, where marquees proclaimed Hollywood spectaculars: Oklahoma, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, Lust for Life, Anastasia . . . Three controversial films, The Girl Can’t Help It, Shake, Rattle and Rock! and Baby Doll, incredibly featured singers — Fats Domino, Little Richard, Joe Turner, and Smiley Lewis — who were veterans of Cosimo’s studio and hole-in-the-wall New Orleans nightclubs.
After The Ed Sullivan Show and his appearance in two movies, Domino was becoming a superstar. On January 19, “Blueberry Hill” reached its pop peak at #2 for two weeks on the Billboard Juke Box chart behind “Singing the Blues” by pop singer Guy Mitchell. After the record’s eleventh week at #1 in the r&b charts, “Blue Monday” replaced it at the top. Lew Chudd bought an impressive four pages in Billboard to advertise Domino’s twelve gold records and attendance records broken in twenty-one cities. Imperial sold two million records in January, a million and a half in February — the vast majority of them 45 and 78 rpm singles by Domino. Though white adults rarely bought albums by black singers, except artists like Nat “King” Cole or Harry Belafonte who were essentially singing pop, Domino’s second album, Rock and Rollin’, invaded the snow-white pop album charts, reaching #18. It was followed by This Is Fats Domino, which hit #19.
In New York, BMI held the first “Rhythm & Blues Awards” luncheon on January 23 to celebrate blowing away ASCAP. Domino and [Dave] Bartholomew won six “citations of achievement” for their hits, the most of any songwriters. Fats also did great business for ASCAP with his revivals of old standards.
Fats was wide-eyed with pride as he flipped through his five-page “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” layout in Ebony. The article rolled up the figures of his success: 340 days a year on the road, up to $2,500 a night to perform, over $500,000 gross income in 1956, fifty suits, 100 pairs of shoes, a $1,500 diamond horseshoe stick pin, and a $200 monthly phone bill from calling Rosemary daily. Pictures also told his story: crowds jostling to beat the fire marshal’s audience limit, whites mixing with blacks, and the broken bottles and splintered chairs of the Newport and Fayetteville riots.
But there were a couple of sour notes in the midst of the coronation. George Oliver, owner of a Ninth Ward bar, the Jail Drop, talked Fats into going to the all-black Gallo Theater to see The Girl Can’t Help It, which had premiered downtown at the segregated Saenger Theater. There was no red-carpet treatment for Domino. “I don’t guess nobody knew I was there,” says Fats. At the same time, he canceled a stay locally at the all-white Safari Room on Gentilly Highway when he found out that the management expected him to dress in a trailer behind the club instead of giving him a dressing room.
On January 3 Domino recorded a session in Cosimo’s studio that included “I’m Walkin’,” a song that added fuel to his fire. Bartholomew challenged Earl Palmer to come up with a different beat. Following Domino’s unique two-beat piano, the drummer added his own parade rhythms. “Fats was a hell of a lot better musician than people give him credit for,” says Palmer. “He had a lot of original thoughts and they were all creative.” Palmer pumped a bass drum introduction that harked back a generation to the parade beat of Little Jim Mukes with the Eureka Brass Band. Then he started a steaming snare two-beat. Papoose Nelson played a scintillating guitar riff, with a tuba bass pattern accelerating to double-time. He also added a crucial sixth note. Frank Fields blended his bass between the guitar and Domino’s rumbling left hand.
Bartholomew wasn’t satisfied. He told Matassa he needed more bottom. “I can’t give it to you, I’m overloaded now,” replied the engineer.
“Well, take it from the top and give it to the bass,” Bartholomew demanded. “Just give me something to stand on!”
The musicians soon kicked off on an exhilarating second line parade rhythm with an extended solo by Herb Hardesty.
After the session, Bartholomew called a couple of kids from out on the street into the studio. He then rewound the tape and played “I’m Walkin’” for them. As if shot with a jolt of electricity, the kids immediately started dancing. “The only record I ever really felt that we had a big hit on was ‘I’m Walkin’,” says Bartholomew. “You put the clarinet in ‘I’m Walkin’’—‘Doomp-doomp- doomp deedly-deedly-dee’—and you got traditional jazz. You got Dixieland.”
“I’m Walkin’” was also one of Domino’s most “country” recordings, with a swinging beat like “Hey Good Lookin’.” Country fans also loved Domino’s records. His version of Gene Autry’s “Blueberry Hill” made #23 on the Billboard Country & Western top 50 Best Sellers for 1956, even though — likely to avoid incensing racists — it never appeared on any other country chart, making Fats the only black artist to make the c&w charts during the early civil rights era and foreshadowing the country crossover of Ray Charles by six years. As Gerald Early writes in One Nation Under a Groove: “What made Motown possible was not that Elvis Presley covered r&b but that Fats Domino, in the end a more significant artist, not only crossed over with r&b hits in 1955 but with a Country and Western tune, ‘Blueberry Hill.’”
From Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Rick Coleman. Reprinted courtesy of Da Capo Press.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/fats-dominos-white-piano/401552/
The Piano That Can't Play a Tune
How Fats Domino’s restored showpiece reflects the trajectory of post-Katrina New Orleans, an Object Lesson
by Mary Niall Mitchell
August 26, 2015
The Atlantic
If you could see Fats Domino’s piano today—white and gleaming on a pedestal at the Louisiana State Museum in the Old U.S. Mint in New Orleans’ French Quarter—you might think he had been kind enough to donate one of his signature grands to the museum for its music collection. That is, if you were unaware of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago, including Domino’s home on Caffin Street in the largely obliterated neighborhood known as the “Lower Nine,” where the white Steinway once held pride of place in Domino’s living room.
Submerged in nine feet of water from a massive breach in the nearby Industrial Canal, it sat for weeks in the fetid lake that covered 80 percent of New Orleans after Katrina. Curators from the Louisiana State Museum raised $35,000 to have it reassembled and restored, and it now sits beneath a spotlight in an exhibit room as if waiting for Domino himself to sit down and play it. At the dedication ceremony in 2013, Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardanne said, “His beautiful grand piano, fully restored, will serve as the perfect symbol for Louisiana’s resilient nature and ever-evolving musical heritage.”
What's been learned since the hurricane struck New Orleans
Well, no and yes. Despite the painstaking restoration, the white grand piano is unplayable. It is this last fact that makes the story of this instrument such a powerful metaphor for New Orleans since Katrina. It is a tale about persistence in the face of government neglect, cataclysmic disaster, and the painful incompleteness of reconstruction. More particularly, it is a lesson about the importance of preserving the material remains of the city’s past even as it focuses on the future.
These objects—some partly restored, some not—are all the more important in light of the city’s record of demolition of many significant musical landmarks, despite the recent efforts of preservation groups to turn the tide. Louis Armstrong’s birthplace, for example, was torn down in the 1960s to build a city jail. Other jazz landmarks are in grave disrepair.
The history of New Orleans music had an additional vulnerability before Katrina: The homes of the city’s musicians and writers held much of the city’s musical heritage. Letters, handwritten scores, photographs, cocktail napkins, matchbooks, and musical instruments were under the beds and in the attics of working musicians and their descendants. Most of Michael White’s enormous collection of artifacts from early jazz musicians—some 50 clarinets, reams of sheet music, reeds and mouthpieces, and taped interviews with musicians—is gone. White’s house near the London Avenue Canal in Lakeview took in water up to the roof. The only things salvaged by volunteers were some of his clarinets. “They looked like bodies,” White told me. “And the ones that were in cases looked like bodies in coffins. They weren’t really about me, they symbolized New Orleans history and culture and the present state of the culture.”
Tending to the artifacts the storm left behind, as White did, can feel restorative. And it is not the same as choosing property over people, something that does not bode well in New Orleans. “The black working class in New Orleans,” the historian George Lipsitz wrote in Katrina’s aftermath, “has long refused to concede that white property is more important than black humanity.” After the storm, neighborhood traditions like the parading of Mardi Gras Indians persisted, despite and because of the challenges of rebuilding those communities. But the preservation of cultural artifacts after Katrina, such as Domino’s piano, was something of a different job.
As show-stopping as Domino’s white Steinway grand is, it is the opposite of the first piano he played, acquired by his family in the 1930s. That piano, Domino told his biographer, was “so beat up that you could see the rusted metal through the ivory, it had been played so hard.” According to the authors of Up From the Cradle of Jazz: “The Ninth Ward blues built off of pianos and horns.” There was an old upright in just about every small music club in the Lower Ninth Ward. The white piano, on the other hand, was not even Domino’s regular instrument. Instead, it was the one that greeted visitors to the house on Caffin Street and was a favored backdrop for family photographs. The glorious grand piano testified to his rise from a part-time musician and factory worker to one of the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll.
Domino’s upbringing in the Lower Ninth Ward, surrounded by his Creole relatives, inflected his music. His father was descended from French-speaking African Americans who lived as enslaved and then freedpeople in Louisiana’s sugar parishes. Like many Louisiana Creoles, black and white, they had roots in Haiti. When the Dominos arrived in the Lower Nine, the neighborhood was still mostly rural, with unpaved streets, farm animals, and scarce electricity and indoor plumbing. In a recent radio show devoted to Domino, writer Ben Sandmel observed the artist’s “Caribbean vocal style” in songs like “My Blue Heaven.” “It’s almost like he’s an English as a second language speaker. It’s a very thick regional accent,” Sandmel said. “If you listen to oral histories of people [from the Lower Nine] who recorded around that time there are a lot of thick accents and a lot of French-isms in the speech.”
When he combined his Creole influences with New Orleans’s distinctive eight-bar blues, Domino changed the course of American music. He sold 65 million records, more than any other musician in the 1950s besides Elvis Presley. Though Presley was proclaimed the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he freely admitted that African Americans in New Orleans like Fats Domino were playing it first as “rhythm and blues.” Domino’s wild popularity in Jamaica also inspired the creation of ska and reggae. But fame and influence, of course, did not exempt him from the hurricane.
At the time of the disaster, many outsiders were surprised that so many poor, mostly black people had no means of evacuating the city. But even long-time New Orleanians with means, Fats included, chose to wait it out, as was their custom. Domino had to be rescued by boat, taken to the Superdome, and then evacuated to Baton Rouge. Because everyone knew where Domino lived, many assumed he had died in the flood; one misinformed soul even painted “R.I.P. Fats” on the front of his house. In an odd way, the 24 odd hours when Domino seemed to be “missing” became the focus of anxiety for many New Orleanians who had lost track of friends and relatives. According to curator Bruce Raeburn, for many observers of Katrina’s aftermath “musicians represented what was best about the city, so their fate became the gauge of both loss and recovery.”
Music historians have long recognized the pivotal role that Fats Domino (by all accounts a shy and humble fellow who seldom grants interviews) played in the history of American popular music. After Katrina, state historians hoped to salvage his instruments from the house in the Lower Ninth Ward. One of the people who spearheaded the effort was Greg Lambousy, then director of collections at the Louisiana State Museum. After he got the call from Domino’s daughter that they could take the pianos to be restored, Lambousy gathered a rescue team and in March 2006, seven months after the levee breach, they drove a truck and trailer through the broken streets to Caffin Avenue.
The white piano seemed to make a triumphant statement about the ability to overcome what had been damaged, to come out the other side of trauma.
There were two pianos in Domino’s house, one white and one black. Whereas the white one, a grand, was a “showpiece” the black baby grand, also a Steinway, was the one Domino played at home. The black piano was also the most intact. Restorers stabilized it and put on display in a permanent Katrina exhibit at the Presbytère on Jackson Square, looking just as it did when the water receded.
The white piano was in worse shape. All but one of the legs had been detached, and it was put into storage until funds could be raised for its restoration. Six years later, with the white piano still in need of a benefactor, Lambousy had an idea. He approached one of Fats Domino’s wealthiest and most influential fans: with $1,000 in seed money from Paul McCartney, the rest of the $35,000 came in quickly. The piano had been submerged for two weeks, and according to Shane Winter, the lead conservator on the project, it still had raw sewage left inside years later when conservators finally went to work on it. Its paint was crackled and peeling. His team had to take the entire instrument apart, some 6,000 pieces, so make sure that no water was trapped inside it. The conservators restored the white piano as much as possible to its original appearance. They could have made it play again, Winter told me, but given all the new parts required that would have created a different piano altogether.
Perhaps the real contrast between the black and white pianos, though, and how they ultimately emerged from Katrina, has to do with when they were each renovated. Charles Chamberlain, a historian at the state museum at the time, recalls the sense of near panic that New Orleans culture was under in the year after the storm. The devastated black piano made a clear visual case for rescuing other remains. “Right after the storm, everyone thought that the culture was truly threatened,” Chamberlain recalled. But the white piano seemed to make a triumphant statement about the ability to overcome what had been damaged, to come out the other side of trauma.
Times are still hard for the Lower Ninth Ward. The neighborhood finally has an elementary school again, Martin Luther King, though many of the children who live nearby instead scatter across the city during the day to attend charter schools. The streets near the canal are still mostly devoid of houses, though Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation continues to build new ones that sit higher above the street than the old shotguns did. On the other end of Caffin Avenue from Domino’s house a new convenience store opened this year, selling fresh produce and groceries in the neighborhood for the first time in 10 years. But lately there has been talk of building luxury condos on the Mississippi River edge of the Lower Ninth Ward.
There is also a Lower Ninth Ward Living History Museum now, run on a shoestring and the labor of young volunteers, which includes oral histories from residents, and an exhibit on the neighborhood and its history of civil-rights activism and culture. Portraits of the Lower Ninth Ward’s musical sons, including Kermit Ruffins and Domino himself, hang on the walls.
Domino’s house is still there, not far from the museum. It is in good condition, though he is living these days across the River on the westbank. And of course, it no longer holds its gleaming white showpiece. When asked by a reporter in 2006 if he planned to move back to his house on Caffin Avenue, Fats Domino replied: “I hope so. I like it down there.” So far, he has not returned to live in the neighborhood.
The residents of the city before Katrina who have lived through the flood’s long aftermath (this writer among them) have proven to be a resilient bunch, but they are not, nor can they ever be, fully restored. By the same token, post-diluvian New Orleans has lost whole segments of itself in the people who have not returned and the neighborhoods that have not been rebuilt.
Fats Domino’s white piano, meanwhile, has become a monument, an objet d’art, a thing reborn with a new and different purpose: to commemorate the storm that destroyed it.
This project was made possible with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2016/02/22/big-beat-bids-happy-birthday-fats-domino-rocks-shy-giant/80747286/
Rock & roll pioneer Fats Domino, who turns 88 on Friday, is a man of widely celebrated gifts. Drawing attention to himself, alas, is not one of them.
"Fats is a very humble man, and very shy," says Joe Lauro, producer and director of the documentary The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, which simultaneously makes its broadcast debut on PBS's American Masters and becomes available on DVD on Domino's birthday.
In contrast to Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name a few early icons he preceded on the charts, "Fats didn't have the rock 'n' roll craziness surrounding him," Lauro notes. "He's led a private life." Outside Domino's hometown of New Orleans — where "he's like a god," Lauro says — that's translated to less coverage of his historic contributions, Lauro posits; which made him think, to quote from one of Domino's signature tunes, ain't that a shame.
The Big Beat traces Domino's life back to Domino's childhood in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, following his evolution into a hitmaker whose other classics include I'm Walkin' and his definitive version of Blueberry Hill. Domino's key relationship with the noted jazz and R&B musician and bandleader Dave Bartholomew, who co-wrote and produced much of his material, is documented in interviews with Bartholomew and other collaborating musicians, as well as live performance footage.
"Fats didn't make any effort to invent rock & roll; it just sort of happened around him," Lauro says. "He was playing rhythm and blues and had a great band and wrote songs that were very accessible." Presley himself was among Domino's most ardent fans: "There was great mutual respect between them. Elvis called (Domino) the king of rock & roll."
Don Bartholomew, Dave's son and a musician and actor, feels that Domino's singing, informed by his French Creole heritage, influenced Presley's. "The way Fats sang was all original; there was Cajun there, a kind of French accent to it. It's hard to copy, but if you listen to some of Elvis's records, where words are kind of shortened — that's from Fats, I think."
The younger Bartholomew remembers Domino from his boyhood as "a kind and generous man, who always looked sharp. You know how some rappers wear a lot of bling? He did that before anybody. And just a straight-up good person — I never saw him mad."
Lauro
nonetheless had to earn his subject's trust. "When I met Fats, he said,
'I don't want anybody documenting me.' He was living in the same
working-class neighborhood where he grew up." The filmmaker bonded with
Domino by "talking about cooking" and playing him a compilation reel of
Domino's favorite boogie-woogie musicians. "He called me 'Video Joe.' "
When The Big Beat premiered at 2014's New Orleans Film Festival, Lauro recalls, Domino "watched it, then kind of grabbed my hand for a bit, then let it go. It got pretty personal. It was a great moment."
THE MUSIC OF FATS DOMINO: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. DOMINO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats_Domino
Antoine "Fats" Domino, Jr. (born February 26,
1928) is a French Creole pianist and singer-songwriter. He released five
gold (million-copy-selling) records before 1955[1]
and had 35 hit records in the U.S. Top 40. His musical style is based
on traditional rhythm and blues, accompanied by saxophones, bass, piano,
electric guitar and drums.[1]
Domino learned to play the piano from his brother-in-law, the jazz guitarist Harrison Verrett.[1][3]
Even after his success he continued to live in his old neighborhood. His large home was roomy enough for his 13 children, but he still preferred to sleep in a hammock outside.
Domino attracted national attention with his first recording, "The Fat Man", made in late 1949 for Imperial Records, an early rock-and-roll record featuring a rolling piano and Domino vocalizing "wah-wah" over a strong backbeat. "The Fat Man" sold one million copies by 1953.[5] Domino released a series of hit songs with the producer Dave Bartholomew (also the co-writer of many of the songs), saxophonists Herbert Hardesty and Alvin "Red" Tyler, bassist Frank Fields, and drummers Earl Palmer and Smokey Johnson. Other notable and long-standing musicians in Domino's band were the saxophonists Reggie Houston, Lee Allen, and Fred Kemp, Domino's trusted bandleader. Domino crossed into the pop mainstream with "Ain't That a Shame" (1955), which reached the Top Ten, though Pat Boone characteristically hit number 1 with a milder cover version of the song,[6] which received wider radio airplay in a racially segregated era. Domino eventually had 37 Top 40 singles.
Domino's debut album, Carry On Rockin, containing several of his hits and tracks that had not yet been released as singles, was issued under the Imperial imprint (catalogue number 9009) in November 1955 and was reissued as Rock and Rollin' with Fats Domino in 1956.[7] [7] The reissue reached number 17 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.[8]
His 1956 recording of "Blueberry Hill", a 1940 song by Vincent Rose, Al Lewis and Larry Stock (which had previously been recorded by Gene Autry, Louis Armstrong and others), reached number 2 in the Top 40 and was number 1 on the R&B chart for 11 weeks. It was his biggest hit.[6] "Blueberry Hill" sold more than 5 million copies worldwide in 1956 and 1957. Domino had further hit singles between 1956 and 1959, including "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" (Pop number 14), "I'm Walkin'" (Pop number 4), "Valley of Tears" (Pop number 8), "It's You I Love" (Pop number 6), "Whole Lotta Loving" (Pop number 6), "I Want to Walk You Home" (Pop number 8), and "Be My Guest" (Pop number 8).
Domino appeared in two films released in 1956: Shake, Rattle & Rock![9] and The Girl Can't Help It.[10] On December 18, 1957, his hit recording of "The Big Beat" was featured on Dick Clark's television program, American Bandstand.
On November 2, 1956, a riot broke out at Domino's show in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The police resorted to using tear gas to break up the unruly crowd. Domino jumped out a window to avoid the melee; he and two members of his band were slightly injured.[11]
Domino had a steady series of hits for Imperial through early 1962,
including "Walkin' to New Orleans" (1960, Pop number 6), co-written by Bobby Charles, and "My Girl Josephine" (Pop number 14) in the same year.
Imperial Records was sold in early 1963, and Domino left the label: "I stuck with them until they sold out," he said in 1979. In all, Domino recorded over 60 singles for Imperial, placing 40 songs in the top 10 on the R&B chart and 11 in the top 10 on the Pop chart. Twenty-two of Domino's Imperial singles were double-sided hits.
Jarvis and Justis changed the Domino sound somewhat, notably by adding the backing of a countrypolitan-style vocal chorus to most of his new recordings. Perhaps as a result of this tinkering with an established formula, Domino's chart career was drastically curtailed. He released 11 singles for ABC-Paramount but had only one Top 40 entry ("Red Sails in the Sunset", 1963). By the end of 1964 the British Invasion had changed the tastes of the record-buying public, and Domino's chart run was over.
Despite the lack of chart success, Domino continued to record steadily until about 1970, leaving ABC-Paramount in mid-1965 and recording for Mercury, Dave Bartholomew's small Broadmoor label (reuniting with Bartholomew along the way), and Reprise. His final Top 100 chart single was on Reprise, a cover of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna", which peaked at number 100 in 1968. Domino appeared in the Monkees' televsion special 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee in 1969. He also continued as a popular live act for several decades. He made a cameo appearance in the movie Any Which Way You Can, filmed in 1979 and released in 1980, which resulted in a Country chart hit, "Whiskey Heaven".
Domino lived in a mansion in a predominantly working-class neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he was a familiar sight in his bright pink Cadillac automobile. He makes yearly appearances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and other local events. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His last tour was in Europe, for three weeks in 1995.[12] In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.[13] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 25 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".[14]
By the end of his career, Domino was credited with more charted rock
hits than any other classic rock artist except Elvis Presley.[5]
As Hurricane Katrina
approached New Orleans in August 2005, Domino chose to stay at home
with his family, partly because his wife, Rosemary, was in poor health.
His house was in an area that was heavily flooded.
Someone thought Domino was dead and spray-painted a message on his home, "RIP Fats. You will be missed", which was shown in news photos. On September 1, talent agent Al Embry announced that he had not heard from the musician since before the hurricane had struck.
Later that day, CNN reported that Domino had been rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. Prior to this, even family members had not heard from him since before the storm.[15] Embry confirmed that Domino and his family had been rescued. The Domino family was then taken to a shelter in Baton Rouge, after which they were picked up by JaMarcus Russell, the starting quarterback of the Louisiana State University football team, and the boyfriend of Domino's granddaughter. He let the family stay in his apartment. The Washington Post reported that on September 2, they had left Russell's apartment after sleeping three nights on the couch. "We've lost everything," Domino said, according to the Post.[16]
By January 2006, work to gut and repair Domino's home and office had begun (see Reconstruction of New Orleans). In the meantime, the Domino family resided in Harvey, Louisiana.
President George W. Bush made a personal visit and replaced the National Medal of Arts that President Bill Clinton had previously awarded Domino. The gold records were replaced by the RIAA and Capitol Records, which owned the Imperial Records catalogue.[17]
Domino was the first artist to be announced as scheduled to perform
at the 2006 Jazz & Heritage Festival. However, he was too ill to
perform when scheduled and was only able to offer the audience an
on-stage greeting. He released an album, Alive and Kickin', in early 2006 to benefit Tipitina's Foundation, which supports indigent local musicians. The cuts were from unreleased sessions from the 1990s.
On January 12, 2007, Domino was honored with OffBeat magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Best of the Beat Awards, held at the House of Blues in New Orleans. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared the day "Fats Domino Day in New Orleans" and presented him with a signed declaration. OffBeat publisher Jan Ramsey and WWL-TV's Eric Paulsen presented Domino with the Lifetime Achievement Award. An all-star musical tribute followed with an introduction by the legendary producer Cosimo Matassa. The Lil' Band o' Gold rhythm section, Warren Storm, Kenny Bill Stinson, David Egan and C. C. Adcock, anchored the band, and each contributed lead vocals, swamp pop legend Warren Storm leading off with "Let the Four Winds Blow" and "The Prisoner Song", which he proudly introduced by saying, "Fats Domino recorded this in 1958 ... and so did I." The horn section included Lil' Band o' Gold's Dickie Landry, the Iguanas' Derek Huston, and long-time Domino horn men Roger Lewis, Elliot "Stackman" Callier and Herb Hardesty. They were joined by Jon Cleary (who also played guitar in the rhythm section), Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Irma Thomas, George Porter, Jr. (who provided a funky arrangement for "You Keep on Knocking"), Art Neville, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint, who wrote and debuted a song in tribute of Domino for the occasion. Though Domino did not perform, those near him recall him miming playing the piano and singing along to his own songs.
Domino returned to stage on May 19, 2007, at Tipitina's at New Orleans, performing to a full house. A foundation has been formed and a show is being planned for Domino and the restoration of his home, where he intends to return someday. "I like it down there," he said in a February 2006 CBS News interview.[18]
In September 2007, Domino was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. He has also been inducted into the Delta Music Museum Hall of Fame in Ferriday.
In May 2009, Domino made an unexpected appearance in the audience for the Domino Effect, a concert featuring Little Richard and other artists, aimed at raising funds to help rebuild schools and playgrounds damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
In October 2012, Domino was featured in season three of the television series Treme, playing himself.
Domino was also an important influence on the music of the 1960s and 1970s and was acknowledged as such by some of the top artists of that era. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney recorded Domino songs. McCartney reportedly wrote the Beatles song "Lady Madonna" in emulation of Domino's style, combining it with a nod to Humphrey Lyttelton's 1956 hit "Bad Penny Blues". Domino returned to the "Hot 100" chart for the last time in 1968, with his recording of "Lady Madonna". That recording, as well as covers of two other songs by the Beatles, appeared on his Reprise album Fats Is Back, produced by Richard Perry and recorded by a band that included the New Orleans pianist James Booker; Domino played piano on only one track, "I'm Ready."
John Lennon covered Domino's composition "Ain't That a Shame" on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll, his tribute to the musicians who had influenced him.
The Jamaican reggae artist Yellowman covered many songs by Domino, including "Be My Guest" and "Blueberry Hill".
Richard Hell, an early innovater of punk rock, covered Domino's "I Lived My Life" with his band, the Voidoids.
The Jamaican ska band Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, formed in the 1960s, was named after Domino, Hinds's favorite singer.
In 2007, various artists came together for a tribute to Domino, recording a live session containing only his songs. Musicians performing on the album, Going Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, included Paul McCartney, Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and Elton John.[20]
According to Richie Unterberger, writing for AllMusic, Domino was one of the most consistent artists of early rock music, the best-selling African-American rock-and-roll star of the 1950s, and the most popular singer of the "classic" New Orleans rhythm and blues style. His million-selling debut single, "The Fat Man" (1949), is one of many that have been cited as the first rock and roll record.[21] Robert Christgau wrote that Domino was "the most widely liked rock and roller of the '50s" and remarked on his influence:
Friedlander, Paul (2006). Rock And Roll: A Social History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. pp. 28–32.
Sublette, Ned (2009). The Year Before the Flood. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. pp. 56–60.
Coleman, Rick (2006). Blue Monday: Fats Dommino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. Boston: Da Capo Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-306-81531-1, ISBN 978-0-306-81531-7.
Coleman (2006). pp. 26–28.
Friedlander, Paul (2006). Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. p. 28.
Show 6 – Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll: The Rock Revolution Gets Underway. [Part 2]: UNT Digital Library
Strong, Martin C. (2004). The Great Rock Discography: Complete Discographies Listing Every Track Recorded by More Than 1,200 Artists. Canongate U.S. p. 434. ISBN 1-84195-615-5.
Rock and Rollin' with Fats Domino Billboard Albums at AllMusic
"Shake, Rattle & Rock!". IMDB. Retrieved November 1, 2006.
"The Girl Can't Help It". IMDB. Retrieved November 1, 2006.
"Oldies Music". About.com. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
Spera, Keith (2011). Groove Interrupted. New York: St Martin's Press. pp. 88–107.
Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts
"The Immortals: The First Fifty". Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. Issue 946.
"Fats Domino Found Alive". New York Amsterdam News 96.37 (2005): 21. Academic Search Premier. Web. March 26, 2012.
Saslow, Eli (September 2, 2005). "Music Legend 'Fats' Domino Coping with Katrina". washingtonpost.com. Retrieved November 1, 2006.
"Fats Domino Holds His Gold Records Once Again". Blog.nola.com. Retrieved May 10, 2012.
"Fats Domino 'Alive And Kicking'". cbsnews.com. February 25, 2006. Retrieved September 26, 2007.
Coleman, Rick (2006). Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. Da Boston: Da Capo Press. pp. xviii, 11–12.
Kehe, John. "Goin' Home: A Tribute To Fats Domino"—Various Artists (Vanguard). The Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2007: 13. Academic Search Premier. March 26, 2012.
Unterberger, Richie. "Fats Domino". AllMusic. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
Christgau, Robert (December 25, 1990). "Consumer Guide". The Village Voice. New York. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmclip
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmcli
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fats-DominoFats Domino
Fats Domino
American singer and pianist
Written by: The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Also known as
Antoine Domino, Jr.
born: February 26, 1928
New Orleans, Louisiana
Fats Domino (birth name Antoine Domino, Jr.) was born February 26, 1928, New Orleans, La. U.S. An American singer and pianist he was a rhythm-and-blues star who became one of the first rock-and-roll stars and who helped define the New Orleans sound. Altogether his relaxed, stylized recordings of the 1950s and ’60s sold some 65 million copies, making him one of the most popular performers of the early rock era.
From a musical family, Domino received early training from his brother-in-law, guitarist Harrison Verrett. He began performing in clubs in his teens and in 1949 was discovered by Dave Bartholomew—the bandleader, songwriter, and record producer who helped bring New Orleans’s J&M Studio to prominence and who became Domino’s exclusive arranger. Domino’s first recording, “The Fat Man” (1950), became the first of a series of rhythm-and-blues hits that sold 500,000 to 1,000,000 copies. His piano playing consisted of simple rhythmic figures, often only triad chords over a boogie pattern, forcefully played and joined by simple saxophone riffs and drum afterbeats (accents in a measure of music that follow the downbeat). These accompanied the smooth, gently swinging vocals he delivered in a small, middle baritone range, with even dynamics and a slight New Orleans accent, all of which made Domino one of the most distinctive rock-and-roll stylists.
With “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955) Domino became a favorite of white as well as black audiences. “Blueberry Hill” (1956), his most popular recording, was one of several rock-and-roll adaptations of standard songs. The piano-oriented Domino-Bartholomew style was modified somewhat in hits such as “I’m Walkin’” (1957) and “Walking to New Orleans” (1960). He appeared in the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It. One of his last hits was a version of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” (1968). Domino was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-rock-legend-fats-dominos-world-crawfish-cards-boogie-woogie-20160226
Inside Rock Legend Fats Domino's World: Crawfish, Cards, Boogie-Woogie
On his 88th birthday, the rock & roll architect's musical influence is honored in a new documentary
Fats Domino, now 88, is one of the pioneers of rock & roll, with a particular style of piano playing influenced by his hometown of New Orleans Clive Limpkin/Daily Express/Hulton Archive
by Patrick Doyle
February 26, 2016
Rolling Stone
When a friend of Fats Domino's invited filmmaker Joe Lauro to hang out at Domino's New Orleans house in the early 2000s, he knew he had to make a film about the rock & roll architect. More than a decade later, Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll will air tonight, on Domino's 88th birthday. The film captures how the New Orleans pianist cut what many believe is the first rock & roll record, 1949's The Fat Man, and went onto sell 65 million records, making the Billboard pop chart 63 times between 1950 and 1963, thanks in part to his songwriting partnership with bandleader/producer Dave Bartholomew. "Everybody started calling my music rock and roll," Domino said in 1991, "But it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playin' down in New Orleans."
But even as he sold more records than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley, Domino and his band dealt with discrimination and turmoil on the road. Lauro touches on the issues, but he mostly focuses on the music, using footage from a recently unearthed 1962 Paris concert that shows Domino at the top of his game. The film airs tonight on PBS at 10 p.m and is also available on DVD.
Of all the Fifties rock & roll pioneers, Fats is one of the most mysterious. Can you tell me about why you wanted to make a film about him?
I'd been going down to New Orleans working on other films just as a friend, visitor and lover for many years, and Fats in that town, to this day, is like a god. But for the rest of the world, he's relegated to some jolly old oldies act, and that really gnawed at me. When I got to know him a little, I realized that, unlike his contemporaries – like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry – there was no high drama. There was no great tragedy. But he sold more records than all of them combined, not counting Elvis. And he was just being forgotten because of his shyness and the fact that he lived a very private, un-crazy life.
The man was on the road for 40 years, but he's not flamboyant with lipstick and screaming, lighting the piano on fire. He's not marrying his cousin that's 13. So in a sense, we all gravitate to that sort of sensationalism. Of course his extreme shyness is the reason why he was forgotten. I said, "Man, we gotta try to change that." For my money, he was the most influential. He was recording before all those guys. His first million-selling hit was 1949. He never changed his music. The music just became rock & roll because it came out of the blues and that's what he played and it was always hard-edged anyway. He had an amazing talent as a songwriter with Dave Bartholomew. Before Lennon and McCartney, it was Fats and Dave. There was no other team that worked on each other's differences to work on amazing songs, and it was a story that was really never told.
If there was no high drama – like Little Richard going to the church or Chuck Berry going to jail – how did you approach making an interesting film about him?
I knew that Fats was private. And when I finally gained his trust – and that took several years – there was no way I was going to let him down. The man sold 60 million records before 1962. The music alone is all I needed to talk about. If anyone wants to read a tell-all on Fats Domino, they can go somewhere else – because this is about great American music. It's a hybrid of New Orleans, all these beats and rhythms that he just used naturally. People from Iowa didn't know that. They'd just heard great songs, but if you listen to the music, more than his other contemporaries, it's traceable to a local rootsy sound. I don't know if you could say that Elvis' sound was a Memphis sound. Fats Domino's sound is 100 percent New Orleans.
How did you gain his trust?
I made a film about Louis Prima a few years ago. [A couple of Fats' closest friends] came and we started chatting. They said, "We love your film. Wanna come over and meet Fats?" This was about 10 years ago. I went over into Fats' world. Talk about a parallel universe. He was still two blocks away from where he was born in the Lower Ninth Ward, in a double-shotgun shack. You'd walk through his bedroom to get to the kitchen. And there was this super modern house next door where he and his wife lived, with a little passageway. We hit it off. I'm sitting in his little room, and he's playing piano and we hit it off. What a sweet man.
I went over a couple of times, and of course I'm thinking I gotta make a film. All his buddies are around, cases of food coming in. They're playing cards, hanging out. That's his world. It was just Fats' world, all his old childhood friends because he's in the same neighborhood. He'd be hanging in his silk pajamas and his hair net. He didn't give a shit. Someone told me another filmmaker came out and started snapping pictures of Fats in his hair net and he got physically removed from the premises. So I knew that I needed to be a little softer in my approach, and it took a really long time. He wanted $10,000 in a bag, cash, like all those guys did. So it took a real long time to really get him online. We'd play pool a little bit, and he would always beat my ass. One time, I won, at that point he owed me a little money. He said, "Hey, Joe, you want me to sign that release? You still making that movie?" I said yeah. He didn't wanna pay me. I got the release.
It took a real long time to really get his trust and all that. He said, "I don't want to be documented by anybody." Then Katrina came, and everything changed a little bit for him. I was in production already. He had moved to be with his daughter, but even then, I was hesitant about whether I was gonna make the movie. Because the tragedy for rock & roll in America, there ware very few TV shows, very few places you could see the music where it was filmed in America. Maybe you'd get on Dick Clark or some horrible rock & roll movie, but there was no good performances because no one filmed them. I wanted to make something where you could see the music and the band. So I lost interest. And then a couple years later, we found a full-length concert that was in the French National Archives. The whole band in 1962. All the guys that played on every rock & roll record in New Orleans. And there they are. There's an attitude that Fats' piano playing is simplistic. He's going nuts on the keyboard! It shows him and the band for what they were, which is one of the most phenomenal groups out there on the road. So I said, "OK, now I can do it."
One problem I have with documentaries is they only show a few seconds of a great performance and then cut to an interview. But you don't do that.
If I wanted to spend all my time talking about his private life, you wouldn't see all that great music. When I make films about musicians, we show the whole songs. There's even an extra where we go to his house and he's playing everything. That's one issue: He wasn't a very talkative fellow. How do I get Fats in the film? I tried to interview him but couldn't get too much. His biographer Rick Coleman had done some audio interviews 10 years earlier, which was very detailed about his childhood and everything. That way, we were able to get Fats in the film a little bit more. Whenever he was on The Steve Allen Show, they interviewed him, but it was nothing really of any substance. That, combined with the French Archive really helped, so I could make this film.
What are Fats' hobbies?
His name is Fats, and the man loves food. He would rather talk to you about the type of frying pan he uses. He would rather cook for you than do anything else. That's what it was all about. It was about cases of New England clam chowder arriving. Or crawfish he would cook on the stove and give you for breakfast. Even when he was a younger man, he would bring his own burner on the road and pack New Orleans food. He continued that love. If you would go to his house and knock on his door, if he was in the right mood, he would invite you in. His hobbies were always music and cooking.
The film doesn't shy away from how difficult it was to be a black musician in the South – they often had to drive 100 miles from a gig to find a hotel that would take them.
These guys are top of the charts, and they didn't have a place to stay. That man lived through it. And you know all of them were hesitant to talk about it. More than anything, I could tell they just wanted to forget about it. Dave Bartholomew particularly: "I don't wanna be talking about no civil rights thing, we just lived it."
I said to Fats, "Did you go see The Girl Can't Help It?" He said, "Yeah." "Where did you see it?" He said, "I went to the Saenger Theatre." He's the star of the film, and he had to sit upstairs! He had to go upstairs at the premiere. The New Orleans Times-Picayune never covered his career. Nothing about Fats.
What did Fats think of your film?
Fats just loved it. At the premiere, he kind of grabbed my hand. His daughter told me he watched the rough cut like four times. They even made some comments on a couple factual things we got wrong. It was a long, drawn out thing. It's a labor of love, these types of things. I choose not go to Keith Richards or big names – why talk to them when I could talk to Fats' friends from the Ninth Ward? When you do it that way, it's harder to get them made because you're not wheeling out the checkbook.
The thing that really broke the ice with him is that I knew he loved boogie-woogie. My company Historic Films is a huge archive of music on film, and we license it out to people. So I made him a tape of Meade Lux Lewis, Amos Milburn, Albert Ammons. All those guys he just cherished, I made a VHS. I put on this clip from the Forties called "Low Down Dog" with Meade Lux Lewis. I gave him the tape, and he just went nuts. They said he never took it out of the machine. He started calling me Video Joe. "Is this video Joe?" When Katrina happened and he lost everything, I made him another copy.
Domino was thought missing in the week after the Hurricane in 2005. What's his life like now?
Right after Katrina, they thought he was dead. They finally found him. The whole neighborhood was completely devastated. This is the Lower Ninth Ward. It's not a wealthy neighborhood. Most of the people either left, died or never came back. The Tipitina's Foundation rebuilt his house, but he never moved in. Why? Because everyone was gone. His whole way of life ended. It's a displacement that you don't hear a lot about as a result of that storm. You hear about people losing their houses or dying or whatever, but you get an old person used to having everyone around their whole life, well, it's gone. So he moved into a wonderful suburban house. His daughter takes care of him. But it's not the same. And it made him withdraw, in my opinion. When I was shooting him like five years ago, I couldn't get too much information from him, but man, I said, "Play the intro to 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy.' Play me a little bit of 'Swanee River Boogie.' There was nothing from his playing and singing he ever forgot.
Why did he stop performing?
I think what happened is he did it for 65 years, and it was just time to stop. I think it was just too much of an effort when you're getting that old. Fats wanted to have that sound unchanged. That's the thing about Fats that none of the other guys preserved. Fats made sure that those arrangements were played. He made sure Herb Hardesty was on the sax. He rehearsed. He did not take a pick-up band and play. When you saw Fats Domino, to the last show, you could close your eyes and it would be like being in a joint in 1955. It was ageless.
Do you ever see him doing another show, even an appearance at New Orleans Jazz Fest?
I don't know. Who knows. The man is still going. I think he pretty much made a conscious decision to not perform in public anymore. But if you happen to be lucky enough to be invited to his house and he's in the right mood, you'll hear some great stuff.
In the film, you talk about the myth of Fats as a harmless guy.
He was a little guy, kind of roly-poly, soft spoken, not outrageous. Everyone assumed he was this harmless sort of little black guy from the South. He wasn't threatening. That image is really unfair because he ran a tight ship with that band. He kept that band going. He played this great, wonderful music. But people react in strange ways on that level. He didn't give a damn but, then again, that goes back to one of the reasons why he's so misunderstood by so much of the world. They get it in New Orleans but nowhere else. And man, those records are kick-ass. They are some serious records.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/fats-domino-book-excerpt-blue-monday-fats-domino-lost-dawn-rock-n-roll/6599/
Fats Domino and The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll
Book Excerpt: Blue Monday. Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘N’ Roll, Da Capo Press, 2016
February 17, 2016
PBS
Fats (Antoine) Domino, Jr.
Singer and pianist
Born: Feb 26, 1928
KNOWN FOR His nickname Fats. Being one of the inventors of rock 'n' roll; his songs "Ain't That a Shame," "I'm Walking," "The Fat Man" and his version of "Blueberry Hill."
AMERICAN MASTERS FILM
Fats Domino and The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll
(Feb 2016)
Directed by Joe Lauro
Rick Coleman, Fats Domino’s biographer and author of Blue Monday: Fats Domino and The Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll, is among the interviewees in the film Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock N’ Roll. Coleman has been writing about New Orleans music for the past 35 years, with his work appearing appearing locally and in Rolling Stone and Billboard.
Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll won the ASCAP Deems Taylor-Timothy White award for outstanding musical biography of 2007. Coleman is working on an extensive history of New Orleans music.
An excerpt from Blue Monday’s chapter 10, below, describes Fats Domino’s work and recognition at the height of his fame, the recording session for “I’m Walkin’,” and his cross-over into Country & Western with “Blueberry Hill.”
Chapter 10: “I’m Walking” (early 1957)
“One time we used to set the pace for the world.” — Dave Bartholomew
Over the holidays there were lines at movie box offices across America, where marquees proclaimed Hollywood spectaculars: Oklahoma, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, Lust for Life, Anastasia . . . Three controversial films, The Girl Can’t Help It, Shake, Rattle and Rock! and Baby Doll, incredibly featured singers — Fats Domino, Little Richard, Joe Turner, and Smiley Lewis — who were veterans of Cosimo’s studio and hole-in-the-wall New Orleans nightclubs.
After The Ed Sullivan Show and his appearance in two movies, Domino was becoming a superstar. On January 19, “Blueberry Hill” reached its pop peak at #2 for two weeks on the Billboard Juke Box chart behind “Singing the Blues” by pop singer Guy Mitchell. After the record’s eleventh week at #1 in the r&b charts, “Blue Monday” replaced it at the top. Lew Chudd bought an impressive four pages in Billboard to advertise Domino’s twelve gold records and attendance records broken in twenty-one cities. Imperial sold two million records in January, a million and a half in February — the vast majority of them 45 and 78 rpm singles by Domino. Though white adults rarely bought albums by black singers, except artists like Nat “King” Cole or Harry Belafonte who were essentially singing pop, Domino’s second album, Rock and Rollin’, invaded the snow-white pop album charts, reaching #18. It was followed by This Is Fats Domino, which hit #19.
In New York, BMI held the first “Rhythm & Blues Awards” luncheon on January 23 to celebrate blowing away ASCAP. Domino and [Dave] Bartholomew won six “citations of achievement” for their hits, the most of any songwriters. Fats also did great business for ASCAP with his revivals of old standards.
Fats was wide-eyed with pride as he flipped through his five-page “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” layout in Ebony. The article rolled up the figures of his success: 340 days a year on the road, up to $2,500 a night to perform, over $500,000 gross income in 1956, fifty suits, 100 pairs of shoes, a $1,500 diamond horseshoe stick pin, and a $200 monthly phone bill from calling Rosemary daily. Pictures also told his story: crowds jostling to beat the fire marshal’s audience limit, whites mixing with blacks, and the broken bottles and splintered chairs of the Newport and Fayetteville riots.
But there were a couple of sour notes in the midst of the coronation. George Oliver, owner of a Ninth Ward bar, the Jail Drop, talked Fats into going to the all-black Gallo Theater to see The Girl Can’t Help It, which had premiered downtown at the segregated Saenger Theater. There was no red-carpet treatment for Domino. “I don’t guess nobody knew I was there,” says Fats. At the same time, he canceled a stay locally at the all-white Safari Room on Gentilly Highway when he found out that the management expected him to dress in a trailer behind the club instead of giving him a dressing room.
On January 3 Domino recorded a session in Cosimo’s studio that included “I’m Walkin’,” a song that added fuel to his fire. Bartholomew challenged Earl Palmer to come up with a different beat. Following Domino’s unique two-beat piano, the drummer added his own parade rhythms. “Fats was a hell of a lot better musician than people give him credit for,” says Palmer. “He had a lot of original thoughts and they were all creative.” Palmer pumped a bass drum introduction that harked back a generation to the parade beat of Little Jim Mukes with the Eureka Brass Band. Then he started a steaming snare two-beat. Papoose Nelson played a scintillating guitar riff, with a tuba bass pattern accelerating to double-time. He also added a crucial sixth note. Frank Fields blended his bass between the guitar and Domino’s rumbling left hand.
Bartholomew wasn’t satisfied. He told Matassa he needed more bottom. “I can’t give it to you, I’m overloaded now,” replied the engineer.
“Well, take it from the top and give it to the bass,” Bartholomew demanded. “Just give me something to stand on!”
The musicians soon kicked off on an exhilarating second line parade rhythm with an extended solo by Herb Hardesty.
After the session, Bartholomew called a couple of kids from out on the street into the studio. He then rewound the tape and played “I’m Walkin’” for them. As if shot with a jolt of electricity, the kids immediately started dancing. “The only record I ever really felt that we had a big hit on was ‘I’m Walkin’,” says Bartholomew. “You put the clarinet in ‘I’m Walkin’’—‘Doomp-doomp- doomp deedly-deedly-dee’—and you got traditional jazz. You got Dixieland.”
“I’m Walkin’” was also one of Domino’s most “country” recordings, with a swinging beat like “Hey Good Lookin’.” Country fans also loved Domino’s records. His version of Gene Autry’s “Blueberry Hill” made #23 on the Billboard Country & Western top 50 Best Sellers for 1956, even though — likely to avoid incensing racists — it never appeared on any other country chart, making Fats the only black artist to make the c&w charts during the early civil rights era and foreshadowing the country crossover of Ray Charles by six years. As Gerald Early writes in One Nation Under a Groove: “What made Motown possible was not that Elvis Presley covered r&b but that Fats Domino, in the end a more significant artist, not only crossed over with r&b hits in 1955 but with a Country and Western tune, ‘Blueberry Hill.’”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/fats-dominos-white-piano/401552/
The Piano That Can't Play a Tune
How Fats Domino’s restored showpiece reflects the trajectory of post-Katrina New Orleans, an Object Lesson
by Mary Niall Mitchell
August 26, 2015
The Atlantic
If you could see Fats Domino’s piano today—white and gleaming on a pedestal at the Louisiana State Museum in the Old U.S. Mint in New Orleans’ French Quarter—you might think he had been kind enough to donate one of his signature grands to the museum for its music collection. That is, if you were unaware of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago, including Domino’s home on Caffin Street in the largely obliterated neighborhood known as the “Lower Nine,” where the white Steinway once held pride of place in Domino’s living room.
Submerged in nine feet of water from a massive breach in the nearby Industrial Canal, it sat for weeks in the fetid lake that covered 80 percent of New Orleans after Katrina. Curators from the Louisiana State Museum raised $35,000 to have it reassembled and restored, and it now sits beneath a spotlight in an exhibit room as if waiting for Domino himself to sit down and play it. At the dedication ceremony in 2013, Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardanne said, “His beautiful grand piano, fully restored, will serve as the perfect symbol for Louisiana’s resilient nature and ever-evolving musical heritage.”
What's been learned since the hurricane struck New Orleans
Read More
Well, no and yes. Despite the painstaking restoration, the white grand piano is unplayable. It is this last fact that makes the story of this instrument such a powerful metaphor for New Orleans since Katrina. It is a tale about persistence in the face of government neglect, cataclysmic disaster, and the painful incompleteness of reconstruction. More particularly, it is a lesson about the importance of preserving the material remains of the city’s past even as it focuses on the future.
These objects—some partly restored, some not—are all the more important in light of the city’s record of demolition of many significant musical landmarks, despite the recent efforts of preservation groups to turn the tide. Louis Armstrong’s birthplace, for example, was torn down in the 1960s to build a city jail. Other jazz landmarks are in grave disrepair.
The history of New Orleans music had an additional vulnerability before Katrina: The homes of the city’s musicians and writers held much of the city’s musical heritage. Letters, handwritten scores, photographs, cocktail napkins, matchbooks, and musical instruments were under the beds and in the attics of working musicians and their descendants. Most of Michael White’s enormous collection of artifacts from early jazz musicians—some 50 clarinets, reams of sheet music, reeds and mouthpieces, and taped interviews with musicians—is gone. White’s house near the London Avenue Canal in Lakeview took in water up to the roof. The only things salvaged by volunteers were some of his clarinets. “They looked like bodies,” White told me. “And the ones that were in cases looked like bodies in coffins. They weren’t really about me, they symbolized New Orleans history and culture and the present state of the culture.”
“The black working class in New Orleans has long refused to concede that white property is more important than black humanity.”
Tending to the artifacts the storm left behind, as White did, can feel restorative. And it is not the same as choosing property over people, something that does not bode well in New Orleans. “The black working class in New Orleans,” the historian George Lipsitz wrote in Katrina’s aftermath, “has long refused to concede that white property is more important than black humanity.” After the storm, neighborhood traditions like the parading of Mardi Gras Indians persisted, despite and because of the challenges of rebuilding those communities. But the preservation of cultural artifacts after Katrina, such as Domino’s piano, was something of a different job.
As show-stopping as Domino’s white Steinway grand is, it is the opposite of the first piano he played, acquired by his family in the 1930s. That piano, Domino told his biographer, was “so beat up that you could see the rusted metal through the ivory, it had been played so hard.” According to the authors of Up From the Cradle of Jazz: “The Ninth Ward blues built off of pianos and horns.” There was an old upright in just about every small music club in the Lower Ninth Ward. The white piano, on the other hand, was not even Domino’s regular instrument. Instead, it was the one that greeted visitors to the house on Caffin Street and was a favored backdrop for family photographs. The glorious grand piano testified to his rise from a part-time musician and factory worker to one of the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll.
Domino’s upbringing in the Lower Ninth Ward, surrounded by his Creole relatives, inflected his music. His father was descended from French-speaking African Americans who lived as enslaved and then freedpeople in Louisiana’s sugar parishes. Like many Louisiana Creoles, black and white, they had roots in Haiti. When the Dominos arrived in the Lower Nine, the neighborhood was still mostly rural, with unpaved streets, farm animals, and scarce electricity and indoor plumbing. In a recent radio show devoted to Domino, writer Ben Sandmel observed the artist’s “Caribbean vocal style” in songs like “My Blue Heaven.” “It’s almost like he’s an English as a second language speaker. It’s a very thick regional accent,” Sandmel said. “If you listen to oral histories of people [from the Lower Nine] who recorded around that time there are a lot of thick accents and a lot of French-isms in the speech.”
When he combined his Creole influences with New Orleans’s distinctive eight-bar blues, Domino changed the course of American music. He sold 65 million records, more than any other musician in the 1950s besides Elvis Presley. Though Presley was proclaimed the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he freely admitted that African Americans in New Orleans like Fats Domino were playing it first as “rhythm and blues.” Domino’s wild popularity in Jamaica also inspired the creation of ska and reggae. But fame and influence, of course, did not exempt him from the hurricane.
At the time of the disaster, many outsiders were surprised that so many poor, mostly black people had no means of evacuating the city. But even long-time New Orleanians with means, Fats included, chose to wait it out, as was their custom. Domino had to be rescued by boat, taken to the Superdome, and then evacuated to Baton Rouge. Because everyone knew where Domino lived, many assumed he had died in the flood; one misinformed soul even painted “R.I.P. Fats” on the front of his house. In an odd way, the 24 odd hours when Domino seemed to be “missing” became the focus of anxiety for many New Orleanians who had lost track of friends and relatives. According to curator Bruce Raeburn, for many observers of Katrina’s aftermath “musicians represented what was best about the city, so their fate became the gauge of both loss and recovery.”
Music historians have long recognized the pivotal role that Fats Domino (by all accounts a shy and humble fellow who seldom grants interviews) played in the history of American popular music. After Katrina, state historians hoped to salvage his instruments from the house in the Lower Ninth Ward. One of the people who spearheaded the effort was Greg Lambousy, then director of collections at the Louisiana State Museum. After he got the call from Domino’s daughter that they could take the pianos to be restored, Lambousy gathered a rescue team and in March 2006, seven months after the levee breach, they drove a truck and trailer through the broken streets to Caffin Avenue.
The white piano seemed to make a triumphant statement about the ability to overcome what had been damaged, to come out the other side of trauma.
There were two pianos in Domino’s house, one white and one black. Whereas the white one, a grand, was a “showpiece” the black baby grand, also a Steinway, was the one Domino played at home. The black piano was also the most intact. Restorers stabilized it and put on display in a permanent Katrina exhibit at the Presbytère on Jackson Square, looking just as it did when the water receded.
The white piano was in worse shape. All but one of the legs had been detached, and it was put into storage until funds could be raised for its restoration. Six years later, with the white piano still in need of a benefactor, Lambousy had an idea. He approached one of Fats Domino’s wealthiest and most influential fans: with $1,000 in seed money from Paul McCartney, the rest of the $35,000 came in quickly. The piano had been submerged for two weeks, and according to Shane Winter, the lead conservator on the project, it still had raw sewage left inside years later when conservators finally went to work on it. Its paint was crackled and peeling. His team had to take the entire instrument apart, some 6,000 pieces, so make sure that no water was trapped inside it. The conservators restored the white piano as much as possible to its original appearance. They could have made it play again, Winter told me, but given all the new parts required that would have created a different piano altogether.
Perhaps the real contrast between the black and white pianos, though, and how they ultimately emerged from Katrina, has to do with when they were each renovated. Charles Chamberlain, a historian at the state museum at the time, recalls the sense of near panic that New Orleans culture was under in the year after the storm. The devastated black piano made a clear visual case for rescuing other remains. “Right after the storm, everyone thought that the culture was truly threatened,” Chamberlain recalled. But the white piano seemed to make a triumphant statement about the ability to overcome what had been damaged, to come out the other side of trauma.
Times are still hard for the Lower Ninth Ward. The neighborhood finally has an elementary school again, Martin Luther King, though many of the children who live nearby instead scatter across the city during the day to attend charter schools. The streets near the canal are still mostly devoid of houses, though Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation continues to build new ones that sit higher above the street than the old shotguns did. On the other end of Caffin Avenue from Domino’s house a new convenience store opened this year, selling fresh produce and groceries in the neighborhood for the first time in 10 years. But lately there has been talk of building luxury condos on the Mississippi River edge of the Lower Ninth Ward.
There is also a Lower Ninth Ward Living History Museum now, run on a shoestring and the labor of young volunteers, which includes oral histories from residents, and an exhibit on the neighborhood and its history of civil-rights activism and culture. Portraits of the Lower Ninth Ward’s musical sons, including Kermit Ruffins and Domino himself, hang on the walls.
Domino’s house is still there, not far from the museum. It is in good condition, though he is living these days across the River on the westbank. And of course, it no longer holds its gleaming white showpiece. When asked by a reporter in 2006 if he planned to move back to his house on Caffin Avenue, Fats Domino replied: “I hope so. I like it down there.” So far, he has not returned to live in the neighborhood.
The residents of the city before Katrina who have lived through the flood’s long aftermath (this writer among them) have proven to be a resilient bunch, but they are not, nor can they ever be, fully restored. By the same token, post-diluvian New Orleans has lost whole segments of itself in the people who have not returned and the neighborhoods that have not been rebuilt.
Fats Domino’s white piano, meanwhile, has become a monument, an objet d’art, a thing reborn with a new and different purpose: to commemorate the storm that destroyed it.
This project was made possible with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2016/02/22/big-beat-bids-happy-birthday-fats-domino-rocks-shy-giant/80747286/
Rock & roll pioneer Fats Domino, who turns 88 on Friday, is a man of widely celebrated gifts. Drawing attention to himself, alas, is not one of them.
"Fats is a very humble man, and very shy," says Joe Lauro, producer and director of the documentary The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, which simultaneously makes its broadcast debut on PBS's American Masters and becomes available on DVD on Domino's birthday.
In contrast to Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name a few early icons he preceded on the charts, "Fats didn't have the rock 'n' roll craziness surrounding him," Lauro notes. "He's led a private life." Outside Domino's hometown of New Orleans — where "he's like a god," Lauro says — that's translated to less coverage of his historic contributions, Lauro posits; which made him think, to quote from one of Domino's signature tunes, ain't that a shame.
The Big Beat traces Domino's life back to Domino's childhood in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, following his evolution into a hitmaker whose other classics include I'm Walkin' and his definitive version of Blueberry Hill. Domino's key relationship with the noted jazz and R&B musician and bandleader Dave Bartholomew, who co-wrote and produced much of his material, is documented in interviews with Bartholomew and other collaborating musicians, as well as live performance footage.
"Fats didn't make any effort to invent rock & roll; it just sort of happened around him," Lauro says. "He was playing rhythm and blues and had a great band and wrote songs that were very accessible." Presley himself was among Domino's most ardent fans: "There was great mutual respect between them. Elvis called (Domino) the king of rock & roll."
Don Bartholomew, Dave's son and a musician and actor, feels that Domino's singing, informed by his French Creole heritage, influenced Presley's. "The way Fats sang was all original; there was Cajun there, a kind of French accent to it. It's hard to copy, but if you listen to some of Elvis's records, where words are kind of shortened — that's from Fats, I think."
The younger Bartholomew remembers Domino from his boyhood as "a kind and generous man, who always looked sharp. You know how some rappers wear a lot of bling? He did that before anybody. And just a straight-up good person — I never saw him mad."
When The Big Beat premiered at 2014's New Orleans Film Festival, Lauro recalls, Domino "watched it, then kind of grabbed my hand for a bit, then let it go. It got pretty personal. It was a great moment."
Fats Domino--"Ain't That A Shame":
FATS DOMINO--"I'm Walking":
Fats Domino - "Walking To New Orleans":
FATS DOMINO-- "Blue Monday":
Fats Domino - "I Want To Walk You Home" :
Fats Domino-"Jambalaya":
Fats Domino-- "Shake Rattle & Roll":
Fats Domino-"I'm A Fool To Care":
Fats Domino - "Kansas City":
Fats Domino - "I Hear You Knocking":
Fats Domino--"My Blue Heaven":
Fats Domino--"Something's Wrong":
FATS DOMINO --"Wait and See":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats_Domino
Fats Domino
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Fats Domino | |
|---|---|
Domino in concert in Germany in 1977
|
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Antoine Domino Jr. |
| Also known as | Fats, The Fat Man |
| Born | February 26, 1928 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Origin | New Orleans, Louisiana, United States |
| Genres | Rock and roll, New Orleans rhythm and blues |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter, musician |
| Instruments | Piano, vocals |
| Years active | 1947–present |
| Labels | Imperial, ABC, Mercury, Broadmoor, Reprise, Sonet, Warner Bros., Toot Toot |
Contents
Life
Domino was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Domino family was of French Creole background; Louisiana Creole French was his first language. Antoine was born at home, with the assistance of his grandmother, a midwife. Like most families in the Lower Ninth Ward, his were new arrivals, from Vacherie, Louisiana.[2] His father was a well-known violinist.Domino learned to play the piano from his brother-in-law, the jazz guitarist Harrison Verrett.[1][3]
Even after his success he continued to live in his old neighborhood. His large home was roomy enough for his 13 children, but he still preferred to sleep in a hammock outside.
Early career (1947–1948)
In the summer of 1947, Billy Diamond, a New Orleans bandleader, accepted an invitation to hear the young pianist perform at a backyard barbecue. Domino played well enough that Diamond asked him to join his band, the Solid Senders, at the Hideaway Club, in New Orleans. Diamond nicknamed him "Fats", because Domino reminded him of the renowned pianists Fats Waller and Fats Pichon.[4]
Imperial Records era (1949–1962)
Domino singing "Blueberry Hill" on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1956
Domino's debut album, Carry On Rockin, containing several of his hits and tracks that had not yet been released as singles, was issued under the Imperial imprint (catalogue number 9009) in November 1955 and was reissued as Rock and Rollin' with Fats Domino in 1956.[7] [7] The reissue reached number 17 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.[8]
His 1956 recording of "Blueberry Hill", a 1940 song by Vincent Rose, Al Lewis and Larry Stock (which had previously been recorded by Gene Autry, Louis Armstrong and others), reached number 2 in the Top 40 and was number 1 on the R&B chart for 11 weeks. It was his biggest hit.[6] "Blueberry Hill" sold more than 5 million copies worldwide in 1956 and 1957. Domino had further hit singles between 1956 and 1959, including "When My Dreamboat Comes Home" (Pop number 14), "I'm Walkin'" (Pop number 4), "Valley of Tears" (Pop number 8), "It's You I Love" (Pop number 6), "Whole Lotta Loving" (Pop number 6), "I Want to Walk You Home" (Pop number 8), and "Be My Guest" (Pop number 8).
Domino appeared in two films released in 1956: Shake, Rattle & Rock![9] and The Girl Can't Help It.[10] On December 18, 1957, his hit recording of "The Big Beat" was featured on Dick Clark's television program, American Bandstand.
On November 2, 1956, a riot broke out at Domino's show in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The police resorted to using tear gas to break up the unruly crowd. Domino jumped out a window to avoid the melee; he and two members of his band were slightly injured.[11]
Domino in 1962
Imperial Records was sold in early 1963, and Domino left the label: "I stuck with them until they sold out," he said in 1979. In all, Domino recorded over 60 singles for Imperial, placing 40 songs in the top 10 on the R&B chart and 11 in the top 10 on the Pop chart. Twenty-two of Domino's Imperial singles were double-sided hits.
Post-Imperial recording career (1963–1970s)
Domino moved to ABC-Paramount Records in 1963. The label dictated that he record in Nashville rather than New Orleans. He was assigned a new producer (Felton Jarvis) and a new arranger (Bill Justis). Domino's long-term collaboration with the producer, arranger, and frequent co-writer Dave Bartholomew, who oversaw virtually all of his Imperial hits, was seemingly at an end.
Jarvis and Justis changed the Domino sound somewhat, notably by adding the backing of a countrypolitan-style vocal chorus to most of his new recordings. Perhaps as a result of this tinkering with an established formula, Domino's chart career was drastically curtailed. He released 11 singles for ABC-Paramount but had only one Top 40 entry ("Red Sails in the Sunset", 1963). By the end of 1964 the British Invasion had changed the tastes of the record-buying public, and Domino's chart run was over.
Despite the lack of chart success, Domino continued to record steadily until about 1970, leaving ABC-Paramount in mid-1965 and recording for Mercury, Dave Bartholomew's small Broadmoor label (reuniting with Bartholomew along the way), and Reprise. His final Top 100 chart single was on Reprise, a cover of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna", which peaked at number 100 in 1968. Domino appeared in the Monkees' televsion special 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee in 1969. He also continued as a popular live act for several decades. He made a cameo appearance in the movie Any Which Way You Can, filmed in 1979 and released in 1980, which resulted in a Country chart hit, "Whiskey Heaven".
Later career (1980s–2005)
In the 1980s, Domino decided he would no longer leave New Orleans, having a comfortable income from royalties and a dislike for touring and claiming he could not get any food that he liked anywhere else. His induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and an invitation to perform at the White House failed to persuade him to make an exception to this policy.
Domino lived in a mansion in a predominantly working-class neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he was a familiar sight in his bright pink Cadillac automobile. He makes yearly appearances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and other local events. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His last tour was in Europe, for three weeks in 1995.[12] In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.[13] In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 25 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".[14]
Domino performing live in New York
Domino and Hurricane Katrina
Graffiti on Domino's home from the time he was rumored dead
Domino's office, June 2007
Someone thought Domino was dead and spray-painted a message on his home, "RIP Fats. You will be missed", which was shown in news photos. On September 1, talent agent Al Embry announced that he had not heard from the musician since before the hurricane had struck.
Later that day, CNN reported that Domino had been rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. Prior to this, even family members had not heard from him since before the storm.[15] Embry confirmed that Domino and his family had been rescued. The Domino family was then taken to a shelter in Baton Rouge, after which they were picked up by JaMarcus Russell, the starting quarterback of the Louisiana State University football team, and the boyfriend of Domino's granddaughter. He let the family stay in his apartment. The Washington Post reported that on September 2, they had left Russell's apartment after sleeping three nights on the couch. "We've lost everything," Domino said, according to the Post.[16]
By January 2006, work to gut and repair Domino's home and office had begun (see Reconstruction of New Orleans). In the meantime, the Domino family resided in Harvey, Louisiana.
President George W. Bush made a personal visit and replaced the National Medal of Arts that President Bill Clinton had previously awarded Domino. The gold records were replaced by the RIAA and Capitol Records, which owned the Imperial Records catalogue.[17]
Post-Katrina activity
Domino with the National Medal of Arts replaced by President George W. Bush on August 29, 2006, after the original medal, awarded to him by President Bill Clinton, was lost in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina
On January 12, 2007, Domino was honored with OffBeat magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Best of the Beat Awards, held at the House of Blues in New Orleans. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared the day "Fats Domino Day in New Orleans" and presented him with a signed declaration. OffBeat publisher Jan Ramsey and WWL-TV's Eric Paulsen presented Domino with the Lifetime Achievement Award. An all-star musical tribute followed with an introduction by the legendary producer Cosimo Matassa. The Lil' Band o' Gold rhythm section, Warren Storm, Kenny Bill Stinson, David Egan and C. C. Adcock, anchored the band, and each contributed lead vocals, swamp pop legend Warren Storm leading off with "Let the Four Winds Blow" and "The Prisoner Song", which he proudly introduced by saying, "Fats Domino recorded this in 1958 ... and so did I." The horn section included Lil' Band o' Gold's Dickie Landry, the Iguanas' Derek Huston, and long-time Domino horn men Roger Lewis, Elliot "Stackman" Callier and Herb Hardesty. They were joined by Jon Cleary (who also played guitar in the rhythm section), Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Irma Thomas, George Porter, Jr. (who provided a funky arrangement for "You Keep on Knocking"), Art Neville, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint, who wrote and debuted a song in tribute of Domino for the occasion. Though Domino did not perform, those near him recall him miming playing the piano and singing along to his own songs.
Domino returned to stage on May 19, 2007, at Tipitina's at New Orleans, performing to a full house. A foundation has been formed and a show is being planned for Domino and the restoration of his home, where he intends to return someday. "I like it down there," he said in a February 2006 CBS News interview.[18]
In September 2007, Domino was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. He has also been inducted into the Delta Music Museum Hall of Fame in Ferriday.
In May 2009, Domino made an unexpected appearance in the audience for the Domino Effect, a concert featuring Little Richard and other artists, aimed at raising funds to help rebuild schools and playgrounds damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
In October 2012, Domino was featured in season three of the television series Treme, playing himself.
Influence
Domino was one of the biggest stars of rock and roll in the 1950s and one of the first R&B artists to gain popularity with white audiences. His biographer Rick Coleman argues that Domino's records and tours with rock-and-roll shows in that decade, bringing together black and white youths in a shared appreciation of his music, was a factor in the breakdown of racial segregation in the United States.[19]
Domino was also an important influence on the music of the 1960s and 1970s and was acknowledged as such by some of the top artists of that era. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney recorded Domino songs. McCartney reportedly wrote the Beatles song "Lady Madonna" in emulation of Domino's style, combining it with a nod to Humphrey Lyttelton's 1956 hit "Bad Penny Blues". Domino returned to the "Hot 100" chart for the last time in 1968, with his recording of "Lady Madonna". That recording, as well as covers of two other songs by the Beatles, appeared on his Reprise album Fats Is Back, produced by Richard Perry and recorded by a band that included the New Orleans pianist James Booker; Domino played piano on only one track, "I'm Ready."
John Lennon covered Domino's composition "Ain't That a Shame" on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll, his tribute to the musicians who had influenced him.
The Jamaican reggae artist Yellowman covered many songs by Domino, including "Be My Guest" and "Blueberry Hill".
Richard Hell, an early innovater of punk rock, covered Domino's "I Lived My Life" with his band, the Voidoids.
The Jamaican ska band Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, formed in the 1960s, was named after Domino, Hinds's favorite singer.
In 2007, various artists came together for a tribute to Domino, recording a live session containing only his songs. Musicians performing on the album, Going Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, included Paul McCartney, Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and Elton John.[20]
According to Richie Unterberger, writing for AllMusic, Domino was one of the most consistent artists of early rock music, the best-selling African-American rock-and-roll star of the 1950s, and the most popular singer of the "classic" New Orleans rhythm and blues style. His million-selling debut single, "The Fat Man" (1949), is one of many that have been cited as the first rock and roll record.[21] Robert Christgau wrote that Domino was "the most widely liked rock and roller of the '50s" and remarked on his influence:
Warm and unthreatening even by the intensely congenial standards of New Orleans, he's remembered with fond condescension as significantly less innovative than his uncommercial compatriots Professor Longhair and James Booker. But though his bouncy boogie-woogie piano and easy Creole gait were generically Ninth Ward, they defined a pop-friendly second-line beat that nobody knew was there before he and Dave Bartholomew created 'The Fat Man' in 1949. In short, this shy, deferential, uncharismatic man invented New Orleans rock and roll.[22]Domino's rhythm, accentuating the offbeat, as in the song "Be My Guest", was an influence on ska music.[23]
Discography
Main article: Fats Domino discography
See also
References
- Coleman, Rick (2006). Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. Da Capo Press. p. 210. ISBN 0-306-81491-9.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fats Domino. |
- Fats Domino at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
- Fats Domino discography (music city)
- Fats Domino at history-of-rock.com
- Imperial album discography
- Article on Domino's return concert
- Fats Domino: Walking to New Orleans special
- Fats Domino interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)
- Keesing Collection of Popular Music and Culture – Collection of Fats Domino memorabilia and research, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland
PBS ‘American Masters’ to Air ‘Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll’
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmclip
PBS ‘American Masters’ to Air ‘Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll’
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmcli
PBS’ American Masters series is giving Fats Domino the documentary tribute treatment later this month.
The one-hour episode, titled “Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” is scheduled to make its national premiere on Feb. 26, Domino’s 88th birthday. According to a press release, the film “traces how Fats Domino’s brand of New Orleans rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll, appealing to black and white audiences alike.”
“Fats Domino is one of America’s most beloved entertainers,” said American Masters executive producer Michael Kantor. “In viewing this film, we come to understand the pivotal role he played in the popularization of the big beat style and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, but also the important influence he had on the music of the ’60s and ’70s.”
As biographer Rick Coleman pointed out, Domino’s music didn’t just help pioneer rock ‘n’ roll — its wide-ranging appeal also helped chip away at segregation. “He had four major riots at his shows partly because of integration,” said Coleman. “But also the fact they had alcohol at these shows. So they were mixing alcohol, plus dancing, plus the races together for the first time in a lot of these places.”
“Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll” includes interviews with a lengthy list of his peers and musical associates, including frequent collaborator and producer Dave Bartholomew, legendary producer and studio owner Cosimo Matassa, and band member Herb Hardesty. An extended cut of the documentary is also arriving on DVD Feb. 26, and is available for pre-order now.
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmclip
The one-hour episode, titled “Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” is scheduled to make its national premiere on Feb. 26, Domino’s 88th birthday. According to a press release, the film “traces how Fats Domino’s brand of New Orleans rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll, appealing to black and white audiences alike.”
“Fats Domino is one of America’s most beloved entertainers,” said American Masters executive producer Michael Kantor. “In viewing this film, we come to understand the pivotal role he played in the popularization of the big beat style and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, but also the important influence he had on the music of the ’60s and ’70s.”
As biographer Rick Coleman pointed out, Domino’s music didn’t just help pioneer rock ‘n’ roll — its wide-ranging appeal also helped chip away at segregation. “He had four major riots at his shows partly because of integration,” said Coleman. “But also the fact they had alcohol at these shows. So they were mixing alcohol, plus dancing, plus the races together for the first time in a lot of these places.”
“Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll” includes interviews with a lengthy list of his peers and musical associates, including frequent collaborator and producer Dave Bartholomew, legendary producer and studio owner Cosimo Matassa, and band member Herb Hardesty. An extended cut of the documentary is also arriving on DVD Feb. 26, and is available for pre-order now.
Read More: PBS 'American Masters' to Air 'Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll' | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/fats-domino-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/?trackback=tsmclip
