FATS DOMINO: Seven Decades In Song

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina only emphasized the fact that New Orleans was perhaps the wellspring of popular music in the 20^th Century-the source, or a major tributary, of jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm & blues, rock and roll, funk and soul. The early 20^th Century legends of New Orleans music included Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Lonnie Johnson, Louis Prima and Mahalia Jackson; others, like the Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Harry Connick, Jr., Allen Toussaint and Wynton Marsalis, are still going strong in the early 21^st Century.The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina only emphasized the fact that New Orleans was perhaps the wellspring of popular music in the 20^th Century-the source, or a major tributary, of jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm & blues, rock and roll, funk and soul. The early 20^th Century legends of New Orleans music included Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Lonnie Johnson, Louis Prima and Mahalia Jackson; others, like the Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Harry Connick, Jr., Allen Toussaint and Wynton Marsalis, are still going strong in the early 21^st Century.

But somehow the crucial lynchpin between the two eras, the man who sold more records than any of the above, Antoine “Fats” Domino occupies a curious place in the honor rolls of music. He is sometimes disregarded with a dismissive footnote in music histories or even missing altogether. This historical neglect (due in part to Domino’s own distaste for interviews) was such that I published the first ever biography on him-Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll-only last year, over fifty years after his historic crossover to the pop charts in 1955 with “Ain’t That a Shame.”

I would argue that he, along with the other greats who recorded blood-rushing rockers at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios from the late 1940s to the 1960s-Dave Bartholomew, Roy Brown, Professor Longhair, Smiley Lewis, Lloyd Price, Shirley & Lee, Ray Charles, Joe Turner, Guitar Slim, Little Richard, Earl King, Huey Smith, Frankie Ford, Ernie K-Doe, Aaron Neville, Irma Thomas, The Meters, and others-changed the world as much as the early New Orleans jazz greats.

“Ain’t That a Shame” certainly had humble origins. Domino says that he got the idea from people talking: “You see somebody beat a little baby boy. A long time ago you say, ‘Oh, that’s a shame, the way they’re doin’ this.’ So in a couple of months I came up with ‘Ain’t That a Shame.’ Dave [Bartholomew] and I and got together and put on the music, and that was it.” The song’s planet-crushing booms virtually deafened shocked adult pop radio listeners accustomed to wall-to-wall “Que Sera Sera,” but grabbed a youthful audience-both black and white. Domino’s breakthrough occurred at the same time as Bill Haley & the Comets’ massive hit “Rock Around the Clock.” White rockers like Haley and Pat Boone (who took his milksop version of “Ain’t That a Shame” to number one on the pop charts) were borrowing the heavily rhythmic dancing style of rhythm & blues as their own (along with the r&b term “rock”).  But Domino’s hit crucially signaled the fact that-unlike in the early jazz era, when black jazzmen were rarely heard on pop radio-this time black originators, led by Domino, were going along for the ride from the start. The crossover, occurring as it did one year after the landmark Supreme Court school integration ruling, paved the way for the subsequent pop crossovers of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, with similarly booming sounds.

Most of Domino’s hit recordings bear the songwriting credit “Domino-Bartholomew,” as his producer, arranger and co-writer was Dave Bartholomew, a fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member. Bartholomew was fronting New Orleans’ most popular dance band in late 1949 when he and Lew Chudd of Imperial Records (based in Hollywood) witnessed Fats and his band entertaining the crowd at the modest Hideaway nightclub. Domino’s signature crowd pleaser was the stomping New Orleans barrelhouse piano standard, “The Junker’s Blues.” The song’s lyric played on the mixed metaphors of a junkman who would go around town with a horse-drawn wagon collecting junk, and a junkie loaded on dope, so it was not quite ready to become popular music.

“I did a thing called ‘The Junker’s Blues,’” recalls Fats. “And I took it over; it was played different…the piano…I switched it around: ‘They call me a junker, ‘cause I’m loaded all the time. I don’t used no reefers, I stay knocked out on that angel wine.’ I was doing everybody else’s numbers, ‘cause I hadn’t recorded anything.  So Mr. Chudd asked me [if I thought I could] write some songs.  I said, ‘Yeah, me and Dave’ll get together.’” It was Bartholomew’s idea to use the name of a popular radio detective, The Fat Man (Dashiell Hammet’s companion to his other popular sleuth, The Thin Man), to play on Domino’s own local renown. Together the two men worked out words that described a mythic version of Domino and his world.

“The Fat Man,” which Domino recorded with Bartholomew’s band at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studio on December 10, 1949, was perhaps the first record that pulled together all of the elements of what became known as rock ‘n’ roll: a brash young street corner attitude, an exuberant vocal veering into nonsense syllables and a supremely throbbing backbeat. Its thematic and musical influence is even clear on subsequent candidates for the “first rock ‘n’ roll record,” like Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” (1951) and Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (1952). Though the discussion of the first rock ‘n’ roll record will never die, Domino’s place, recording in a hard rockin’ style years before the other founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll, is certainly at square one.

Fats and Dave generally came up with song ideas separately, with Bartholomew arranging and writing the musical notation, as Domino-like many great songwriters (including Lennon and McCartney)-did not write music. The sources of Bartholomew’s songs are sometimes obscure, requiring historical excavation. For instance, both “I Hear You Knocking” (first recorded by Smiley Lewis in 1955 and subsequently a smash pop hit by both Gale Storm that year and by Dave Edmunds in 1971) and “My Ding-a-Ling” (first recorded by Dave in 1952 and made famous by Chuck Berry in a smuttier and funnier version in 1971) were both based on comedy routines by New Orleans-based comedians. A skit by a comic named Lollypop Jones, loosely based on Dusty Fletcher’s “Open the Door, Richard,” inspired the former; Dave based the latter was a risqué nightclub act by Sam “My Ding-a-Ling” Rhodes. Other songs Bartholomew came up with-like “Bo Weevil” and “The Rooster Song”-had their roots in old African-American folk rhymes, as did Bartholomew’s own classic, “The Monkey Speaks His Mind,” which became a legendary song in Jamaica. So impressed was Elvis Costello with the tune that he not only covered it, but he even wrote a sequel to it, “Monkey to Man.”